HISTORY

WHERE DID WE
COME FROM?
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ORGANISATION

The Culture Company emerged from the agency Photo 98 that ran Photo 98 - The UK Year of Photography and the Electronic Image. This was one of nine 'Years of …' that the Arts Council of England set up as the Arts 2000 initiative dedicated to exploring, developing and raising the profile of a different art form for each year in the decade leading up to the Millennium. The Yorkshire region bid for, and was chosen to host the Year and the agency was set up to co-ordinate, commission, fundraise and market the programme.

Photo 98’s core aims included reaching new audiences and raising the profile and practice of creative photography and related lens based media within contemporary visual arts. The programme, including Public Sightings, 10x98, the 10 European Commissions, the Yorkshire photography commissions, the Unusual Suspects, the education programme, the numerous partnership commissions with organisations, curators and artists are all part of a legacy that now influences The Culture Company’s current interests and ambitions.

For example, a key strand of the programme, Public Sightings, a programme of new commissions for sites outside of gallery contexts was intended to encourage experimentation and question assumptions about where and what a photographic art work could or should be. It encouraged artists to work beyond the virtual, the computer screen and the photographic frame to engage with the physical realities and demands of architectural space, public environments and audiences.

This emerges in The Culture Company as demonstrating ways new media can work in public environments such as the Bus-stops project; developing the emerging creative and economic opportunities of cross platform media with the MELT programme; developing exciting high quality commissioning opportunities for artists such as the Photography and New Media commissions, the BBC commissions and Shooting Live Artists and about working with partners such as Opera North, Harewood Trust, the BBC, Channel 4, the Arts Council and local authorities to extend all our ambitions and abilities. All ways that influence and reflect creative, economic and social changes and opportunities.

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PROGRAMMING CONTEMPORARY ART@HAREWOOD
2002-2004

Harewood House Trust has programmed a series of changing exhibitions of contemporary art for the last 15 years, gaining a national reputation for a commitment to contemporary arts. Harewood commissioned The Culture Company to curate a series of exhibitions, from 2002 – 2004, which explored the relationship of Harewood’s social and cultural history as it sits within contemporary culture. The Culture Company responded by programming a series of diverse and sometimes challenging exhibitions, by established and emerging artists. This included significant solo shows by well known names such as Marc Quinn and Mark Wallinger, and three group exhibitions featuring artists of both international standing including Mariele Neudecker, Richard Wentworth, Sonia Boyce and Dan Graham alongside younger artists at the beginning of their career such as Simon Patterson and Jonathan Monk.

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THE YORKSHIRE PHOTOGRAPHY AND NEW MEDIA COMMISSIONS

The Culture Company has been managing a regional photography and new media commissioning programme since the inception of the first Yorkshire Photography and New Media Commissions during Photo 98, when seven artists were commissioned to create new works for The Unusual Suspects. In 2000, following the success of that programme, eight artists created new works for the group show Brilliant which showed simultaneously at Impressions Gallery and York City Screen, and also appeared as a continuous on-line presence throughout the production period as each artist contributed their own personal experience of making their commission. In 2001, six artists were commissioned to make work for a new show Tone, which was substantially supported by Opera North, and again exhibited at Impressions Gallery. In 2002, seven further practitioners created new work in photography and digital media for the group show at Cartwright Hall, One Landscape Many Views.

Many of the commissioned artists have acknowledged the impact the commissioning programme has made in developing their careers; the opportunity to experiment with a new direction in their work; an intense period of time to make a substantial body of work; the support of experienced curators and gallery staff; the greater impact afforded by being part of a well marketed group show (figures grew over the years as the programme became established); an opportunity to showcase emerging and mid-career artists to new audiences and their own peer group; and continuing informal support once the commissions and exhibitions are over.

“The Culture Company's support of my Tone project back in 2001 gave me an invaluable opportunity to explore creative avenues unconventional to my then working practice. Furthermore, during the production period they organised work-in-progress and pre-exhibition talks and radio interviews. This exposed my work to a nationwide audience, providing me with much constructive feedback.  Consequently, the agency was instrumental in launching my career as a lens-based media artist. For that, I'm indebted."
Andy Eccleston, commissioned for Tone

The ‘Brilliant’ Photography and New Media Commissions gave me the opportunity to really develop my personal photographic work in a supportive environment. I have always found approaching galleries and setting up exhibitions the most daunting part of the photographic process and because the commission came as a package, you could really concentrate on the production of the work knowing that there was a guaranteed exhibition at the end of it.

I also found working with a gallery during production beneficial in that it enabled me to explore new ways of presenting my work and increased my confidence. The commission and exhibition definitely helped raise my profile regionally and nationally – it was published in several photographic journals and also nominated for the Arles 2002 Fringe Festival Prize and was projected at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in France, in July.

I also received a major exhibition commission directly as a result of Brilliant which has developed my work further and will be part of the Hereford Photography Festival this year, as well as being exhibited in the region.
Tessa Bunney, Commissioned for Brilliant, 2002.

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In 2000 The Culture Company was approached to help promote and support a research project which explored the future creative possibilities offered by the convergence of broadcasting, telecommunications and computer technologies. The first B-TV Festival was held in Sheffield in 2001 and established its reputation as a unique platform for exchanging the latest research and developments in creative convergence media, showcasing leading work and ideas from across the world.

B-TV bought creative practitioners together with major industrialists including representatives from BBC, Saatchi & Saatchi, Endemol, Radio 1, Flextech, Channel 4 and the Swedish Interactive Institute. The forum allowed important yet rare communication between artist, theorist and the media industries.
The second B-TV Festival took place in Sheffield in 2002 and introduced a new convergence arts commissioning strand Shooting Live Artists.

In 2002 and 2003 Shooting Live Artists offered 12 live artists and live arts collectives the opportunity to exploit the new creative potential of combining the net and emerging technologies to originate daring, seminal convergence media art resulting in work that celebrates, irritates and / or inflames key, critical and tender areas of contemporary culture. The work was showcased on the BBC’s website (www.bbc.co.uk/shootingliveartists) and at the London offices of Saatchi & Saatchi where Forced Entertainment performed Institute of Failure and was streamed live on the SLA Website. The website has received the most hits of any BBC arts website and in Oct 2002 - Blast Theory's Can You See Me Now was nominated for an award at the Interactive BAFTA's in London.

Shooting Live Artists was a partnership project which bought together the BBC, The Arts Council, Studio of the North and The Culture Company.

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The Culture Company was commissioned by Bradford Metropolitan Council to produce as series of three high profile conferences on Culture; Culture Culture 2000 which explored the experiences and legacies of year long cultural festivals and programme, Two Cultures 2001 which looked at the relationship between arts and science and Sport and Cultural Diversity 2002 which interrogated the strategic links sports and cultural and social regeneration. The Conferences bought delegates from across Europe together to look at different aspects of cultural regeneration in its broadest sense, to debate and learn about current strategic thinking. Speakers included; Rt Hon Chris Smith (MP), Rt Hon Richard Caborn (MP), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Pierre-Yves Gerbau, Lord David Puttnam, Professor Lola Young OBE and Dr Tom Shakespeare

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The Culture Company won the tender to produce art works for a new guided bus route in Bradford and fundraised substantial amounts of match funding to produce a really innovative and award winning response to the brief. Colour Stops were bus shelters for the 21st century and were installed in January 2002 on Bradford's Manchester Rd. The shelters attracted international interest for the way artists and architects worked together to produce bus-shelters that are eye-catching, attractive and engaging spaces to use.

The architects Bauman Lyons designed six bright red shelters, two of which are adorned by 12 metre masts that support wind turbines creating energy for elements inside the shelters. Appearing in two of the shelters was a world first by artists Greyworld, who used hidden colour recognition cameras in their artwork to create playful and gentle sounds and voices triggered by the colours worn by clothes of the people standing at the stop "a unique song of colour" that quietly altered the experience of the space. In another shelter, writer and performer Tim Etchells, wrote a 24 hour narrative about the city, which appeared as a line for every minute of the day on a digital clock. The mood and content changed as day moves into night, charting the waking and `dream time` of the city.

Our starting point was to ask ourselves what it is like to be standing at a bus-stop waiting for the next bus. How could that experience be made more interesting and engaging? Our intention was to commission works that would have an element of fun, surprise and quiet anticipation. Works that would not necessarily be identified or labeled as “art”; artworks that would demonstrate the use of new technologies and how they could be used in the public realm in a creative way; and works that would be appropriate for the nature of the experience i.e. short waiting periods and the robust nature of their physical environment.

Architects Bauman Lyons (Leeds), artists Greyworld (London) and Tim Etchells (Sheffield), worked with the partners and the collaboration was awarded funding from the Royal Society for Arts (RSA) through its Art for Architecture Award, the Regional Arts Lottery Fund, Bradford City and Metropolitan District Council, Metro and First Bardford. The project attracted attention from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), featured in two Channel 4 programmes about design in the environment and has appeared in a number of international journals.

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The Culture Company have been appointed by Kirklees Council to work with the Gallery over a number of years on the look of the Gallery, its promotional material and programming content.

A much improved physical upgrade was achieved through the support of the Arts Council which gave the Gallery a whole new look and created an Art Lounge.

Significant shows have included Groove an exhibition which brought together some of the quintessential exponents of ‘vinyl disc culture’, putting the needle back into the groove and the groove into art. This exhibition, curated by David Briers in collaboration with The Culture Company, offered an international, cross-generational selection of works in all media, mixing contemporary works with earlier, historically significant ‘touchstones’. This exhibition of original art works and documentation spanned the 1960s compositions of John Cage and Mauricio Kagel, work by visual artists including Marcel Duchamp and Cornelia Parker, and some idiosyncratic output from the experimental fringe of DJ culture by Matt Wand and Project Dark.

Mary Martin: The aim is always to achieve simplicity was one of the most distinguished and influential of a small group of English constructive artists of the 1950s and '60s. Her geometric paintings, sculptures, reliefs and drawings explore colour, line and form as basic formal elements. This was the first major exhibition of her work in twenty years. The exhibition explored her personal and distinctive contribution to modern and contemporary British art. It draws together for the first time a selection of her early paintings and traces her move to abstraction. It also includes her first reliefs and structures and her later Perspex abstract reliefs. The show toured to Kettles Yard, Cambridge and the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne.

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The Culture Company has carried out a number of consultancy reports for clients that include Wigan Metropolitan and District Council (Re-positioning the Turnpike Gallery, Wigan), Spike Island, Bristol, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Regen 2000 Bradford.

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