Front Row - 'Risk series'

Wednesday's episode of Front Row was the last in the 'Risk' series; a series questioning the importance of risk-taking in art.

risk

NOUN


1. A situation involving exposure to danger.

1.1 in singular The possibility that something unpleasant or unwelcome will happen.

1.2 with modifier A person or thing regarded as a threat or likely source of danger.

1.3 usually risks A possibility of harm or damage against which something is insured.

1.4 with adjective A person or thing regarded as likely to turn out well or badly, as specified, in a particular context or respect.

1.5 The possibility of financial loss.

In a number of interviews with people involved in the arts, Front Row has been investigating the extent to which risk is essential to creating great art.


Questions asked include


What is artistic risk?

What are the emotional risks of using your life as your art?

Why is diversity in the arts seen as risky?

What happens when artistic risk fails?

In what ways are artists risky?

How do you decide if a risk is worth taking?

How has risk changed in the past 10 years?


To mark the end of Front Row’s Risk season, the panel created the Front Row Risk List - what they believe to be the 10 riskiest artworks of the 21st century.


They considered all aspects of risk such as:


putting your reputation on the line
putting yourself in physical danger
is it always a good thing to risk offending people?
how does gender play a role in what's risky?

To view the results please visit https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f07w

Ian Sansom Is Waiting - BBC Radio 4

Ian Sansom Is Waiting on BBC Radio 4 was an interesting examination of the familiar act of waiting. Whether that be waiting for a bus, waiting for your name being called out on the register, waiting for the weekend, waiting for that career break that you have been longing for, waiting for the right moment to propose to the love of your life, or simply waiting for a sunny day in which you can hang your washing outside; 

"We're always waiting for something. 

Sometimes, it feels like it might never arrive. But what if the secret to getting what you want lies in the space between things, rather than in the destination itself? Through terminal spaces, waiting rooms and traffic jams, Ian Sansom offers a delayed deliberation on those moments when someone or something makes us... wait. As Ian puts us on hold, forms an orderly queue and sits down to watch a slow film in the company of filmmaker Spencer Slovic, he experiences a sense of delayed gratification with philosopher Professor Harold Schweizer, tunes up in the orchestra pit with percussionist Sam Staunton, and endures the protracted delay in getting published with Northern Irish author Wendy Erskine. Maybe if he's able hang around long enough, Ian might just arrive at his conclusion."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00047tf

Grayson Perry: En Garde

In this episode of Archive on Four (BBC Radio 4) Grayson Perry goes backwards in the archive in search of the moment the avant-garde died.

'It's a century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called Fountain to an exhibition staged by the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain was a urinal -- not a painting of a urinal or a sculpture, just a urinal, bought from a Manhattan hardware store and signed R.Mutt.

(c) Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 / Photo (c) Tate

The Society of Independent Artists rejected Duchamp's provocation and the original object was lost. Nowadays Duchamp's urinal is canonised as the fountainhead of conceptual art and the high water (closet) mark of the avant garde. Replicas of the Fountain grace museums around the world - emblems of the avant-garde spirit of experimentation and confrontation. Somewhere in the intervening years though, something changed - contemporary art lost its ability to shock and critique. We're still hopelessly drawn to the idea of art that's 'cutting edge', 'ground-breaking', 'revolutionary'. But is that possible at this point -- haven't we seen it all before?

 
Maybe the death knell was sounded when the Saatchi Gallery opened on the South Bank? Or with the advent of protest and radical chic in the 1960s? Maybe it was when the CIA funded the abstract expressionists? Or when the post-war art market began to reign supreme? Or when the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 1927? Or maybe it was all a matter of style the very moment Duchamp's Fountain was conceived?'

Perry questions whether the avant garde over emphasises the importance of the individual at the expense of valuing the collective.

Can people be accidentally avant garde? One tends to think that people have somehow made a set of conscious decisions to 'break the mould' and do something groundbreaking, but quite often they have simply done something that they find interesting and have not considered the notion of the avant garde. 

This episode features Brian Eno, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nnenna Okore, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Thornton.

Producer: Martin Williams.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090v482

The Joy of Text on BBC Radio 4

Artist and broadcaster Bob and Roberta Smith, famed for his hand-painted slogans, goes on a personal journey to explore how text and language are used in art. 

From monks in Cistercian Abbeys and medieval bureaucrats, to conceptual art subversives challenging who could be considered artists, Bob and Roberta Smith draws on a wide range of traditions. He also re-examines his own formative experiences with the interplay of words, colour and form to bring listeners into the present. 

Tom Phillips

Over the course of the programme, we're led on an emotional trip through a world of cut up Victorian novellas - and we encounter pop-art printing making nuns working at the coal face of the civil rights. Bob and Roberta Smith meets political cartoonists creating new languages, artists fusing text and images to give voices to the marginalised, and a group of women democratising art through text, images and a Risograph printing machine. 

Corita Kent

This programme reveals that - away from plays, novels or song lyrics - text and language have been adopted by artists in contrasting and ever-evolving ways, but these all reveal that text is an art form in itself. Featuring Steve Bell, Corita Kent, Janette Parris, Tom Phillips, Donna Steele and Sofia Niazi.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkqv3x

Double-Talk - A radio programme about dialogue

This BBC Radio 4 programme explores the art of the dialogue, in philosophy and law, in religion, psychoanalysis and the arts.

"Dialogue is a special kind of exchange. At its most simple, between two voices A and B back and forth, one speaks as the other listens and vice versa. Both parties change from the experience. It's an ancient model for how we should communicate, debate, speak, listen and think.

Built around a series of conversations, this programme explores the two-voice dialogue across different spheres - its foundations in the ancient world and in law, in religious thought and modern psychoanalysis, in philosophy and fiction, in drama and comedy and even in music. Dialogue as competition and exchange, as the art of listening as well as speaking, a form of equity or even disguise.



The very earliest dialogues were rowdy and competitive, each voice trying to gain mastery over the other with one judged the winner - in ancient Sumerian writing summer debates with winter, copper takes on silver, fish against bird. These dialogues, all about prosecution and defence, became a foundation for legal argument. But dialogue can be used to describe something more pacific, an approach to understanding and agreement. In Western philosophy, the dialogue was the great revealer of truth - most famously the Socratic dialogues of Plato, which lay down the principles of reason through opposition and exchange.

When it works, the dialogue is a learning process, transforming both participants in the process.

But when two voices are put in dialogue, face to face, is truth and understanding always the outcome? Dialogue can also be a measure of silence, a space where parties conceal as much as they reveal - a way for authors to disguise their own voice by writing for two, sometimes in order to print radical ideas or reveal secrets without taking direct ownership of them, from Galileo to Oscar Wilde.

Contributors include curator Irving Finkel and Helena Kennedy QC; philosopher Simon Critchley and literary scholar Hugh Haughton; singer Catherine Bott and jazz bassist Alec Dankworth; comedy writer John Finnemore and playwright Tristan Bernays; psychotherapist Adam Phillips and Giles Fraser, priest of St Mary's Newington in London."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w05zh

My Mind and Me on Radio 1

BBC Radio 1 have a programme called My Mind and Me which covers topics relating to mental health. 

Episodes include:

Dealing with depression

Tips to beat stress

What is mental health?

Dealing with abuse

The latest set of episodes is all about hearing voices. Over 10 episodes the story of Alice is told.

"Imagine hearing voices in your head. Alice does. She’s a 27-year-old mum who’s had different characters in her mind since she was about 15. They all have names and personalities and they can be hard to ignore. Alice wants to tell you about them so you can understand what it's like to live with schizophrenia."

- Donna - Join Alice as she invites you to meet the very first voice she ever heard, Donna. Welcome to her inner world.

- Rose and Rachel - Join Alice as she gets her revenge on a couple of voices in her head. They're a tricky pair, Rose and Rachel, but Alice has worked out how she can get her own back.

- Michael - This is a love story between Alice and someone very special to her. You'll find out what happened when the voice she loved the most in the world turned into one of her most frightening.

- Mum and Dad - As if things weren't confusing enough for Alice, she started hearing her mum and dad's voices in her head. But, they weren't exactly like her parents in real life.

- Celebrity voices - Alice's voices are often frightening, but in this episode she reveals how she hears celebrity voices which lighten the mood. She even has a bit of a crush on one of them.

- Tony - Leaving the house can be hard sometimes for Alice because that's when she'll hear muffled voices from crowds in the street or supermarket. It's confusing and makes her feel paranoid, but she's learnt over the years how to cope with it.

- Ricky - Alice talks about how sometimes when she's feeling low, she self-harms. But there's a voice which can lift her mood and sometimes she pines to hear from Ricky.

- Joshua - Alice's positivity oozes through this episode. She's in a good place in her life right now and she talks about the voice which reflects this and that's Joshua. She also reveals her plans for the future, which include maths... and bras. Prepare to be inspired.

- Stigma - We're nearing the end of Alice's story and she wants to deal with some of the stigma surrounding schizophrenia. Some people assume those with the illness are deluded all the time and that they never have any sense of reality. In this episode Alice explains why that's actually far from the truth.

- Last voice - Over the years Alice has experienced positive and negative voices, in this final episode she reveals whether she'd get rid of them if she could. It's a difficult question and her answer might surprise you.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05q82d8

The Confidence Trick - Episode 2

In the second part of her three part series, Laura Barton explores the extent to which the schools we attend and our social backgrounds more generally play a part in determining our levels of confidence. 

She visits a state comprehensive school and an independent fee-paying school, both in the North West of England, to discover how much effort is made to ensure the confidence of pupils is actively developed, and the means by which that development might take place. She questions how far the network of influential contacts more readily made at private schools can help generate confidence in pupils as they set out into the world, but hears too how for many youngsters today a mask of confidence can often cover a sense of insecurity. 

At a visit to a comprehensive school, a member of staff tells her that in some ways it is easier to instill confidence in students at a comprehensive school rather than a private school because the students have the experience of talking to and interacting with students from a wide range of social backgrounds, cultures and classes. He believes the students are more tolerant and do not have a sense of entitlement that perhaps students from a private school may have.

He explains that the school tries to find something in every student that they can do well. For example, he has discovered that a boy who struggles with his academic school work has a real talent for fishing, and so he has encouraged the student to write about fishing for the school newspaper.

Laura speaks to figures such as Joe Queenan, Dreda Say Mitchell and Stuart Maconie about the ways the place you come from can influence confidence, whether that's the vast expanses of America, the East End of London or the industrial north of England. For Queenan, his own self-confidence comes from a combination of indifference to others' attitude towards him, and a childhood in relative poverty. Once you know you can deal with that, he says, such things as public speaking that terrify so many carry little fear.

Stuart Maconie acknowledges that private schools are meant to instill confidence in their students, but he thinks that this confidence is born of the absolute objective notion that you can't fail because underpinning that confidence is actual material and political power. He states that "if you are poor and you have no shoes, no amount of self-confidence will help you get on in life." It is understandable that those with a good education have a degree of confidence because they have a good reason. Certain opportunities will not be available to those of the lower classes or less well-educated. "No lower-class individual will have the opportunity to become the editor of a newspaper without any journalistic experience, in the way that someone such as George Osborne did because he had a particular network of contacts and a status."

Laura follows up her notion that an unexpected factor in determining is architecture and the built environment in which we're raised, asking expert John Grindrod how correct Winston Churchill was when he said that, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."

Stuart Maconie comments on the difference in confidence between counties. He recognises that Mancunians are generally confident, whereas Brummies are often self deprecating. He also speaks about how the St George's Hall in Liverpool is positioned directly in front of the train station, so that it is the first thing you see once out of the station. This building gives the impression of its grand status.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09czp4l

The Confidence Trick - episode 1

In this new three part series, Laura Barton sets out to examine the increasingly important part confidence appears to play in modern life, at the point when so many of us are beset by problems surrounding our own self-confidence. 

Over the course of the series Laura examines the key role of our background and education in determining our levels of confidence, teasing out the intricate interplay between aspects including class, gender, psychology and even architecture. 

She hears how our inclination to follow those who seem most confident can lead us into dark waters, and looks at the complicated connections between confidence and creativity. 

Laura also explores her own vexed relationship with this commodity that has so often proved elusive in her own life, seeking out an alternative to the brazen, pushy version of confidence that is currently so dominant. 

In the first episode, Laura speaks with the likes of Marina Hyde, Susan Cain, Katty Kay and high-wire walker Chris Bullzini to look at how we have come to be so in thrall to confidence and those most assured of their own opinions. She heads into the workplace to look at the ways the loudest and the cockiest most often rule the roost, and attempts being made to give more space and weight to the voices of those given to quiet reflection in order to maximise their potential contribution. 

Marina Hyde points out that it is surprising how quickly people are to form an opinion and have strong views about things that they know relatively little about. 

Writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie is of the opinion that, "We've become obsessed with confidence and self-assertion.... it seems to be a new strain in our thinking. Isn't quiet modest competence a better thing?" He believes that confidence comes with knowing that you are doing the right thing. Maconie realises that being at ease in ones own skin is something that is hard acquired and comes with a long experience of doing what we do.

It is not just through the voice that we can give the impression of confidence. Wearing a uniform can instill confidence in people that you know what you are doing. For example, a pilot wearing a pilot's uniform can be deemed more confident than a pilot dressed in shorts and a t-shirt.

You get confidence by doing things that are challenging to you, but once you have done it once, you feel more confident to do it again.

There is research that suggests that you need three women to make a difference. Evidence of women underestimating their abilities is wide ranging. Men tend to overestimate their abilities by about 30%. Women apply for promotions when they have 100% of the skills set whereas men apply for promotions when they have only 60% of the skills set, thinking that they will learn those skills while on the job.

Susan Cain reported that in a typical meeting only 3 people tend to account for 70% of the talking. 

Social media and electronic means of sharing ideas can be a good way to encourage less confident people to participate. They do not need to compete with loud voices and are given credit for what they share - their contributions are in black and white and can be proven.

The first episode ends with a proposition from Susan Cain. She proposes that real confidence is when you know who you are. 

Do you know what kind of life you want to lead? 

Do you know who you are? 

Do you know what kind of decisions you want to make?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09bykhx