Comparing Art Late Night Openings: East London, Seattle, and Cape Town, Essays (high school) of Art

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fore-word

This essay pulls together the results of a research conducted over the placement in the Whitachpel Gallery Commincations Department and focused on the concept of the First Thursdays, a festival of free late night art, music performances, happenings and interventions across east London. First Thursdays was established by the Whitechapel Gallery in 2007 to champion the east London art community and attract art lovers and new visitors to the area. Each month participating galleries keep their doors open until 9pm and run free events, exhibitions, talks, workshops and private views. Visitors are encouraged to explore the area using the information listed on the Whitechapel Gallery’s website or by joining a free guided Art Bus Tour and self-led Walking Tour. Ultimately the First Thursday is a tool of promotion for new and upcoming galleries in the surrounding area, to help them reach a wider audience as well as to increase their exposure and create a good network. After a brief overview of the first Thursday late night openings, using a few data collected through a Fits Thursdays survey and found in the Communications archive as initial parameters, the essays then proposes comparisons with South London Art Map (SLAM) and First Thursdays Cape Town. The comparisons aim to highlight how similar programmes have successfully applied ideas that, over the course of the placement, have been discussed as potentially useful for the implementation of the First Thursdays. These include making the First Thursdays website more user-friendly by adding widgets as a tab search and a calendar, imposing a fee for the Bus Tour, developing a dedicated app and changing the design and functioning of the printed art map.

trac-ing-his-to-ries:

pi-o-neer-square

The idea of collectively organised late night openings originated back in the late 1970s in Seattle, United States, and precisely in the neighbourhood of Pioneer Square, the city's birthplace and first down-town. In 1852 the area that is today known as 'Pioneer Square' was chosen by the first stable white settlers to establish their residences because it was the only flat zone by the harbour of Elliot Bay. The neighbourhood burned down in the Great Fire of 1889 but fortunately, at the time, Seattle was the biggest city in US and the economy was strong enough and Pioneer Square was quickly rebuilt. To avoid perishing in another blaze, the city council decreed that all the new buildings were to be constructed in fire-resisting bricks and stone. These were built upon the remains of old Pioneer Square, buried to raise the street level from the marshy and unstable ground of the first instalment. The process resulted in the formation of what is today known as 'Underground Seattle' a myriad of catacombs that were sealed and forgotten until the 1960s. The new buildings were in pure Romanesque Revival (or Norman) style and modelled after those projected by Henry Hobson Richardson in Chicago. These constructions were mainly characterised by a heavy masonry base and a wide use of simple arches and windows. During the Klondike Gold Rush (1897-1898) Seattle became the getaway for Alaska and Pioneer Square flourished reaching its golden period. In 1904, thanks to revolutionary technology of the steel-frame construction, Pioneer Square was enriched by the first skyscraper in town, the Alaska Building. Unfortunately, the good times did not last and soon afterwards started the slow but steady decline of Pioneer Square as new and bourgeois areas were made accessible thanks to cable railways and other technologies. When in 1914 the Smith Tower was inaugurated, Pioneer Square was already considered a place of sin and decadence: filled with pawnbrokers and brothels, it stood as the symbol of the civic policy that had long tolerated

pa-ra-me-ters

Even if shaped onto these initiatives, the Whitechapel Gallery First Thursdays reveals a far more complex nature because the self led walking tour, that can be equated to all the above mentioned art walks, is only a small part of the whole programme. East London is now a thriving cultural quarter with over 200 galleries and thousands of professional artists. Gallery attenders are increasingly looking for evening visits that fit in with their busy social lives. Since it first started, First Thursdays capitalised on both these factors to increase awareness of the east end as a major centre for the visual arts, not only locally but internationally. Thus First Thursdays, as its American ancestors, is mainly a promotional tool for exhibiting artists to benefit of an increased patronage, for galleries to acquire new potential clients and in general to involve an entirely new audience. The results of a survey sent to subscribing galleries last February confirmed a general acknowledgment of the scopes. The 83,33% of the spaces that compiled the survey are motivated to take part in the First Thursdays to increase the visitors number or promote the gallery, followed by a 72,22% that see the First Thursdays as a way of being included in the east London art scene. The survey also aimed at collecting feedback on new ideas to improve the programme. In particular, it was asked if the galleries would have been willing to fund a paid advertising campaign and if they would have considered a first Thursdays application an useful tool of promotion. Despite the great majority of the results was against a paid advertising campaign, the 100% of the answers was favourable to a promotional app. Besides, it has been considered the hypothesis of charging £10 for the Art Bus Tour ticket. The following comparisons are a research into the possibilities of these pitched ideas.

slam–south-lon-don-art-map

Starting in 2010 in the back of BEARSPACE Gallery, on Deptford High Street, director Julia Alvarez created the South London Art Map (SLAM). Launched at TATE Modern a year later, with 90 member galleries, they published a physical map to make the labyrinth of galleries in South East London more accessible to the public. The map have separated the different areas into 5 hubs; Bankside, Bermondsey, Deptford, Greenwich and Peckham. Today they are on the 5th^ publication of the physical map with a 6th^ due at the end of summer 2015. With over 150 galleries & studios on the map, SLAM now offers much more than just a physical map; they run a user-friendly listings website and SL-app (see appendix), an app dedicated to show the (open) galleries in the user's immediate area. SLAM also holds ‘SLAM Fridays’ where, with their encouragement and co- ordination, galleries are open late on the last Friday of every month (6.30– 8.00pm). It is now the case that most galleries use this evening to host their private views, as with the First Thursdays. Likewise, they curate a tour which focuses on a particular hub each month. The tour offers talks and introductions from curators and artists from an array of galleries, studios and project spaces. SLAM has also recently launched the ‘South East Coast Art Map’ (SECAM) where they hold monthly ‘Art Weekenders’ in one of the four hubs; Brighton, Hastings, Margate and Folkestone. During these ‘Art Weekenders’ they also run guided tours to experience the places' thriving art scene. They have partnerships with many organisations, including the Affordable Art Fair, The Greenwich Peninsular, London Art Fair and, only recently, Time Out. The SLAM website has core affinities with the First Thursdays one. They both list exhibitions and galleries, categorised by areas, and the listings can be easily browsed scrolling down the page. However, SLAM website presents a better navigation system as users are not forced to wait for more listings to be loaded and exhibitions can also be looked up selecting a

specific day in which events are happening. Besides, their web-page offers a

search tab missing in the First Thursdays website. Even if both are to be

considered as a tools for people to discover what it is happening in a given area, it would be helpful having the possibility to look up and retrieve details of a known event. On the contrary, the First Thursdays website lists always a monthly Top 5 of shows 'not to be missed', which the SLAM does not offer. The Top 5 is a great promotional tool and for sure the one, alongside the bus tour, with which people engages the most, thanks also to the partnership with Time Out. The SLAM art maps are built following the same criteria of the website; galleries are grouped in areas and listed accordingly. The out of date First Thursdays map is currently on the process of being re-designed and updated. The pitched ideas included deleting the old map of east London, too broad and detailed to be useful, and substitute it with a map for each area: Bethnal Green, Bow, Dalston, Hackney, Hackney Wick, Haggerston, Hoxton, Old Street, Shoreditch, Stoke Newington, The City and Whitechapel. It is also likely that the above mentioned areas will fall into wider groupings (e.g. Hoxton, Haggerston & Dalston; Old Street & The City). To join a SLAM tour there is a fee of £10. The tour offers an insight to the visited hub and is led by a SLAM guide aided by in-house speakers. The First Thursdays Art Bus Tour presents more or less the same features but the coach makes possible to reach spaces far away from each other, consequently implementing the choices. For 25 bus seats allocated on a raffle basis, from February to May, the Whitechapel received around 60 booking requests each month which marks the impossibility to satisfy the public demand. Besides, few successful applicants do not always show up on the tour night. Usually the seats are reallocated following a waiting list available for everyone to join at the information desk. Nevertheless, it has sometimes happened that spare seats have remained empty, meaning that places already paid for by the Whitechapel have gone to waste. A fee of £10 will produce new funding to reinvest in the First Thursdays and limit this potential loss. Given the recorded volume of the applications, it is very unlikely to not sell out anyway. The most interesting aspect of the SLAM is the SL-app, launched last February. To face the necessity of making the First Thursdays events more accessible, a PDF version of the Walking Tour Map is now available for download from the website. Beforehand gallery goers could only pick up the walking tour maps at the Whitechapel front desk, limiting the choice of events and exhibitions included to those in the very proximity of the Whitechapel itself. With the downloadable PDF it is no longer necessary to physically fetch a copy from the Gallery, therefore tours can space accross areas further away (e.g. Hackney Wick). Although, the walking tour map offers a limited outlook if compared to SL-app, an user-friendly interactive map that lists all the spaces taking part to SLAM. Attendees can easily browse galleries on a dedicated page and get directions to them. Alternatively, they can look up exhibitions which are always accompanied by a brief description and connected to the gallery page. The app also specifies opening hours and of course redirects to social media and SLAM website.

first-thurs-days-cape-town

The very first First Thursdays in Cape Town took place on November 1, 2012, from 5 to 9 pm. The inaugural event was launched with just 6 galleries (see appendix) but today First Thursdays counts more than 42 participating venues amongst galleries, design shops, theatres and more. The idea was imported by the Stellenbosch business strategy graduate Gareth Pearson. “I was in Zurich, I happened to be there during Lange Nacht der Museen: Long Night of the Museums happens once a year when all the museums are open until 02h00. You buy a single access ticket with free public transport between venues and you get to explore the museums until the early hours of the morning. It was just amazing. I really like the idea of a lot of things happening in the city besides just restaurants and bars. First Thursdays is not a new concept and has been happening in cities like London and Seattle, but I want to test it in Cape Town.”^3 3 Alma Viviers (2012), Creative Cape Town, First Thursdays in Caper Town [Online]. Available at: http://www.creativecapetown.com/first-thursdays-in-cape-town-2/

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ref-er-ences

Alma Viviers (2012), Creative Cape Town, First Thursdays in Caper Town [Online]. Available at: http://www.creativecapetown.com/first- thursdays-in-cape-town-2/ [Accessed: 30 October 2012]. Walk C. Crowley (2001), HistoryLink , Seattle Neighbourhoods: Pioneer Square [Online]. Available at: http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=10180 [Accessed: May 2004].

use-ful-links

First Thursdays South Africa - http://www.first-thursdays.co.za San Francisco Art Dealer Association - http://www.sfada.com Seattle Art Dealers Association - http://www.seattleartdealers.com South London Art Map - http://www.southlondonartmap.com WG First Thursdays - http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/first-thursdays