DIY Spirit

The thing that makes Leeds a great place to be a practicing visual artist is that there is room to experiment and try stuff out in front of captive audience. Unlike other cities Leeds is far from reaching saturation point in terms of visual arts activity, so if you want to do something you can organise it yourself and not worry about having to compete with more established or seemingly important activity. Big and small, new and old co-exist nicely in the city at the moment and we should be proud of that.

I guess the downside of that is that there is less willingness to enter into critical debate around some of the activity because the fact that it has happened is often an achievement in itself, regardless of its 'quality'.

In agreement that it is often an achievement in itself that things have happened - it shouldn't mean that there is less room debate. The lack of independant arts spaces / institutions in Leeds has definitely pushed many artists in leeds to organise their own events and exhibitions and I think this is one of the great things about Leeds.

The downside to this way of working is that marketing one-off events and temporary spaces beyond the arts community is hard. Activity can go unnoticed by the general public unless they happen upon lvaf. It would be beneficial if there was a central space/info point that people could find out about the other things that are happening. A possibilty might be devoting a small but prominent space in Leeds Art Gallery (or somewhere as equally or more accessible) which could be used to promote what's happening in the city, with leaflets, catalogues, artists books, a calendar, a real life lvaf?

I reckon that's it totally leeds is blooming marvellous...but sometimes it's tricky to find out what's happening, i love the idea of a real life lvaf...dotted all over the city there will be spaces where artists frequent regularly maybe a list of those places could be compiled and then some way of those communicating with each other through some paper with words and pictures...the common place?...how about an AGM of LVAF or does that exist?..ps sorry never done this before

Lvaf is a great facility for letting artists know what is going on but it's rather too much information for your average art consumer (ie me) to wade through. There is a pretty well established scene mailing out weekly gig listings with highlights - surely there must be someone within Lvaf with enough enthusiasm and interest in arts admin to do something similar for the art scene.

Send me a weekly or fortnightly mail with an edited highlight of what is on and where, don't need detailed descriptions as i can see for myself, links to the artists work if given might be useful tho.

If that can be backed up by some kind of physical presence in Leeds art gallery (ie a few hours at lunchtime when people come to see what's new) then all the better.

In January I spent some time reading about the urban transformation of Berlin in particular the process of re-use over successive decades of the Mietkaseren (rental Barrack). Interestingly Berlin seems to have had a series of influential exhibitions, stemming from a general discomfort with the way the 1960's large scale urban renewal projects were changing the city aiming to adapt it into to separate zones, economic, industrial, residential and so on connected through high speed rail links. The International building exhibitions - with typically german poetic themes such as 'the inner city as residential area' and 'European monument preservation year (1975) explored and proved that 'renewal without removal' was a workable, profitable (renewing meant 40% to 60% of the new build cost) and vital undertaking. Apparently leading to a new approach by the city architects and planners to work with the old people, the squatting movement and the inhabitants to create more care in keeping the unique characteristics of the buildings, and the mix of residents and artisan businesses in areas such as Kreuzberg. It is an inspiring realization that the soft and intellectual undertaking of a city exhibition had a direct and real impact in changing the opinions and approach to the hard economics and business of regeneration. Having experienced first hand the last decade of art biennales and art fares, such as frieze, Liverpool biennale, Istanbul biennale, Venice biennale etc, and locally; situation Leeds, Manchester international festival, has the city exhibition become a celebration of culture, the individual creative and an attempt to place itself within a overly broad and global issue or debate (the theory led curatorial vision), at the expense of something a bit more sensible and useful. I think it probably has, and it seems a lot of artists are following the herd.