On Monday I met some cool people organising an art festival in Hackney Wick. You can read the feature here, or just keep reading for the full transcript.

Present: David C West, Decima; Ingrid Z, The Residence; Louise Loudoun, Hackney Wick artist; Tom Jeffreys, Spoonfed Culture Editor

T: How did the idea for Hackney Wicked first come about?

I: Well, about a year ago, at the Residence, my colleague Laura May Lewis and myself were sitting one afternoon and just talking about how it would be interesting to launch the Hackney Wick area in a show that would appeal not just to local people but also to people London-wide and internationally. There’s so much going on here in terms of artists’ studios and new galleries like Decima, Elevator, Schwartz… The name came from a bit of graffiti on a street sign that just said Hackney is Wicked.

T: What was it that drew you to Hackney Wick in the first place?

I: I think the space first of all. The attraction for a lot of artists is that you could get a good size space for a reasonable amount of money.

D: And it’s actually not too far away once you know about it. But it’s kind of hidden away as well so you can get away with doing more.

L: It’s like a little island surrounded by the motorway.

I: It’s an area of real transition and you get a genuine sense of excitement to create your own projects there because it’s still not established. If you were to start something on say Vyner Street or in the West End then you’ve already got a scene established there. So it’s very much a chance to do something in-the-moment and contemporary. There’s a specific spirit to Hackney Wick too, a real spontaneity that’s shared amongst the people there.

T: Has the area changed since you’ve moved there?

I: We’ve really attracted an audience, I’d say.

D: You get a lot of people coming now who wouldn’t normally go there. Like for our show on Saturday, we had people from the West End galleries coming who’d never normally bother.

T: Why do you think that is?

D: Well we’ve had a lot of shows . We’ve probably had 15-20 short shows since we arrived.

T: That seems a distinctive element of what you’re doing. Lots of short shows.

I: High capacity event organisation.

T: Why?

D: Lots of people come to opening shows, but as they continue attendance tends to dwindle. We had maybe 6-700 people at the gallery opening in February but not much after that.

T: Why do people go to openings?

I: For the social and event aspects. I think that’s becoming a growing attraction and it’s an area that I’m focussing on more. Everybody likes coming to the grand opening and they enjoy the performative aspects of it. But if the show’s on for a month then the amount of people who come tends to taper off. Another reason to have shows every two weeks is that you really keep the spirit alive.

T: How do you see the area developing over the next year or two?

I: I’ve lived in the area for 4 years and in that short space of time it’s completely changed. In the beginning there wasn’t really anything for the public to come to. It was only for the people who already lived there. I experienced a lot more crime back then too but now it’s become more ‘gentrified’. That’s not necessarily a great thing, but that’s just the trend that happens. You get artists then you get galleries then you get price increases. There aren’t many empty spaces any more, opportunities to squat like there used to be.

D: There’s actually a shop there now, where before there wasn’t really anything. Premier Food and Wine.

I: Since the Costcutter opened across the street the crime rate has gone down. I used to get chased by a bunch of boys into my house at night, but now the lights are on at Costcutter, it’s safer.

T: Is there a single unifying aim for Hackney Wicked or is it simply people who live and work near each other organising something at the same time?

D: We’re looking to present a revised history of the area.

I: Hackney Wick has a really interesting history. There were the the Eton Mission in the 1890s. The whole area was a slum in Victorian times and the Eton Mission was an attempt by the church to introduce a presence in the area and start sports and a social clubs and all sorts of things to keep people ‘off the streets’. In the 50s and 60s the vicar in the church was a rocker and he started a kind of mods and rockers club called the 59 club and is still going today as one of the largest nightclubs in the world. One of the first films they screened was The Wild One which was actually banned in the UK at the time. The screening was attended by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Cliff Richard. I only found these details out recently – you’d never really suspect it in the area.

There was also a famous railway theft and murder here. A guy called Thomas Briggs was stabbed on the train at Hackney Wick station, they stole his jewels and his half-dead body was dragged to the Top o’ the Morning Pub (which still exists) and he died there.

Plastic was invented in Hackney Wick. Bridget Riley, Gavin Turk, the Chapman Brothers all had studios round here.

T: How did you get the likes of Gavin Turk and Gilbert & George involved in Hackney Wicked?

D: Gavin Turk has a studio just round the corner. And we have a website that sells signed and dedicated artists’ books so I know him through that too. A lot of these people just have connections with Hackney Wick.

I: One of Rachel Whiteread’s famous pieces is a series of photographs of seven tower blocks that they demolished

D: Yeah, and another person involved is Stephen Gill who has produced a number of books on the area. And Banksy apparently started doing a lot of his graffiti around this area.

L: There’s a guy called Ruben who sells all the paint to these guys. He’s been there for quite a while and was never really open to the public before. But he is opening a shop now too.

T: There seems to be a trend maybe in the last year or so to get lots of people involved in art who otherwise wouldn’t really be interested to do something fun. Is that something new, is it specific to Hackney Wick?

I: I think that’s a trend in contemporary art internationally. The focus has shifted to the event, to do with audience participation, creating situations which engage the public. The public shapes the show in the end.

T: Why do you think that is happening now?

I: It’s not just specific to contemporary art. If you look at television, media, with reality shows that the audience can join in, it’s happening across all facets of contemporary life.

T: Do you see that as a positive development, or would you rather perhaps see some concept of art back on a pedestal?

I: I wouldn’t say it’s positive or negative. I think it’s just a reflection of the times that we’re in. It’s just a natural progression that will probably turn into something else in a few years once we’re sick of audiences. Perhaps some sense of spectacle will return.

T: Is that something you try to do? To predict developments in art?

I: I think I try to focus on the moment.

D: To see where things go is part of the idea. That’s partly why we put on lots of events.

I: It’s an excellent way to establish yourself and then you become a lot more snobbish and more exclusive and have guest lists and not let in more than ten people.

T: and you have to ring a doorbell to get in.

I: I reflected on this with my last show. I only let people into the gallery one-in-one-out. There wasn’t even any art in there. They just came to hang out with the polysexual music/art it crowd. It’s about queuing. Things look more important if there’s a queue.

T: Is there something more serious at root in this idea of fun? Is there some kind of intellectual scrutiny of the idea of fun?

I: I think maintaining a sense of fun is quite a serious endeavour. Especially now with everything becoming more computerised and regimented, there are more rules, fast-paced. There are a lot of demands on the professional workforce to conform to a robotic way of life perhaps.

And oh this is quite a big topic. But it’s become even more challenging because big companies and advertisers have picked up on so-called alternative methods of appealing to crowds.

T: Is there a desire among artists to resist that kind of appropriation by big corporations or brands?

I: I think that’s always been one of the rules of the artist, to ask questions and to tap into something that you don’t necessarily have an answer for. Maybe that’s why there’s an abundance of death imagery in contemporary art because you can never quite answer those questions. It’s important also to have a sense of humour about the whole thing that you don’t really get in too many other professions.

T: Are there specific artists doing that better or more interestingly than others?

I: In Hackney Wick specifically, the galleries take artists but also shape the message themselves. Like I think Decima has quite a Dadaist attitude. (to David) You create situations which have artists in them, artists who – if they had a show on their own – might not necessarily present that attitude. Curators and artists are pretty much on the same level now. You have to see them both equally.

T: Dogs seem to be a running theme at Decima?

D: Yeah, it is really. I’m not quite sure why. People seem to quite like dogs, for no apparent reason. We’ve got these dog costumes – we did a dog male-voice choir, with the dogs singing ‘New Dog, New Dog’ like Frank Sinatra. And we did a dog fight at Elevator Gallery, a boxing match with people dressed up as dogs. It went down terribly well actually.

T: What aspect of Hackney Wicked are you most looking forward to?

I: The glamour!

D: The glamour of hackney wick!

T: What was the thinking behind the Art Olympics?

D: Well, we wanted to organise an inter-gallery five-a-side football competition which somebody actually did about ten years ago. We thought it would be quite a fun way to get all the galleries from across London together in Hackney Wick. But, because we’re near the Olympic site, it’s rather evolved into the Art Olympics.

There’s Hackney Wicket with Aaron Barschak, the Comedy Terrorist. We know him through somebody called Mark McGowan, who does these ridiculous performance pieces. He turned a tap on in Camberwell and planned to leave it on for a year in protest against water leakage.

T: Did somebody turn it off?

D: Well they had to. The gallery nearly got closed down. He does a lot of these things just to get media attention.

T: How much is Hackney Wicked, and to some extent all contemporary art, geared towards creating some kind of media stir?

I: I think that that might have been the attitude a few years ago but now it’s more about using the media to your advantage. It’s interesting to see how an idea takes shape through the media.

D: Up to a point, some of things that are being done are actually genuinely quite interesting. They’re not being done simply to get media attention; the media just picks up on them. The media is important in order to promote events and get people to come. If you didn’t have the media you’d simply rely on word of mouth.

T: How did the idea for bike polo come about?

D: It was an Olympic Sport in the 1908 Olympics and Gilbert & George read about it in the Telegraph or somewhere and told us about it. It just sounded a really great idea. Everybody has bikes in Hackney Wick because the public transport is slightly lacking and cycling’s easy. Everybody has bikes but polo is normally quite an exclusive sport, so cycling polo just sounded a really great idea.

T: So anybody can turn up and join in?

D: Yes, we’ll just have to sort teams out. There’s also dog racing and other things, like lying around, doing nothing, sitting in the sun. Maybe a barbeque competition, who can make the best barbeque.

T: Do you think there has been a change in Decima’s ethos since the gallery’s move to Hackney Wick?

D: Because we know the gallery in Hackney Wick is going to be short-term we’re trying to do as many things as possible.

T: Just looking at exhibition titles alone, it seems that while you were in Bermondsey the aim did seem to be deliberately provocative. That seems to have changed?

D: Well, a lot of it just seemed to have got media attention, like the Fuckart and Pimp, a kind of fake show but real as well. We had a girl on a mattress pretending to have sex with someone in order to consummate the picture. There was a peep-hole. The only person who paid the £5 to look through the peep-hole was somebody from the council. And we got a letter saying we were doing immoral things and we should stop. But by that time his picture was in the Independent. And the council hasn’t really pursued it. We’ve done a lot of events and shows in a similar vein but some of them just don’t get covered, even thought they were equally interesting. For some reason that was something that caught the media eye, which is quite a good thing because it got the gallery quite well known and encouraged people to come to other shows, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise.

T: Has there been a change of direction since the move to Wick?

D: I don’t think there’s been a change of direction so much as we never really had any direction. The idea of having a gallery space was so that – when you think of ideas in the pub you never really goes any further with them – but the space provided an opportunity to actually do it. We had a pantomime cow in the old gallery which we took to different areas of London just purely for publicity and amusement.

We did a Diana Weekend and the cow was front page news. It was to celebrate one year since Diana had died and we did a ceremonial walk along Tower Bridge with the cow and had a Diana party. It was all pro-Diana. Swedish TV came down to cover it for some reason. For the show there were actually some really great things, but not many members of the public actually came to see it.

T: Do you think that a lot of people are intimated by art’s perceived weirdness or unapproachability? And what you’re trying to do is to say well art can be fun and you can join in?

D: People think that we’re doing something weird but once they come down and see it they can understand it better and see that some of it is actually really great art. We’re just promoting it in a different way.

I: At the Residence I’ve always sought to engage with pop culture. As part of the event aspect, I’ve had a lot of performers like musicians, pop stars coming in to do shows, DJs, dance parties and that really widens the audience. People come just because they want to go to the party but then they end up seeing the show too. So you give people an entry. But at the same time I don’t think that artists should necessarily be missionaries, like a religious institution trying to convert people who might actually be very happy in their established way of life. You can give people opportunities, but at the end of the day it’s up to the individual whether they want to engage with them. It can also be compromising to the art if you open it up so it’s so accessible that you’ve lost the substance of what it was in the first place. So it’s my particular opinion now that a little bit of exclusivity or what people call elitism is not such a bad thing in the end.

T: What’s your take on what’s happening in the art world in London? Is there anything that you find particularly exciting or particularly depressing?

D: There’s always new things cropping up. Guerrilla artists like Mark McGowan are popping up and doing mad things, but that have interesting messages or undertones to them. A collective like Artists Anonymous are interesting. Even quite mainstream galleries are turning their openings into something more performance-based.

I: I’ve come from Toronto where I had a gallery for two years and I’ve also worked internationally for galleries and commercial art fairs. What I’ve noticed about London is that because it’s so vast as an area, it’s all quite disconnected in a way. One of my motivations for leaving Toronto was that it was quite incestuous. Everything was focussed on one area of the city – that’s where you had all the galleries all on one street. It’s amazing because a lot of the artists from that area have become quite international superstars. But just being in that area you see the same people and the same thing all the time. But here, there’s so many different areas that you’re always getting a real variety of different ethos (ethoi is apparently the plural of this after some Wikipedia work) of how things are done. There’s no established way of doing things and people are quite open to do-it-yourself. And I think that’s what Hackney Wicked is really all about.

L: it’s pot-luck until you fall into somewhere. You never know what you’re going to get until you do it.

I: In Hackney Wick there ‘s a real opportunity to just abandon the established rules for doing something and to start something new. Because London is such an international hub you automatically have the attention of the wider contemporary art world. In Toronto I never got reviews in Art Review, but now suddenly I’m based in London and I’m getting media attention. A big audience, an international base of artists who want to show in my gallery…

T: Do you think there’s a slight drawback in the feeling that anybody who wants to do something has to come to London? Most people in the media are lazy and don’t fancy travelling to the provinces

I: Well the media are always concerned with their marketability and who their target audience pays attention to and the audience might not be as thrilled to hear about something happening in some little town like… um I don’t even know. I think I probably fall into that same category!

Being in a metropolis is also a lot more challenging in a way because there’s a lot more competition when you’re up against millions of people. In a small town not such a charged statement can go a lot further and upset the locals or whatever. I see London as a megaphone that speaks really loudly to the whole world.

D: In London you can put on really great shows and get lots of people to come. You don’t need the media attention so much if you’ve got people there who are actually just thoroughly enjoying the work.

I: You’re making a communication.

D: You try to tell the media about it but whether they pick up on it or not, that’s up to them. A bit like Hackney Wicked – I think it’ll be a fantastic thing, but it’s up to the media to pick up on it if they want to.

I: Whether we get lots of publicity or not, there’s already going to be a large attendance.

D: When we were in Bermondsey, Decima did a lot of shows pointed specifically towards at getting media attention. And they did get media attention, but the public didn’t pick up on it. And you can do things that the public pick up on and enjoy but the media don’t. Generally we just try to put on good shows that are interesting and that people enjoy.

T: do you think there are specific things intrinsic to a show that the media will pick up on, and different things that the public will pick up on?

I: Well, I’ve noticed from my shows in Hackney Wick that the media pick up on me when I put in the least effort. The other shows, hundreds of people turn up, so many that I can’t let them all in, and it’s not picked up by the media at all. The media focus on established spectacles: they seem to like the fact that I do it all in my own home, but that was just my circumstances. ‘Who cares about the ideas in the show or whatever, this is someone who does it in their own home!’: that seemed to be the focus.

T: Are there any aspects of the London art world that bore you?

D: There are a lot of things going on that are just the same. There a lot of galleries showing work that isn’t so interesting and they continue doing it. They don’t really try to do anything exciting or new. A lot of the shows can be much the same as they’ve ever been.

I: In terms of collectors, collectors are only interested in long-established galleries and are often ignorant of contemporary art. They might not have any knowledge whatsoever – they’re interested in a marketable purchase.

T: Do you think that emphasis you place on the particular event or the particular experience puts off collectors? Because you can’t buy an event?

I: Maybe that’s the attraction of the experience – you can’t put a price on it. At least not yet, maybe that’s the future. I find a lot of my collectors are from America and they haven’t even seen the show. They maybe just see something on the website and buy it. In my experience in London, collectors want to see reputable names, schools that the artist has come from. Establishment seems to be an important aspect of buying art. But at the same time the goal of my gallery has not been totally commercial. It offers that but the main emphasis is on the ideas.

D: If an artist is excited about being in the show then they’ll create an excitement about it. A lot of things you see, the artist puts something in but isn’t that interested in it. But here in Hackney Wick, people are actually excited and wanting to do things.

T: How much do you contact artists about a project and how do they contact you?

D: About 50:50. For Hackney Wicked lots of people have contacted us to try and get involved.

T: Do you find that it’s easier to get people involved once you have a couple of big names involved?

D: I think new names are probably as important as the big names.

I: It’s not so much about the names but more about the ideas involved and what’s going on. It’s the same with both known names and unknowns: it’s more about the situation. London has no shortage of big names to go and see every night, so it takes more than that to attract someone.

T: Any artists for the future?

D: Byron Pritchard just had his first solo show on Thursday in Stoke Newington. He does a thing called 20 Cunts, a spinning thing and you look through the holes and there’s photographs of 20 people he thinks are cunts.

I: Robert Hawkins: he used to show with Andy Warhol – he’s 56 years old. There’s quite a bit of emphasis on emerging artists right now, but maybe we shouldn’t entirely lose sight of older artists, many of whom are still making work and still relevant and have the benefit of an experience with someone like Andy Warhol. So Robert Hawkins: He lives in the Barbican. He paints all day and all night. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him. He’s self-taught but had amazing experiences, he’s sold in auctions in New York, but doesn’t have the kind of fame that you’d expect. He does a lot of ghostly paintings and references current events and TV shows like most haunted.

T: How important do you think it is for artists the networking aspect of things, making contacts and meeting people it strikes me that it’s quite a major part of it.

D: You’ve got to do it in order to build up a mailing list really. If you don’t tell people about things, they’re unlikely to find out.

T: It must be hard for artists who don’t want to live in London or don’t want to meet people.

D: The show we had on Saturday was called The Arts Club, a kind of Royal Academy Summer Show. Artists had to pay £25 to put a piece in. Every artist in it promotes themselves. So you get a real cross-over of people coming down. We even had an 8 year-old girl doing portraits – she made about £300. I’ve got one of a dog she did (takes a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket: it’s pretty good!)

T: Do you think the self-promotion aspect is more important than or as important as what you’re actually doing?

I: I would say that more than 50% of the time spent in running a gallery is not even thinking about the work or the art ideas: it’s administration and promotion.

D: Especially with the internet now. It’s a lot of emailing people. When we were in Bermondsey the internet was only just beginning really so most things were done through the post.

I: Now you have every avenue – post, internet, email, magazines

T: From a personal point of view, I’m quite lazy and have to write a lot quite quickly. If I can’t look something up on the internet (like if the artist doesn’t have a website or the gallery doesn’t show a lot of their work) it’s a hard to find out about it. It seems that having a web presence of some kind is as important as what you’re actually doing.

I: I think in the beginning those who had the knowledge to make a website had an advantage but now it’s just standard. But it’s not just a website. You’ve got to be on facebook, you’ve got to be on myspace, and if you don’t cover those avenues you’re cutting off thousands from your possible mailing list.

T: Is this a positive development?

D: It’s just the way things have developed.

I: I don’t think the internet is as simple as just posting something. Some people don’t even check their email anymore. Some people are just on facebook and they don’t look at their email. So you have to cover all bases and it’s become more complicated and requires more of your time.

T: Any final things about Hackney Wicked?

D: There’s going to be a lot happening!

L: It’s very timely because nobody knows what’s going to happen to the area in the next few years.

D: Look out for Calum F Kerr – he’s going to be doing a pole vault over the Olympic blue fence.

T: Does he have some kind of landing mat on the other side?

D: Well no, He’s looking through the windows in the fence to try and find a suitable place to do it.

T: How high is the fence?

D: Just sort of fence high.

—-Ends—-