Emily Crane is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia. Her PhD focuses on the contemporary artist exchanges within the Triangle Network, with specific focus on Africa and South Asia and is entitled Navigating the void: The Triangle Network of artist-led initiatives. Crane has become a contributor to the Triangle blog. In this, her first blog post Crane shares her experience of looking through the archive of Triangle activity, currently housed at Gasworks, London, and discusses the nature of the archive more generally.

The infallibility of the archive has long been exposed to its more fragmentary and partial nature,  capable of being utilised, manipulated and distorted.  What is included and excluded is a political concern, and what constitutes an archive has been questioned.

With this in mind, it is almost impossible to conceive of what an archive of a network such as Triangle might look like. How can a multifaceted set of relationships across the world be represented in any single place, and how can the explosive creative activities that happen throughout the network be represented by administrative papers, photographs and booklets?

Considering these nonsensical questions, I have nevertheless been spending much time pouring through the archival boxes stored at Gasworks. Aware of the partiality of the stories such an archive might suggest to me, I continue to look with the addiction of a treasure hunter with my metal detector in hand. The boxes hold over twenty years of materials that have been accumulate through the London office: correspondences in the form of letters, cards, faded faxes and emails;  reports and meeting minutes; funding applications; newspaper clippings, gallery flyers, workshop catalogues, artist postcards; and the occasion sketch, artist publication, poster or workshop related remnant. Although much of the materials I have been considering are tied to specific logistical arrangements for workshops or studio buildings, there is a wealth of material collected that more generally pertains to events happening in many artworlds across the globe. Read the rest of this entry →

The Networked blog was created in the lead up to the conference Networked: Dialogue and Exchange in the Global Art Ecology, which was held at Bloomberg, London on the 26th and 27th of November 2011. The conference brought together different views on network and collaborative practices, which were explored through case studies and presentations from artists, curators, researchers and policy makers amongst others.

Following the conference, this blog continues to function as an open platform for debates over themes, issues, strategies and ambitions around networks and their need, role and function. Additionally, it is a platform for zooming in on projects, research, articles, videos and sound recordings relating to the different Triangle Network activities. Overall the blog maintains the spirit of Triangle, one of international dialogue and exchange, and aims to be a space to showcase the vibrancy of the Network.

Cross-pollination is normal – if not essential – for networks, especially in the culture sector where the broader (more formal) networks learn from the horizontal structure of (less formal) artist collectives and community art projects that artists create and enjoin intuitively.  While this is often an organic process, I have seen different experiments intended to instigate cross-pollination among and across networks.  In March 2009 the Institute of Network Cultures convened Winter Camp, which brought 12 networks (including freeDimensional) to Amsterdam for a week to connect the virtual with the real in order to find out how distributed social networks can collaborate more effectively.  Modeled after that experience, freeDimensional convened a meeting on Creative Resistance – An Intersecting Networks Approach in 2010 on Wasan Island for arts networks, mobility operators, and human rights groups from Latin America, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe.  One of the results of this meeting is the International Coalition of Arts, Human Rights and Social Justice, which is essentially a network of networks. Read the rest of this entry →

In a previous post, I mention issue or urgency-based networking vs. casual membership in a network.  Speaking from the perspective of starting (or instigating) the freeDimensional network, I can say that it was only through trial and error that I came to understand this dichotomy.  At first, I believed that network members would need an incentive in addition to their engagement with the typical issues and actions on which freeDimensional was founded.  Leading with that idea, I pressed forward attempting to engage the growing network with regular programs and thematic campaigns that connected to the social justice aim of the network at the intersection of community engagement.  This phase of network growth witnessed some amazing engagements – e.g. economic migration in Senegal with a manifestation at the Dakar Biennial with Atelier Moustapha Dime; support to the Tadamon Multicultural Council through partnership with the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo; and help creating a year-long livelihood residency training local youth to be citizen journalists at Casa das Caldeiras in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  However, and due to our limited administrative capacity, we were unable to maintain both regular programming and the rapid response to urgent situations (hosting culture workers in distress) that is our raison d’etre.  One reason for this is that it was not easy to extract value (get paid) for networking in a way that allowed us to build up our staff capacity.  This leads me to a generalization:  the labor expended on building trust and confidence – the essential ingredients for a network – is a front-end expenditure while financial grants and program investments usually come after this initial trust-building phase; different from corporate world, civil society and the nonprofit sector do not have the practice of retrospectively compensating or remunerating investments of time and social capital made before financial capital is received.  This means that the network administration may work with the network member to write itself into a programmatic function compensated by the grant; however, this is a new (and different) staff function from the more abstract knowledge work of networking.  Therefore, finances gained through such partnerships do not pay for the labor already invested, nor do they cover the cost of continued networking unless it is couched in a programmatic line item.

The necessary instability of hybrid cultures, New Silk Roads: repositioning the role of art activists in Asia at the end of the 1990’s and the birth of Arthub.

This text appeared on Asia Art Archives in May 2009 and it was commissioned to Davide by the same organization.

The source of my fascination with the instability of crossing/mixing cultures is a long story. It is not the case that my connection to China came from a very different background than contemporary art and has been incredibly related to the complicated geography that connected the western world (Europe) and the Far East. My first contact with the ‘other’ was with Gandhara art, the fusion of Hellenic and Indian artistic aesthetics; from there my curiosity brought me to Indian, Tibetan and Sino-Tibetan histories of architecture. These complicated cultural environments still remain an area of interest for me and are embedded in my personal and professional life; BizArt and consequentially Arthub are the final products of it.

I cannot avoid feeling part of an historically constructed and highly symbolic concept of the Silk Road, the place where communication between West and East (as the extremes of this fertile cultural area) created what can be defined as the exotic ‘other’, the ‘other’ that cannot be understood, the ‘other’ that fascinates but does not and cannot represent ‘you’. This concept of the ‘other’ is the foundation of one of the most dangerous equations: the concept of the exoticized ‘other’ vis-à-vis national and ethnical identity. Read the rest of this entry →

This text was written for a publication that never got to the printer. Still, after a couple of years, it seems to me that some of the considerations and examples involved in the text are central of many of the art organizations that straggle between independency, local context and the international art system.

“Here, you will get to know Chinese youth oil painters, and become our friends while enjoying our oil paintings full of eastern sentimental appeal ,modern and classical realism oil paintings.

XXX Art Studio was a professional oil painting organization, which set up in 2001 ,It mainly sell Chinese youth oil painters original oil paintings to collectors,while receiving entrusted orders of oil painting portrait from different countries and areas all over the world. Foreign collectors, such as American, Japanese, Australian, Brazil and so on, have collected most of his original oil paintings.

We are sure that you will be satisfied with it because of its good quantities in both art standard and materials. If you enjoy a certain original oil painting artwork you can choice to purchase; If you are an art agency or oil painting wholesale dealer, send a e-mail to us, We can provide large numbers of any kind of the high quality oil paintings.”

From a promotional email of a Beijing based gallery received in October 2009

“A leaner, meaner, angrier art world that has to fight harder for our attention is exactly what we need.”

From Time for a cull in the art world. The art world is plunging, along with the rest of the economy. Hooray, by Waldemar Januszczak, New York Times, 11 January 2009

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What does the word network mean anyway?  In Dispatch #2, I mention big institutions starting networks  – e.g.  CreativeAfricaNetwork and other regionally-focused initiatives (Puma), SustainArt (Illy), and Rhiz.eu (European Cultural Foundation).  Similarly, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development has its Network Partnership and the Arts Collaboratory network was started by Hivos, Mondriaan Stichting and Doen Stichting.

Without delving into theories pertaining to intermediary (civil society) organizations or Social Network Theory, I contend that the network is situated on a continuum somewhere between the social movement and the non-governmental organization (NGO).  And without assuming a human rights or social justice sectoral perspective, I contend that the network is self-organizing (sometimes organic, unplanned or accidental) with a goal and seeks to affect social change at some level.  So, if the social movement is the lifespan as well as the initial moment of coming together by people and groups around a common idea; and the NGO (or social movement organization) is the maturation of that process; then the network is a liminal phase of the organizing or coming together process.  For me, this is inherently a grassroots or bottom-up process; therefore, I draw a distinction between the network and the act of networking.  When big institutions deploy capital (by way of grantmaking, underwriting meetings and mobility, branding and cross-marketing) to the benefit of select constituents who rely on those same institutions (wholly or in part) for their operational funding and/or programmatic support, I would argue that a disparity in social agency (even while there may be agreement on a common idea) means that the process is necessarily one of top-down networking rather than network-building. Read the rest of this entry →

The world of arts-related networks is a fast evolving one.  Networks can be either top-down or bottom-up.  Whereas big institutions are getting in the game with CreativeAfricaNetwork (Puma), SustainArt (Illy), Rhiz.eu (European Cultural Foundation), I think that the realm of the individual artist’s network is also very important.  It has occurred to me on several occasions lately that once an artist has already been in residence at a space/site that they typically have the occasion to go back and draw on that institutions resources.  For example, a Cameroonian cartoon journalist that we once hosted at the Carlton Arms art hotel in NYC always stays there for free when he passes thru the city; A Druze artist hosted by Bilbao Arte went back again to Spain with student visa status that they helped him apply for; etc.

While not always the case, top-down networks are usually driven by  a larger institution (e.g. funder, business, NGO) and bottom-up networks are driven by individuals or smaller, community-based organizations (e.g. artist-in-residence, culture worker, art space).  By using this dichotomy, it is easier to understand modes of affiliation (or network membership) and priorities held by the organizer.  For example, foundations, businesses and larger NGOs often prioritize geographic diversity and contract-oriented financial relations.  These contracts/financial relations are present with funders and larger NGOs because grants made to network members are usually intended for specific purposes; businesses will have branding objectives; and larger NGOs will typically require dues payment from network members.  Individual artists and art spaces tend to care more about individual livelihood, mobility and community conditions. Read the rest of this entry →

In order for networks to raise funds they must either register (as non-profit /non-governmental organizations) or have a registered fiscal sponsor.  This means that networks have to register under the tax system of a specific country, and thus the network must defer to that nation’s rules.  When a network is horizontal and works across multiple countries and regions, this can cause an identity crisis with the network in limbo between older non-profit institutional strictures/limitations and the prospect of radical organizing offered by the evolving network form.

Almost thirty years ago, Sir Anthony Caro and Robert Loder founded the first Triangle Artists’ Workshop at Mashomack Fish and Game Preserve in Pine Plains, New York. This initial event was inspired by Sir Caro’s previous experiences at a workshop he attended in 1977 at Emma Lake in the Canadian prairies, a site where the paradoxically isolated working environment was highly productive for the artists. The idea for the New York workshop was similar; bring together artists from different parts of the world for two intense weeks of art production in an uninterrupted and idyllic setting. This would create a space to focus on process, alleviate the pressure of production, and find collective inspiration outside the loneliness of the studio.

The first Triangle workshop was intended as a one-time getaway. It was a retreat to reinvigorate a group of artists who were somewhat familiar with one another’s work, and the name came from the three geographical points from where most of the artists were invited – New York, London and Edmonton. Yet, the initial workshop was so successful that it continued to evolve. The following year it was repeated, and invitations were sent outside the initial “triangle” to foreign artists from South Africa and France. By 1984 the roster grew to include Spanish and German artists as well, and as the workshops progressed they became increasingly international and diverse. In 1985 South African Triangle alumni David Koloane and Bill Ainslie set up the first affiliated workshop outside of New York, the Thupelo Art Projects in Johannesburg, South Africa. Two years later Europe hosted its first workshop, Triangle Barcelona, and throughout the past thirty years the network has continued to emerge organically throughout the five continents.

Read the rest of this entry →