
Open Forum, 2012, mixed-media installation (detail), ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, Arnolfini, Bristol
‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, 2012–13
solo exhibition at MK Gallery (Milton Keynes), Arnolfini (Bristol) and CCA (Glasgow)
‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’ traces connections between several of my projects, which focus on historical and contemporary forms of education and its relation to the so-called Protestant work ethic, as famously described by sociologist Max Weber. Drawing on social history, the series of five ‘period rooms’ that make up this solo exhibition explore different educational models to emerge in the industrial and post-industrial eras – starting with the religious pulpit, and ranging from world fairs to television and Google. The installations look at opposing ideas about the purpose of education, training for the workplace versus education as an emancipatory practice. With a strong architectural dimension – involving the fabrication of platforms and models and a deliberate emphasis on play and game-like structures – the exhibition invited visitors to participate and ‘perform’, while considering how social roles and models of society have been constructed over the last few hundred years.
Exhibition catalogue/artist’s book published by Sternberg Press (2016), with essays by Maeve Connolly, Angus Cameron, Lars Bang Larsen and Tirdad Zolghadr. Edited by Olivia Plender and Gerrie van Noord.
Tags: Anchor Stone BlocksArt and EnvironmentBankingBeehivesBritish Empire ExhibitionChance and ChoiceChickensColonialismCommons EnclosureCommonwealCommunesCommunity Arts MovementCruikshank, GeorgeDavis, Andrew JacksonDebtFactoryFeminismFeudalismFord, HenryFourier, CharlesFox, Kate & Maggie (the Fox sisters)Fröbel, FriedrichGamesKeynes, John MaynardKibbo KiftLines and GridsMilton KeynesModern SpiritualismNew AgeNew GamesNew TownsOwen, RobertPilgrim’s Progress, ThePolitical SatirePost-FordismRegenerationRepublic of ChildrenRevolutionSummerlandSwedenborg, EmanuelTelevisionUtopiaWomen’s Liberation

Words and Laws (whose shoulder to which wheel?), 2012, mixed-media installation, ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Words and Laws (whose shoulder to which wheel?), 2012, mixed-media installation
A collection of printed material, games encouraging participation, objects and posters, which reveal my interest in the history of popular printing and political satire. The installation focuses on how we learn social roles and includes various allegorical objects, resembling enlarged pieces from a board game.

Words and Laws (whose shoulder to which wheel?), 2012, mixed-media installation, ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

Hortus Conclusus (Enclosed Garden) (detail), 2012, green tape floor piece ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Hortus Conclusus (Enclosed Garden), 2012
suspended mobile, floor piece of green tape
In the mobile that makes up half of Hortus Conclusus (Enclosed Garden), the hierarchy of British society is presented as a pyramid. At the top sit the crown, lion and unicorn (which can be found on British passports), followed by a manor house. Below, separated from this paradise by a heavy gate, are human labour and raw materials, extracted from both Britain and the colonies, upon which the pyramid stands.
The green lines on the floor, which make up the other half of the work, follow the plans of a grand country house garden.

Social Construction, 2012, architectural toy set and posters (detail), ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Social Construction, 2012
architectural toy set and posters to assemble 31 different institutional structures
This work is based on the Anchor Stone Blocks, a popular learning game patented by Friedrich Richter in 1884. The game owes its logic to a system developed by Friedrich Fröbel, the German nineteenth-century educational reformer and inventor of the kindergarten. He advocated ‘free play’ in childhood and to this end made a series of toys that he named ‘gifts’. They were meant to encourage different stages of a child’s development, while being open enough in form to engage their creativity. Unlike Fröbel’s version of the blocks (the sixth ‘gift’), Social Construction is a ‘closed’ game, which educates players about the institutional structures that make up mainstream society. Only a limited number of building options are presented on the posters, including a church, a school, a military academy, and even a cultural institution.

Social Construction, 2012, architectural toy set and posters (detail)

Social Construction, 2012, architectural toy set and posters (detail)

Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire), 2007
printed board, cards, dice, lead counters, painted plastic figures, fake gold pieces
Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire), 2007
The board game tells the story of the enclosure of the commons, a process that began in Britain during the sixteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. As described in the game’s rules, it was symbolic of the shift from feudalism to modernity and was essentially a privatisation of the land, whereby ‘commoners’ lost their traditional rights of access to the meadows and forests that had previously sustained them. Subsequently, the now impoverished rural poor were forced to migrate from the countryside into the factories of the newly industrialised cities in order to work for wages. In this rigged game, debt is the only feasible option with the sole avenue of release from the downward cycle being to ‘set sail to The Levant, where the law can’t reach you’. A player makes their fortune by reproducing this system of exploitation in the colonies, following which they are allowed back into the game at the top of the hierarchy: as the owner of the bank.

Honey Makes Money Makes Honey, 2012, wicker beehive, brass plaque
Honey Makes Money Makes Honey, 2012
wicker beehive
A wicker beehive (or skep) was representative of the perfect industrious society in the Victorian period. The use of the beehive as an emblem has a long history in Freemasonry, on trade union banners and in the Co-operative Movement. George Cruikshank also famously used it in his satirical cartoon The British Beehive (1867), which appears elsewhere in the exhibition, to represent the economist Adam Smith’s idea of a hierarchically organised society in which there is a clear division of labour.

Words and Laws (whose shoulder to which wheel?), 2012, mixed-media installation, ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

Stockholm Duck House: Proposed Monument to British Parliamentary Corruption, Circa 2009, 2012, architectural model
Stockholm Duck House: Proposed Monument to British Parliamentary Corruption, Circa 2009, 2012
architectural model of painted wood and lead, brass plaque
An image of the Stockholm Duck House was widely circulated in the British media in 2009, becoming the symbol of a corruption scandal, in which many British MPs were found to be fiddling their parliamentary expenses and claiming money for inappropriate items from the public purse. It was an aristocratic Conservative MP, Sir Peter Viggers, who famously claimed for the ‘Stockholm Duck House’. The structure, designed to provide protection for the birds, is based on an eighteenth-century building in Sweden. His expenses files reveal that British taxpayers also footed the bill for 28 tons of horse manure. Fellow Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, Third Viscount Hailsham, claimed the cost of cleaning the moat around his country estate.

Empire City: The World on One Street, 2009
installation view with architectural model and video, ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, CCA, Glasgow

Empire City: The World on One Street, 2009, mixed-media model (detail)
The New Jerusalem, 2012, mixed-media installation and video
Filling the gallery are two architectural models that use display methods from the past in order to demonstrate the relationship between imperialism, trade and religion.
Empire City – The World on One Street (2009) represents the British Empire Exhibition, which took place in the West London suburb of Wembley in 1924. As an event, its purpose was to educate the public during their leisure time about Britain’s trading relationships with its colonies and bolster support for imperialism. In 1924 it was the largest exhibition that had been staged anywhere in the world, and the pavilions were piled high with theatrically displayed commodities, produced by countries that Britain ruled over. One of the most absurd examples was a life-sized refrigerated statue of the Prince of Wales riding a horse, carved in butter, which occupied the Canada pavilion. At that time, butter was one of Canada’s main exports to the UK. Human exhibits were also included, with over 60 West African people housed in 'native villages' in the pavilions representing Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The model mixes the plan of the British Empire Exhibition with the fictional topography of John Bunyan’s widely read evangelical allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).

The Truth Itself Speaks Through Me, 2012, mixed-media model
O wretched man that I am, that I should sleep in the daytime!
—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
A model titled The Truth Itself Speaks Through Me (2012) reveals the journey to the Celestial City recorded in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the nineteenth century, this book was instrumental in educating the factory workers of the industrial revolution, illustrating the principle that the only route to paradise was through hard work. In many respects it exemplifies German Sociologist Max Weber’s famous theory about the relationship between puritanism and the ideology of work. In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920–21), Weber argues that the Protestant work ethic was vital to the emergence of modern capitalism.

Market, 2009, video, 10 min. 9 sec., still
Market, 2009, video, 10 min. 9 sec.
Accompanying the models is a video titled Market, shot in a contemporary London street market in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. Next to the traders sits a red brick neighbourhood named the Empire Estate. In the 1920s, the British Empire Exhibition was the main engine behind the westward expansion of London and was used to advertise and promote new ways of living, suburban lifestyles in which ‘pioneers’ and their families were encouraged to settle in the ‘colonies’ surrounding Wembley. Parallels can be made with contemporary mega events, such as the London Olympics of 2012, which similarly exemplified the ideologies of ‘progress’ and competition, changing the urban landscape and the demographics of whole city districts.

How Paul’s Penny Became a Pound, 2012, hand-painted fabric banner
How Paul’s Penny Became a Pound is a hand-painted fabric banner, based on a joyless nineteenth-century book that taught British children about banking.

Britannia Receiving her Newest Institution, 2012, hand-embroidered fabric banner
Britannia Receiving her Newest Institution is a banner embroidered in the Arts and Crafts style, in which Britannia is seen holding a miniature version of the Selfridges department store in London.

Regeneration, 2012, installation view at Arnolfini, Bristol, with fabric banner, fabric costumes, vinyl text, drawing
Regeneration, 2012
fabric banner, costumes, vinyl lettering, diorama
Regeneration comprises a small selection of works about two related utopian social movements that practised forms of mutual education: the Modern Spiritualist Movement and the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. Emerging in the 1840s and the 1920s respectively, the roots of contemporary New Age ideas can be found in their combining of mysticism with the promise of liberation and colonial fantasies of the Other.

The Structures and Institutions of the Universal Summerland, 2007, framed ink on paper drawing
The Structures and Institutions of the Universal Summerland, 2007, framed ink on paper drawing
An elaborately framed drawing, from my graphic novel A Stellar Key to the Summerland, illustrates the progression up the social ladder that can be made in the afterlife – from slum dwelling to utopian socialism, as exemplified by illustrations of Charles Fourier’s phalanx and Robert Owen’s New Harmony.

Machine Shall Be the Slave of Man, But We Will Not Slave for the Machine, 2009, diorama (detail)
Machine Shall Be the Slave of Man, But We Will Not Slave for the Machine, 2009, diorama
A diorama representing a Kibbo Kift camp, with an industrial city and smoke-belching factories in the background.

Open Forum, 2012, mixed-media installation (detail), ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, Arnolfini, Bristol
Open Forum, 2012, mixed-media installation
Open Forum is a re-creation of a 1970s style TV studio, complete with stage, audience ‘conversation pit’, television monitors and a world map. The installation contains archive material related to experimental art education in the UK, focusing on The Open University’s interdisciplinary Art and Environment course. Running from 1976 until 1985, the influential course’s chief agenda was to rethink the relation between art and society. The Open University (OU) itself was founded in 1969, with the aim of expanding higher education to working adults who had not previously had the opportunity to study at that level. For this reason, many of the students were from working-class backgrounds or were women who had previously missed out on education due to child care responsibilities. Courses were offered for home study without entry requirements, and lectures were broadcast on BBC television and radio.

Open Forum, 2012, mixed-media installation (detail), ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, Arnolfini, Bristol

Open Forum, 2012, mixed-media installation (detail), ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, Arnolfini, Bristol

Open Forum, 2012, mixed-media installation (detail), ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, Arnolfini, Bristol

Children and Video (1976), detail from Art and Environment course book

Whatever Will Be (1977), still from programme made by the Art and Environment course and the BBC
Three programmes, produced as course material in collaboration with the BBC, were shown on monitors in the installation. In Children and Video (1976) young children, aged 7–9, work with light-weight video cameras and recorders to make their own episode. Play and Place (1976) demonstrates how children’s play evokes larger society and environment on a miniature scale. In Whatever Will Be (1977), futurologist James Dator analyses the modern world and suggests how it can be improved through alternative lifestyles, communes and adventure playgrounds.

Children and Video (1976), still from programme made by the Art and Environment course and the BBC

Children and Video (1976), still from programme made by the Art and Environment course and the BBC

TAD 292, 2012, archival display, ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’, Arnolfini, Bristol
TAD 292, 2012, archival display
As part of the exhibition I curated a display of archival material from The Open University’s interdisciplinary Art and Environment course which was officially titled ‘TAD 292’ (referring to Technology, Art and Design). The archival presentation comprised course material, including television programmes, letters, vinyl records, artworks, posters, course books and other printed matter.

The Great Divide (1976), front cover of Art and Environment course book

Social Relationships in Art (1976), inside cover of Art and Environment course book showing George Cruikshank‘s The British Beehive (1867)

Interactive Art and Play (1976), front cover of Art and Environment course book
Art and Environment emphasised ‘playfulness’ and creativity as tools for liberation, aligning itself with many of the activist movements emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Women’s Liberation, the Community Arts Movement and Environmentalism. Students were asked to start with their own experiences at home, mapping their locale and the environment around them, in order to make art that was relevant to society.

Art and Political Action (1976), Art and Environment course book (detail)

Entrepreneurial Garden, 2012, mixed-media installation in MK Gallery foyer
Entrepreneurial Garden, 2012, mixed-media installation
At MK Gallery, the foyer was transformed into Entrepreneurial Garden, a red, blue, green and yellow Google-style working environment with relaxed seating, a coffee machine, plants, table football and basketball hoop, along with motivational prints. This installation seeks to explore how distinctions between work and leisure, public and private, are collapsed within the apparently playful workplaces characteristic of contemporary media companies. Google’s stated mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, an educational claim which has led me to question what kind of information and knowledge are being privileged by this profit-driven framework.
Visitors were encouraged to use the Entrepreneurial Garden as a working environment. An accompanying release agreement (paraphrasing those found on social media platforms) states that any intellectual property produced within the space becomes the property of MK Gallery, and that by reading the text, users of the space immediately indicate consent to its terms.

Proposal to Remodel Arnolfini, 2012, architectural model of Arnolfini gallery transformed into an Entrepreneurial Garden
Proposal to Remodel Arnolfini, 2012, is a satirical proposal to transform this art institution into a work space for the creative industries, which takes the form of an architectural model of the building.

Proposal to Remodel Arnolfini, 2012, detail

Proposal to Remodel Arnolfini (detail), 2012, architectural model of Arnolfini gallery transformed into an Entrepreneurial Garden
Resources
Olivia Plender interview about ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’ at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2012
(watch)Rise Early, Be Industrious, exhibition catalogue/artist’s book, published by Sternberg Press, 2016
(buy the book)Art Monthly review, Laura Allsop, September 2012
(download)‘Building Blocks as Tall as Buildings: Artists working with Early Child Pedagogy’, by Anna Craycroft, in ==#, edited by Matt Keegan, published by Capricious, 2015, featuring an interview with Olivia Plender
(download)==#, edited by Matt Keegan, published by Capricious, 2015
(view here)