The Night Art Worked

By Alistair Hudson

‘You’ve broken art!’ The apoplectic gallerist jabbed a finger in my face. Around us, the field of circular gala dinner tables re-fragmented into a chaotic hubbub of art chatter. I could overhear other dealers venting their displeasure that artists, or even a collective of artists, or for that matter architects, not-artists, from outside their sphere of influence, had won the 2015 Turner Prize. For a housing project in Liverpool.

For jury members the deal is that what happens in the jury meeting, stays in the jury meeting. But it was pretty obvious from my track record as an advocate of ‘useful art’ that I would have championed an artistic practice from the world beyond the world of white walls and stubbornly ‘useless’ art.  

Assemble’s winning of the Turner Prize that night in December 2015, highlighted the complex anxieties embedded in our inherited conceptions of what art should be and what it should not be. It is a framework that has been tightly regulated by institutions, academies and markets for about 300 years of our 40,000 years of human art history. The other three artists on our shortlist, Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers all had some form of gallery representation and had emerged through the usual university art school route. 

A few days after the Turner Prize announcement the writer Morgan Quaintance, one of the two Channel 4 hosts of the televised event, published a post in the e-flux online journal with the title ‘Teleology and the Turner Prize or: Utility, the New Conservativism’.

His pitch was that the awarding of the prize to Assemble was a hollow tokenistic gesture that instrumentalised a non-political architectural practice which had no artistic intentions, in order to make a case for a neoliberal vision of social art that merely replaced lost services to the citizens of state (Take a breath here). In his argument he distinguished contemporary art as: 

 ….a critically engaged field that, for the most part, produces critically engaged actors who are uncomfortable with state power and its various methods of citizen subjection - this is nowhere more prevalent, diligently observed or else thoroughly critiqued than in socially engaged practice. Because Assemble are not and do not claim to come from this discipline, because they are not critically engaged, and because they are a firm of architects employed to creatively fulfil a design brief, however open, theirs is an acritical almost completely depoliticised response to a highly politicised social situation.

To my ears, this sounded elitist, but more so what this argument fails to acknowledge is the possibility of an artistic socio-political critique beyond the traditional idea of an artist outsider, commenting from the margins, with unique seeing capabilities (unattainable to everyday folk), and delivered through an object removed from the system it critiques – ie an artwork presented in the detached and reflective space of the museum. 

However, I would say that what the Assemble project offers instead, is the possibility for critique and action through a complex intersubjectivity, not from one person to an ‘audience’, rather through people acting and working together in time. Assemble may not be overtly political or critical artists, but their work and projects, which take place between people and disciplines, forms a critique that is of its own making in direct response to the realtime situation it inhabits.

To illustrate this, and counter Morgan Quaintance’s critique, let’s look a little more closely at the project that won them the prize.

In the shadow of the 1981 Toxteth riots and subsequent Thatcherite policies, the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust grew out of a long running struggle by residents to resist the attempts by local and national government to depopulate and demolish their local community and its infrastructure. When only five houses on one street remained occupied, a group of female residents began to develop forms of everyday resistance and activism by moving their lives onto the street: planting flowers, sitting at tables, redecorating boarded-up buildings whilst developing a shared knowledge of housing and property law.

The Granby Four Streets CLT formed in 2011 as a not-for-profit community-interest company that successfully lobbied to secure assets from the local authority for redevelopment. As part of this process the CLT also engaged Assemble in this very ground-up, guerilla version of regeneration. The CLT actively and knowingly engaged Assemble because of their high degree of visibility in the cultural landscape. Assemble then worked with local residents and the CLT to repurpose derelict homes into affordable housing, create new projects for developing social spaces, and local training and employment opportunities also began to emerge. They were doing things the state would never do.

This included the setting up of the Granby Workshop where local skills were harnessed to reimagine the rubble and broken timbers from the derelict houses as the source material to make beautiful products and furnishings for the new homes that were being reclaimed from the shells of the abandoned terraced houses. These highly handcrafted products and furnishings included ceramic tiles, door handles, printed textiles, Toxteth Terrazzo kitchen tops and fireplaces. In the radical lineage of John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, this was collective making as a political act and aesthetic social experience, with and for the former working classes. 

When Assemble were notified of their nomination for the Turner Prize, they were insistent that they would only accept with the full backing of the Granby Four Streets community, and this took some deliberation. In the end it was collectively agreed to take the opportunity, and present the Granby Workshop in the Turner Prize Exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway Gallery. 

The nature of the project meant that it could not - should not - deliver an ‘work of art’ as such, but more fittingly represent the project and the community in the form of a showroom that presents its products for sale to the wider world on a pre-order basis. This strategy proved so successful that, by the beginning of 2016, enough orders had been placed to establish the Granby Workshop as an independent company.

On that night of December 7th, I heard, amongst the post announcement chaos, a gallerist denounce, ‘it can't be art, you can’t sell it.’ The irony was Assemble and the Community Land Trust had effectively made a shop. This was art, economy, architecture, politics, aesthetics and even critique rolled into one. And not from one voice, but many.

That night the members of the Granby Four Streets Community organised themselves to watch the live Channel 4 broadcast of the Turner Prize award ceremony at Liverpool’s Small Cinema. 

Prof John Byrne of Liverpool John Moores University, recalls it like this: 

When Assemble were announced as winners, it was like being at a football match when your side scores the winning goal. With a roar, everybody who was there leapt from their chairs, danced, jumped about, hugged each other, punched the air and shouted, ‘we’ve won, we’ve won!’ I have never before or since been to an ‘art event’ – and certainly not a prize giving – that has been like it. It wasn’t only the refreshing break with art world protocols – manners, decorum, etiquette – that was so revitalising: it was the collective feeling of participation and ownership that was, frankly, overwhelming. It is an experience that has stuck in my mind, and has also shaped my thoughts, ideas and attitudes to what art is, can be or become.

Looking back now, ten years on, it is clear to me that Assemble are part of a trajectory that is bending art away from a singular idea rooted in the autonomy of an object and the the sovereignty of an individual artist, towards a hybridity where meaning and intent are defined much more in the relations and actions between people and things. With artificial intelligence, quantum and the synthesis of machine and biology in emergence, the fixed boundaries and conceptual architectures of the modern era will have to be retired. It is inevitable. The new fluidity will require us not to think whether something is art or not, but to ask in what sense is anything art, to what degree and to what end? Assemble are not artists, neither are they not artists. They are just people who bring a degree of artfulness into everyday life.

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