Output details

Independent State

Independent State, a public-sector exhibition organized by Foreground, was the first participatory visual art project in the UK to commission contemporary artists to produce works in collaboration with the general public to be inserted into a live community carnival context (26 September 2009) in Somerset. The exhibition, curated by Morrissey, combined an intellectual framework created by a curator together with a variant of the context-responsive model for the creation of new artwork; in this case the idea of ‘site’ was replaced with a non-art social context rather than a physical site.

By exploiting the context of community carnival, this output contributes to artistic dialogues concerning the relationship between contemporary art practice and amateur art production or ‘folk’ art. The output sits in within the field outlined in Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK (2005) and forms an explicit dialogue with Deller’s project Parade (2009). Unlike Parade in which Deller ‘appropriated’ the existing ‘folk’ and community activity of Greater Manchester to become an artwork in the form of a carnival-style procession, this output challenges the established model of artistic appropriation of popular culture and its subsequent ‘elevation’ into a fine art context by reversing the process and involving the general public in the generation of contemporary artworks that are then ‘demoted’ into a ‘folk art’ or community context.

The research was discussed by the curator in Independent State published by Foreground, (2010), and at the Healthy Communities, Sustainable Places event initiated by the Dorset Design and Heritage Forum (February 2011). It was reviewed by David Trigg, Frieze.com (21 October 2009), and Cherie Federico, Aesthetica (5 August 2009).