James Lingwood and Michael Morris are celebrating 25 years as directors of the art commissioning body Artangel, the organisation that has taken art out of the gallery and placed it in and around the city.
Founded by Roger Took, a former director of the Barbican Art Gallery, in 1985, Artangel was always intended to be a commissioning body for ground- breaking work. For an early project, the US artist Jenny Holzer produced lithographed stickers, which were distributed as inserts in the December 1988 issue of the (now defunct) zeitgeist-defining style magazine The Face. Other early collaborators include Barbara Kruger and the Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Little of Artangel’s history under Took is visible today. On its website, the organisation begins its history with the first projects commissioned by Lingwood and Morris.
The arrival of the duo as co-directors in 1991 had an immediate impact publicly and critically. For the first project they commissioned, the German artist Stephan Balkenhol created a lifesize figure of a man on a buoy in the river Thames. The bobbing figure prompted calls to the emergency services and even a rescue attempt.
It is a neat emblem for the ambition, originality and popular appeal of Lingwood and Morris’s quarter-century in charge of Artangel. They had both been curators at London’s ICA and realised that artists “were developing ways of working, imagining kinds of experiences where the best place for them was not within the conventional art institution”, Lingwood says. “They needed an organisation like Artangel to help these ideas and ambitious, imaginative visions materialise in the world.”
Morris adds that the idea was also that these different places for art might “offer artists a broader-based audience than might go to traditional institutions [such as] museums and galleries and that has proved to be true”.
A knack for marrying resonant art with equally memorable spaces quickly became Artangel’s trademark. Today this is harder than ever before. There is greater competition “because everyone across the cultural industries is trying to offer an exciting and different kind of experience”, and there is “more awareness of the potential monetising of those spaces in the city”, Lingwood says.
Artangel has also changed. Nowadays it works more in film and broadcast media and, since 2005, commissioning work overseas. Its international projects include a three-part sculptural and architectural work with Cristina Iglesias in Toledo, and a major work made in 2010 with Mike Kelley in his native Detroit not long before the artist’s untimely death in 2012.
The Artangel directors are skilful fundraisers and their organisation, a charitable body, receives money from the taxpayer (its Arts Council grant currently stands at £825,000 a year) and private donors in both the UK and US.
Being asked to choose highlights from more than 100 Artangel projects is, they say, like trying to name their favourite offspring. They are equally proud of the works “that cast the longest shadows—Rachel Whiteread’s House, Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave, Michael Landy’s Break Down, Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor”, says Morris, and what Lingwood describes as “projects that have had a relatively quiet presence but hum along rather than making a huge noise”.
The duo are currently working with Mike Nelson on a major project, though not, they say, a resurrection of the artist’s controversial plan for converting parts of the demolished Heygate Estate in south London into a pyramid.
Transforming London and beyond: six Artangel projects Cristina Iglesias
Tres Aguas, Toledo, Spain, 2014
Three works between sculpture and architecture, featuring pools of water with cast elements resembling overgrown riverbeds, set in a renovated water tower, a convent and a public square. “That whole process of journeying to a place and spending some time relatively quietly absorbing what the work is and what it might be saying to you, in counterpoint to what are often very busy and noisy cultural experiences, is very attractive,” Lingwood says.
Katrina Palmer
End Matter, the Isle of Portland, Dorset, and on BBC Radio Four
One of a number of works commissioned in collaboration with BBC Radio Four, End Matter was “a very elegiac project” set on Portland, off the Dorset coast, says Lingwood, “which took as its starting point the quarries and the empty spaces in this island pockmarked by voids and absences”. On an audio walk, visitors were accompanied by the voices of fictional characters created by Palmer. The “quiet audience on Portland” was “amplified”, Lingwood says, by the broadcasts on Radio Four.
Roni Horn
Library of Water, Stykkishólmur, Iceland, 2007
An ongoing project on the south-west coast of Iceland. Within the Library of Water is a collection of water made from ice gathered from 24 different glaciers, a collection of emotional words relating to weather conditions, and a collection of weather reports. “These different, quite subtle presences in the space are catalysts for reflection—on identity, on the climate, for instance,” Lingwood says.
Rachel Whiteread
House, London, 1993
Now almost universally regarded as a landmark work, House, the cast of a Victorian family house in Bow, east London, prompted an extraordinary and often “antagonistic” furore, Lingwood says. There was even an early morning motion in the UK Houses of Parliament in favour of saving the sculpture from demolition. “It was fascinating that the debate moved so quickly from the houses around House in Bow to the Houses of Parliament and beyond,” Lingwood says.
Matthew Barney
Cremaster 4, London, 1995
Artangel imagined that it might work with Barney on an installation in London. Instead, it ended up co-funding the first part of “an epic five-film project”, Lingwood recalls. He adds that they had had no conception in their early conversations with Barney of the existence of the cremaster muscle in the scrotum, which “would lead us to making a film on the Isle of Man with three extraordinary female body builders, four experienced TT motorbike riders and Matthew himself playing a dancing satyr-like figure”.
Ben Rivers
The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, London and beyond, 2015 and ongoing
“It was shot in different parts of Morocco, not only on his own film set, but on the film set of another artist who happened to be making a film at the same time, which was woven into the narrative of Ben’s film,” Morris says. Rivers’ feature film has been screened in numerous locations but the rushes were shown in installations in the empty drama block of the old BBC Television Centre. The project has “stretched in different ways in different configurations”, Morris says. “That’s something that we wouldn’t have done at the outset of Artangel.”