The GBAD Bus arrives, 2011

Attention all Great British Art Debate fans. It is with sadness that we announce that the project is about to come to an end! We have had a great 4 years and created some fantastic debate around Britishness and Art.

Watercolour Paintings at Camp Bestival 2011

Under-age Festival 2011

Thank you to everyone who has been involved in the festivals, workshops, discussions and website over the project, it’s been a great pleasure to meet, challenge and interact with you!

Late at Tate October 2011 © Richard Eaton

As the project draws to a close this week we are going to be freezing the Great British Art Debate on-line accounts. If you loved the project and still want to be involved, why not download the Pocket Art Gallery, our app and place the national collection in your surroundings?

Photo taken with Pocket Art Gallery

Alternatively stay involved by following or visiting one of the partner galleries.

Facebook:

Laing Art Gallery

Norfolk Museums

Museums Sheffield

Tate

Twitter:

Laing Art Gallery

Norfolk Museums

Museums Sheffield

Tate

Websites

Laing Art Gallery

Norfolk Museums

Tate

Museums Sheffield

Tate LABEL marked one of the last large GBAD events of the year, taking over Tate Britain with collaborative creativity and pumping baselines. The Great British Art Debate and Tate Collective spent a joyous day repositioning how artists can represent Britishness whilst working in response to the Family Matters Display.

The day saw gallery visitors take part in a host of workshops run by Tate Collectives  aimed at getting people to be critical and creative. The day started with a series of lively street art workshops, reworking traditional emblems of Britishness led by Soulful Creative.

Meanwhile other members of the crowd were drawn into Union Slack, a workshop encouraging people to create their own alternative British flag in mosaic.

In the gallery space, artist Tracey Moberly presented a mass participation project, bringing in a range of art and artists from across the country to contribute to a projection piece. Images submitted challenged ideas of the family in contemporary Britain and included some deeply personal work.

As dawn fell,  the Duveen Galleries hosted live acoustic sets by Shakka and Speech Debelle, followed by a Great British Art Debate discussing how family and Britishness influenced creativity.

Later DJ Stooki Sound took over the historic collection with reverberating baselines and was joined by performance artists from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Turner Prize installation.

In addition Tanya Boyarkina and  fellow Tate Collective’s created a homage to sound artist Alvin Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting In  A Room’ (1968), by exploring the transformation of spoken language in Britain. In this 30 minute soundscape, recordings of Tate Collective’s members speaking Yoruba, Patois, Dutch, Spanish, English and Russian were repeatedly played back and re-recorded within the gallery walls.

To the sound of these reverberations, Artist Diana Kolawole hosted a roaming photography  workshop inviting people to investigate their inner child by producing a series of prop assisted portraits. These snapshots intended to show visitors that they can access childish exuberance no matter how old we are.

(c) Tracey Moberly

To celebrate the opening of The Tanks at Tate Modern, Tate hosted UnderCurrent festival from 16^th to 27^th August over the summer. Focusing on sub-culture, underground art and the under-represented this festival saw Tate Collectives work with artists to fill The Tanks  with a mixture of installation, intervention, music and live events.

(c) Tracey Moberly

As part of this festival artist Tracey Moberly presented Tweet Me Up! a digital project marking International Day Against Intolerance, Discrimination and Violence based on Musical Preferences, Lifestyle and Code. The piece encouraged audiences from around the world to contribute photography, film and comments via social media to create an amalgamation of ideas in the name of cultural tolerance and exchange. The result was a 6 hour piece presented across The Tanks on 4 screens.

(c) Tracey Moberly

Since the summer, The Great British Art Debate has been preparing for the arrival of The Family Matters Display and LABEL, an event that will see The Great British Art Debate and Tate Collectives take over Tate Britain with DJ’s, workshops and artists.

As part of both of these events, The Great British Art Debate wanted to reach out to audiences and ask them, ‘What does family mean to you?’ as a way of understanding modern interpretations of the family.

As a result we have asked Tracey Moberly to return to Tate and create a new project for LABEL that asks Britain’s creative minds for contributions titled ‘Family old, family new … who am I?

(c) Tracey Moberly

As part of the project, YOU are invited to submit your photographic responses to the themes of a Family Saturday, a Self Portrait Profile, or Old Family Photos.

To be included, please send your contributions to Label@foundry.tv.

If your contributions are larger than 20 MB please use a service like yousendit or wetransfur to submit your files.

Your images will be merged together and the final work will be exhibited by projection in the Deveens at TATE Britain on 24^th November 2012.

We can’t wait to see the end result!

To mark the release of Pocket Art Gallery, The Great British art Debate would like to invite you to take part in a little bit of fun. We are launching a competition to see who can take the most impressive photograph with Pocket Art Gallery.

Whether it be adventurous, ambitious, thought provoking or quirky we want to see what you can produce by blending beautiful works from the national collection with a dash of augmented reality. What wondrous snaps will you be able to take?

Once you’ve taken your inspirational shot, upload it to the Pocket Art Gallery Map and post it to twitter with the hashtag #PocketArt.

OR upload your shot to the Pocket Art Gallery Map and email it to us at gbartdebate@tate.org.uk.

The lucky winner will receive a selection of goodies from the Tate Shop. Last entries will be taken on 20th December 2012, so get snapping.

Paul Graham, Television Portrait (Danny, Bristol)
© Paul Graham

When Greg Sullivan and I began to think about the Family Matters display we were excited at the opportunity to explore changing ideas about the family over the centuries and hang contemporary works alongside historic art. Bringing the many strands of the show together in a coherent hang was a challenge – how were we to exhibit contemporary photographs, archive photo albums, public submission photographs, oil paintings, sculpture and video art alongside each other in a way that did them all justice?

In addition, the show, which originated in Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, had travelled to two other venues before reaching us, where it was displayed over several rooms. With only one large room for our version of the exhibition, the first task – carried out by our colleague Tabitha Barber- was to edit down the hang while trying to retain the spirit and complexity of its original conception. Our solution was to try and pair works of art and draw attention to connections and disjunctures between them.

David Hockney, My Parents
© David Hockney 2010

In some instances, works spoke to each other visually, such as David Hockney’s My Parents and Henry Walton’s Sir Robert and Lady Buxton and  their daughter Anne, which both explore ideas around parenthood. In the Hockney, mother and father are passively observed by their son; the father left to peruse his book uninterrupted. In Walton’s painting, the daughter interrupts her parent’s reading and demands to be included. Equally, by hanging Martin Parr’s The Last Resort (1983-6) next to Johan Zoffany’s The Bradshaw Family (1769) Parr’s modern scene of a family eating chips is recast in the light of traditional family portraiture and begins to reveal many of the same compositional devices as its eighteenth-century counterpart.

Johan Zoffany, The Bradshaw Family
Tate Collection

In other cases, the links were more conceptual. Donald Rodney’s In the House of my Father (1996-7) shows the artist’s hand holding a small house made of skin, which was removed during an operation to combat sickle-cell anaemia, an hereditary disease. Engaging with ideas of inheritance, it is paired with Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home (1862) in which a father who has squandered all his money is forced to sell the family house. Lot numbers are visible on all the paintings and furniture and the grandmother weeps to the left of the scene but the father, oblivious to the pain he has caused, appears to be pointing his son on a similar path as they sample wines to the right of the picture.

Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father
© The estate of Donald Rodney

Robert Braithwaite Martineau, The Last Day in the Old Home
Tate Collection

Responding to public feedback in relation to the taster display for this show, mounted in the gallery earlier in the year, we also wanted to reflect the complexity of families. While some of the works on show, for example Michael Andrews’ tender portrait Melanie and Me Swimming (1978-9) revealed the support and love families can offer, we also wanted to acknowledge their more difficult side. Bill Brandt’s photographs A Sheffield Backyard (1936) and Parlourmaid and Undermaid ready to serve dinner (1936) show two very different experiences of British family life; a bleak urban backyard revealing the underbelly of industrial Britain contrasted with the cut glass and silverware of an upper class dining table.

Michael Andrews, Melanie and Me Swimming
© The estate of Michael Andrews

The final element of the display, which really drew all the strands together, was the inclusion of photographs sent in by members of the public in response to the question ‘What does family mean to you? The images we chose to display, in a showcase opposite a group of Vanessa Bell family albums from the Tate Archive, found resonances in a number of the works hanging on the walls around them and helped to  illustrate the highly varied nature of the modern British family.

Karl Ohiri, Family Portrait,
(c) Karl Ohiri

Family Matters: The Family in British Art opens today at Tate Britain and runs until 24th February 2013.

Written by Ruth Kenny, Assistant Curator 1750-1830