Elisabeth Lalouschek, Artistic Director of London’s October Gallery, on William Burroughs, lemmings, and contemporary African art

Elisabeth LalouschekInterview by Polly Savage (transcribed by Sophie Willis)
3rd March 2009 - London

Polly Savage: The October Gallery was the first permanent space in London to focus on contemporary art from all parts of the world, rather than only the West.  How did your exhibition policy come to be defined?

Elisabeth Lalouschek: When the Gallery opened in 1979, this approach was something that very few galleries, if any, were taking. We wanted to explore the idea of the ‘transvangarde’, or cross cultural avantgarde – we are still trying to define this – asking whether such an idea could encompass all artists from a certain culture who choose to work with another culture, or whether it might define such a thing as a global avantgarde.  Clearly it is not only artists in the West who work out new strategies - there are artists all around the world experimenting with ideas and forms.  We wanted to look wider than the West - not excluding the West of course – but looking at artists from across the planet.  It may sound normal now but that kind of global outlook didn’t really exist at that time.  Most British galleries were focused on British artists, and similar things happened in other countries.  But gradually the scene has changed.  The internet has made a big difference in that respect – it’s now possible to see more clearly what is happening around the globe, to be more informed of what is happening everywhere - for those people who have the opportunity of internet access at least.  I see this as a big shift in the cultural landscape over the last ten years.

PS: How was the Gallery started?

EL: The Gallery was founded in 1978 by the Institute of Ecotechnics, a group of artists, actors and writers, who had first started working on ecological projects in the 1960s.  Their idea was to create a cultural centre, a meeting place in a world city.  There are several other projects around the world with which they were associated – whilst this one was placed within a city, looking at the cultural landscape of that city, there were others in Australia, France, the US and Nepal, as well as the RV Heraclitus, a ship which researches the ‘sea people’ of the world, the different cultures of the seas.  This kind of international network gives you a different outlook, because you are not only focused on one place.

The building, an old Victorian schoolhouse in Bloomsbury, was almost derelict when they arrived, so Chili Hawes, the Director of the Gallery, was assigned the task of renovating it with a crew of people, and they did this with their own hands.  There was dry rot everywhere, which had to be treated, and they dug out the basement to make extra space. It evolved over many years to become what it is now.  We recently received a grant from the Arts Council to streamline it and make a better environment for exhibiting work, but we also tried to retain the quality and the character of the building with its large Victorian windows and heaters – difficult, sometimes, to balance this character with the function of the Gallery.

It opened with an exhibition by Gerald Wilde, a British artist often neglected by the mainstream.  Following that, we had a range of exhibitions by artists from around the world.  About twice a week, we ran performing arts, music and dance events in the theatre on the top floor of the Gallery, many of which reflected the connections we had with the Indian subcontinent at that time.  Chili had been invited by the British Council to go to India and look for artists, the Indian Dance Academy was located here and Tambimuttu, the Sri Lankan founder of Poetry London, lived here, so the space had a multi-cultural flare even at that time.

William Burroughs also spent time here, invited by Kathelin Gray and John Allen, one of the Trustees of the Gallery. We held his first painting exhibition here in 1988, and he stayed here – I remember him talking about lemmings over dinner!  The opening was very interesting - Francis Bacon, JG Ballad and Marianne Faithful were all there.  Burroughs was showing his Shotgun works, in which he shot through spray-cans of paint, into sheets of wood, so the colours travelled the course of the bullet, splattering onto the wood.  There were also paintings, quite freehand, spray painted on paper. 

PS: How did you get involved with the Gallery?

I came here in 1983, as an exhibiting artist, and then in 1987 I became involved in the management of the Gallery.  I had come from studying at the Royal College of Art, which was a quite different context. I was only finding my way in the multicultural art scene; it was something that was relatively new to me when I came here.  I had seen the work of Aubrey Williams and Ablade Glover, but I hadn’t really concerned myself particularly with contemporary art from Africa, being more concerned with the Western art which was being talked about in art colleges at that time.  It took me a while to get used to this different approach, as it does for anybody finding themselves in a new environment.  But once I started participating in the management of the Gallery, in decision making, and the hanging of the shows, my perspective became quite different to that of a spectator or audience.

PS: How do you think the outlook of the Gallery has changed since you have worked there?  What kind of challenges have you faced?

EL: I think it has come a long way; one learns as one lives.  Some of the works which we are showing now might qualify as being a little more cutting edge than those which we were showing ten or fifteen years ago, but not all of them, I think it’s a very difficult generalisation to make. Initially the idea was to focus on the artist as an individual, but gradually this filtered into group exhibitions, focussing on particular areas of the world, partly because it was easier to get funding for that kind of show.  In order to produce catalogues, or to get the artists here, or even just to keep the Gallery running, we had to produce that kind of area-based exhibition.  It might be different now but that’s how it was then.

PS: So would you say the Gallery’s exhibitions have also traced changes in the climate of funding policy, and wider shifts in cultural politics in the UK? Were you aligned with Britain’s Black Arts Movement of the late 1970s and 1980s?

EL: It does in a way reflect those shifts - there was a programme called International Initiatives by the Arts Council, which was very supportive of our programmes; they supported an exhibition of South African work in 1996, and two exhibitions about Yoruba Diasporas, in 1997.  We weren’t directly involved with the Black Arts Movement, although we did work with some of its key figures, such as Aubrey Williams.

PS: Were there any exhibitions or events that really stood out for you?

EL: I remember researching for a press release about Aubrey Williams – I became so fascinated by his work, and the American-Indian groups he was referring to, the Arawak and Carib.  At that time, we also showed the Indian painter Arpana Caur, and the Ghanaian painter Ablade Glover.  About a year later, I came across a small image of a gold painting in Art Review.  It was by Kenji Yoshida, a Japanese artist, who was working in Paris.  One of my colleagues was going to Paris, so she sought him out in his studio there, and we opened his first show in 1989.  It had quite extraordinary metaphysical paintings, all called La Vie.  During World War II, he had been sent on a mission as a Kamikaze pilot, but his plane had malfunctioned, preventing him from completing the task.  Upon his return, he found that the war had been declared over.  Having survived this experience, he moved to Paris and dedicated all his paintings to a celebration of life, La Vie.  He says a prayer for each work, and this spiritual element is very clear in his work; it has a great balance, reflection, and intensity.  He uses very large shapes, of gold, silver, bronze and black and sometimes very simple green, red, yellow and blue, working on screens, in the Japanese tradition.  That was an interesting discovery at that time and stood out for me.

PS: How does your work as an artist relate to your work as a curator?

EL: It’s a funny thing; they are quite different, and quite separate in a way.  It is very hard to say whether the work you exhibit is the work that influences you.  I don’t think it is necessarily so. I was very interested in Yoshida’s work, and in gestural marks, so in terms of painting there will have been some influence, but not as much as you might imagine.  I have had seven exhibitions at the Gallery, which seems quite a lot thinking back, but the last one was all the way back in 2001, because I had kids in between. When you work full time and have three kids, it pushes things like painting into the background.  In any case, I became very interested in what I was doing as a curator, especially when contemporary African art took on its own momentum.  It’s just a different kind of creative process.

PS: How did you begin specialising in contemporary art from Africa?

EL: I didn’t consciously set out to specialise in contemporary African art at all.  I saw El Anatsui’s work on a film called Kindred Spirits, back in 1992, and straight away I knew he was an artist I wanted to work with, although it took us a long time to find him. There were a couple of other initiatives which we were informally involved with at that time, such as Africa 95, and An Inside Story: African Art of Our Time, the first Japanese touring exhibition of Contemporary African art, curated by Yukiya Kawaguchi.  It has been a long process over the years; we had exhibitions of El Anatsui’s work, and then of artists from the Yoruba Diasporas.  Later there were exhibitions of work from South Africa and Benin, as well as individual artists such as Romuald Hazoumé and Sandile Zulu in 2005.  We also started to collaborate with other institutions, bringing contemporary African artists to The British Museum, the V & A, and Tate Modern.  As these artists’ public profile increased, so demand increased and the whole thing just snowballed to the point that I now spend most of my time working in this field.  For many years one banged against closed doors, but then gradually some of the doors opened, and then more, and then people started banging on our door!  The Gallery itself still maintains a programme of artists from around the world, but I tend to focus on that particular field because it has become so much bigger.

PS: Do you think public attitudes about Contemporary African Art have changed much throughout your time at the Gallery?

EL: Absolutely. I think to a great degree, this is because of the individual artists.  Once these artists come to the forefront of the international stage, perceptions change and they are seen less in geographical terms, as ‘African’ artists, and more as artists in their own right.  This certainly applies to El Anatsui and Romuald Hazoumé.  The other reason, of course, is that the cultural landscape has changed quite substantially, with the widening and opening up of global perspectives.  There are fewer barriers now, and greater receptivity, greater interest in artists that come from around the world.  There have been a lot of changes, but this does not mean that does not mean one has not pushed enormously hard to make this happen.  Maybe not right now, but a few years ago, I felt I really had a mission to push this through. But then it began to happen, and it’s still happening.  It’s less surprising now to see these artists in The British Museum or in Montmartre.  What would have been extraordinary is now normal.

PS: What about the future? What directions would you like the Gallery to take?

EL: It is a very exciting field that we are working in. I work with artists individually on their careers, so one grows together with them in a sense, and there are always interesting developments.  What I am interested in at the moment, is to look for a handful of artists that one can push forward, and help them through this process.  I am working currently with two younger artists, Nnenna Okore and Gerard Quenum.  As time passes, and we all age, it’s good to work with a younger generation and see what developments emerge.  Now of course, the challenge is to sail through the storm of the credit crunch completely unscathed.  There’s nothing like stormy waters!  It’s good for creativity in a sense, because you need a challenging environment in which to create.  I have never had so many artists applying to exhibit at the Gallery as now, and the standard of work gets better and better, which is fantastic, because there is so much richness to show.  I am full of hope.

Photo Credits:

El Anatsui , Man Moons II, 2008, 420 x 520c

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