This project sets out to fashion a context within which some geographically disparate cultural practices can be viewed and considered in relationship to one another. All of the practitioners whose works are presented (and represented) in this project make their works in response to the complexities and challenges of particular rural situations and places, with which they have engaged over periods of time, some of those quite extended. These are situated practices, operating at least partially outside of the display mode normally associated with the art world, using complex circuits for the production and distribution of cultural experiences and meanings, in which the gallery functions as just another node.
Yak Yak uses three distinct modes of presentation – a gallery exhibition, a website and an assemblage of visual and textual materials in the form of a publication. Each mode of presentation attempts to do something different. The gallery exhibition in Swan Hall addresses a local audience, using the aforementioned display mode to present visual, textual and aesthetic responses to the questions ‘What are the conditions that you are working with? What actions/ strategies/ operations are you using to impact on those conditions?’ These were questions that we put to participating artists and collectives with a view to making visible a body of knowledge and experience, including tools and methods that they have evolved through actions, practices and discussions over an extended period of time. This reflects a commitment to the idea of commons, a principle of sharing, cooperating and supporting that has been crucial to the sustainable life of rural places in the past, and will become even more so as climactic instability impacts on all of us in the immediate future.
The Yak Yak website, as one might expect, attempts to bring this material to a wider, international audience. The importance of the translocal aspect of this work in rural contexts cannot be over-emphasized. Artists practising in relation to rural contexts had long struggled against a presumption by the metropolitan artworld that their work must be somehow regressive, undoubtedly romantic, probably parochial and almost certainly politically uninteresting. Online platforms were crucial in overturning this view, as distinct, disparate and isolated cultural explorations in rural places came into view, generating a political dialogue of singularity and multiplicity, opening up new avenues of thought about collectivity, material production, praxis and aesthetics.
The Yak Yak publication is best understood as a constellation of elements, brought into a kind of dialogue with one another. The participating artists and collectives were asked to contextualise their work for the gallery and to elucidate some of the thinking and processes involved in their productions. The publication is an attempt to present and to contribute to a wider discursive production, involving these and many other practitioners and theorists, in which considerations of culture, ecology, social forms, sustainability, politics, economics and pleasure overlap.
The curators would like to thank all of the participating artists, farmers and collectives for their generosity and their rich and complex works. We hope that you, the readers and viewers, will find challenge, complexity and pleasure in all that has been assembled.
Ian Tully and Fiona Woods, 2013.
YAK YAK
rural/art dialogues