3. Y Ddinas - The City

In 1955 Queen Elizabeth II declared Cardiff to be the capital of Wales. Cardiff is the country's largest city (around 320,000 inhabitants) and thus seemed an obvious choice. But 'Swansea and every other major town in Wales had laid claim to becoming the capital, and most of them had better historical justification for their claims. In their eyes, Cardiff was a town without a past, a nouveau riche fishing village which made a career for itself in the 19th century as a coal port, and did not even receive a town charter until 1905.' (Sager 1991, 93) Cardiff is also Wales' most anglicised city, geographically and culturally located in close proximity to England. And as a port it has always maintained stronger links with the rest of the world than with its Welsh hinterland, which for many called into question its suitability as a capital. The dispute was revived again in the wake of the so-called 'devolution': 1999 saw the creation of the National Assembly for Wales, a somewhat historic achievement in that it gave Wales, which up to that point had been governed from England, its own executive forum for the first time in six centuries, albeit one with restricted powers. When searching for a fitting location for the Assembly, Swansea and every other major town in Wales again laid claim to becoming the seat of government, but in the end the city of Cardiff won out.

In 2005 Cardiff celebrated its centenary as a city and fifty years as the Welsh capital. It was the town's ambition to follow this by becoming European City of Culture in 2008, but it narrowly missed out to its competitor Liverpool. Cardiff's campaign for the competition, however, briefly energised the local arts scene and inspired a debate on the nature of urbanity and the artist's place within it. It also highlighted the major changes the city had undergone in recent years. Cardiff, once a thoroughly anglicised and overwhelmingly working-class town (and as such with no real tradition of a public patronage of the arts) has been gentrified by a new middle class, many of whom are Welsh-speakers employed in the media and government. Symbol for the change is the bay area, where, adjacent to the neighbourhood that still houses one of the oldest multicultural communities in Britain, one of Europe's biggest waterfront developments now attracts new upwardly mobile costumers to its chic bars and restaurants. But the accusation of a cultural apartheid between a Welsh-speaking elite, an English-speaking second-class proletariat and various disenfranchised multi-ethnic groups ignores the far more complex interplay of different communities, languages and economies that make up the cultural life of the city, and that presents the context in which many socially-engaged artists in Cardiff create their work.

For some, of course, the very idea of 'Cardiff as City of Culture' is already an oxymoron - for this is the city in which Zaha Hadid's daring design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House won an international competition in 1994, but was turned down by the financiers. The ensuing scandal won Cardiff an international reputation as a city of philistines, a reputation it recently confirmed when architect Richard Rogers was first hired, then fired, then hired again to design a new home for the Welsh Assembly. Cardiff has one of the best schools for architecture yet little contemporary architecture of any note, and one of the best art schools in the country yet (at present) no publicly run contemporary art space. (There are a number of Welsh galleries devoted to contemporary art outside the capital in towns such as Swansea, Machynlleth, Aberystwyth, Wrexham, Llandudno and Newtown. Plans to open a major new visual arts facility in Cardiff, the Depot, have currently stalled, but the success of the Cardiff-based Artes Mundi, the largest prize for visual art offered anywhere in the world, has awakened a new public interest in contemporary visual arts after its launch in the spring 2004.) In the absence of large public institutions, the critical mass of artists involved with contemporary art in Cardiff thus takes the form of independent artist-led centres, collectives and networks.

The Cardiff School of Art and Design (or Howard Gardens as it is familiarly known) has for many years offered students the opportunity to specialize in time-based art practice (i.e. performance, video, sonic and installation art) as part of their fine art degree. Teachers and students affiliated with the school have consequently occupied a central position in the performance art scene of the city. For a number of years the time-based department was led by poet and performance artist Anthony Howell, founder of the influential Theatre of Mistakes, with whom in the 1970s he performed Fluxus-inspired minimalist 'conceptual performances' based on rules and instructions. During his time at Howard Gardens, the school housed Cardiff Art in Time (CAT), a performance art and video festival, which took place in 1994, 1996 and 1999 and featured student and professional work from around the world. Stuart Sherman, Gary Stevens, Seji Shimoda, Aaron Williamson, Hayley Newman, Station House Opera, Mark Jeffery (Goat Island) and Jeremy Deller all presented live work at the festival, whilst artists such as Christo, Gary Hill and Aleksandr Sokurov were represented by video works. CAT fulfilled an important role in the development of performance art in Wales, not so much because of its spectacular event character, but by providing a forum for the documentation and dissemination of contemporary performance art practice, a form of performative 'publication' in the shape of a festival. This function was further enhanced by Howell, who filmed much of the first festival as a contribution to his Grey Suit: Video for Art & Literature, a performance art magazine distributed on videotape, which was intended as an innovative approach to the recording of live art practice and remains to this day the only publication originating in Wales and solely devoted to performance art.

CAT also brought André Stitt to Cardiff, who presented three of his intensely visceral and cathartic 'akshuns' at the festival. The themes of the Belfast born-artist, issues of oppression, freedom, subversion, alienation from and appropriation of cultures, resonate strongly with the concerns of many political artists in Wales. Stitt took over from Howell as subject leader of the time-based department in 1999, which he now runs in collaboration with Paul Granjon, a French artist working in robotics, whose playful performances and installations take a tongue-in-cheek look at the relationship between human and machine. Recent performance graduates from Howard Gardens include Kira O'Reilly, Richard Dedomenici, Robin Deacon, Paul Hurley, Eve Dent, Phil Babot and Matt Cook. Cook in particular creates works that directly reflect on their urban environment. His sound work, Pendulum Electronica, an extension of Steve Reich's famous Pendulum Music, featured swinging torches above light sensors that triggered a series of sound samples collected from around Cardiff, which produced an increasingly dense aural portrait of the city.

Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff, Photo: Chapter

On the other side of town from Howard Gardens is Chapter Arts Centre, Wales's most important centre for contemporary art. A former school, the building was opened as an arts centre in 1971 by local artists Christine Kinsey and Bryan Jones with journalist Mik Flood. Their vision was to establish a place that would serve the local community as well as provide an environment in which all creative disciplines could be housed under one roof. More than thirty years on, Chapter has developed into an extensive complex of artists' studios, performance spaces, galleries, cinemas, and premises for various cultural enterprises. It now presents over a thousand events a year and works with partners from all over the world. It also still functions as a meeting place for community initiatives, mother and baby groups, the local Buddhist congregation or weekly Yoga classes, although the two sides to its activities rarely meet.

For a long time Howard Gardens in the east and Chapter in the west of the city presented the main two sites where performance practice in Cardiff was created, but in between which there was surprisingly little exchange. Howard Gardens was devoted primarily to performance work that had its roots in the traditions of visual art, while Chapter championed work coming from experimental theatre, multimedia performance and new dance. This separation has changed in recent years - the two scenes today are much more interconnected. The reasons for this development are manifold: in the UK generally an increasing blurring of the boundaries between theatre and performance art has taken place, which manifests itself in the wide-spread use of the term 'live art' for practices emerging from both. In Wales specifically, a recent crisis in arts funding has led to the abolition of most of the ensembles and companies working in the experimental theatre sector. What has emerged in the wake of this crisis is a new generation of solo performers (Eddie Ladd, Simon Whitehead, Marc Rees), often working in highly conceptual ways, whose practice owes as much to the tradition of performance art as it does to that of theatre. Under its theatre programmer, James Tyson, Chapter has in the past few years organised a number of festivals (12 Days of Risk in 2000 and Experimentica annually since 2001) which have been devoted to the presentation and discussion of innovative time-based work, including performance, video, sonic and installation art, and which have acted as great catalysts for the development of emerging artists working in this field in Wales.

tactileBOSCH, Photo: Kim Fielding

By opening itself up to the support of young local artists practicing time-based art, Chapter has managed to reassert its position within the contemporary art scene in Cardiff. But in this it has been joined by an increasing number of artist-led venues devoted to innovative art, among them tactileBOSCH, morefront and G39. One of the most performance-oriented of the new venues is tactileBOSCH, which is situated in a reclaimed Victorian laundry and opened as a studio complex and alternative exhibition space in 2000. In the mere four years of its existence, it has developed into one of the main players on the Cardiff arts scene, driven by the seemingly limitless creative and networking energies of its founders, Kim Fielding and Simon Mitchell. Fielding and Mitchell have built a reputation for establishing international exchanges between artists and galleries in a host of other countries, helping to bring a wide range of work into Wales for their "ridiculously large international multi-media exhibitions", and in return raise the profile of Welsh art abroad. tactileBOSCH's 'carnivalesque' curatorial approach (described by local critic Debbie Savage as 'throw as many people into the mix as possible and see what happens') often favours performance work of a vaudeville nature that is able to withstand the legendary party atmosphere of its opening nights. Among the artists who regularly present work at the venue is Mitchell himself. His work is task-based, including such actions as attempting to grab a pint of beer repeatedly whilst being pulled back by an elastic band. His performances confront clichés of macho masculinity from a very British perspective: whoever has found himself in a bar in Cardiff, the drinking capital of Britain, on a Friday night will recognize the images of aggression and violence with which Mitchell plays.

Pearson/Brookes, Carrying Lyn, Cardiff 2001, Photos: Paul Jeff

Increasingly, Cardiff itself becomes the focus of much of present-day performance work in the capital. Performance collective Pearson/Brookes is currently engaged in a series of works for the city, multi-site events for several groups of audiences watching different situations occurring simultaneously in different locations in the town, recorded by the spectators themselves and then assembled in a multimedia installation in Chapter's theatre space. Good Cop Bad Cop (Richard Morgan, John Rowley and Paul Jeff) created an event in which they tried to break the (often archaic and abstruse) by-laws of the city and document their transgressions with the help of camera-phones. Artist Jennie Savage, whose practice has a strong socially engaged approach, created Anecdotal Cardiff in 2003, an archive of stories from and about Cardiff, which she collected whilst working as artist-in-residence at the town's central library. The archive was made available in the library's local history section and later staged as a guided bus tour, visiting many of the locations to which the stories referred. Cardiff Projects has undertaken a series of situationist dérives in and around Cardiff, among them a search for the Heart of Cardiff and Relax Cardiff, a psychogeographical survey of leisure in the city. And SWICA (South Wales Intercultural Community Arts) engages the city's multi-ethnic communities in celebratory street actions such as carnival and light processions.

Performative civic explorations like these are not limited to the Welsh capital either: Locws International, a bi-annual series of site-specific installations and events located across the city of Swansea, was created as a response to the varied topography, history and architecture of Wales' second city.

Paul&Paula, The Drifting Document, Locws International, Swansea 2002. Photos: Paul Jeff

Literature cited:
Sager, Peter (1991) Wales, London: Pallas Guides.

[Introduction] [Y Maes/The Field] [Y Tir/The Land] [Y Ddinas / The City] [Y Ty / The House] [Postscript]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.