Firm Foundations
Fact director Mike Stubbs says Liverpool's arts organisations are still benefiting from Liverpool’s time as the European Capital of Culture. By Simon Stephens
This November the Museums Association conference is returning to Liverpool for the first time since 2008, the year that the city was the European Capital of Culture.
It was a heady time as the Liverpool Biennial was also being held and what seemed like hundreds of cranes punctured the skyline as new shopping and leisure facilities sprung up all around.
One of the people attracted to all this activity was Mike Stubbs, who had arrived the year before from Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image to become the director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Fact), which combines a cinema and art gallery and focuses on film, art and new media.
“It was like coming into a bumper city,” says Stubbs, who started his career as an artist and film-maker. “There was something on every night, the city was heaving, and the traffic was in chaos because the roads weren’t finished.”
On the horizon was the credit crunch that came at the end of 2008 and the subsequent worldwide economic downturn.
Fortunately, projects such as the £1bn Liverpool One shopping centre, the £72m Museum of Liverpool and the £14m redevelopment of the Bluecoat Arts Centre were all well enough underway to be completed.
“In terms of getting that shopping centre finished, getting that museum done, having the new conference centre and the private development around it, if that hadn’t happened then it would have been rubbish because we could have ended up with a building site at the end of it all,” Stubbs says.
He also says that the Capital of Culture was important because it led to the arts being a key part of the city’s strategy for economic regeneration.
“Five years later there is a continued commitment from the city council and the mayor, which is also acknowledged by the arts council, which recognises that Liverpool has really put its money where its mouth is,” says Stubbs.
“Fact gets good arts council support and we get good city council support and then there is a whole slate of commercial income, trust and foundations, and private donations, which we need to grow more of.”
Even though Capital of Culture status made Liverpool attractive for Stubbs, it was Fact itself that was the big draw.
“When people in Melbourne asked why I was moving to Liverpool, I said: ‘I’m moving there because Fact is there,’” says Stubbs. “I think that Fact is an amazing creative project. I still feel privileged to work here.”
Stubbs did have some links to the city, including a grandfather from Bootle. Also, one of his first major exhibitions as an artist was in 1989 at Video Positive, a biennial new media festival in Liverpool that was organised by Moviola.
This organisation, which later became Fact, also ran the Collaboration Programme, which was built on an ethos of crowdsourcing, knowledge-sharing and joint-idea generation. It brought together communities and artists on hundreds of collaborative creative projects.
“Moviola’s Collaboration Programme was imbued with that sense of wanting to democratise the relationship between the viewer and the producer and to break down the barriers people from different backgrounds have to art,” says Stubbs.
Programming strategy
Lots of museums and galleries talk about attracting new sections of the population, but what does this mean for Fact in terms of its programming and the ways it engages its audiences?
Stubbs says the centre is partly helped by the mix of facilities it offers: “One of the things about having cinema within the offer is that it’s great for bringing people into the building who would not go to an art gallery as it’s a much more popular form.”
Having a broad appeal is an important part of its visual arts programme, with one of its four annual exhibitions covering popular culture. This year it was The Art of the Pop Video, which profiled the work of Michael Jackson, the Pet Shop Boys, Madonna and Lady Gaga, among many others.
Staging riskier exhibitions is also important to Stubbs. He points to the 2011 work ZEE, by Kurt Hentschläger, who was born in Austria but now lives and works in Chicago. This artwork invited visitors, who had to sign a disclaimer and be over 18 years old, to enter an immersive and abstract space.
“You were given instructions, and had to guide yourself with a rope,” says Stubbs. “It was full of dry ice, you could not see further than six inches. Word got out and it became very cultish. Someone did trip over and get a nosebleed and someone did faint.”
Taking risks
Stubbs says he is keen on art initiatives that are immersive, experiential and risky. He points to one of his favourite works, the Grass House in Hull, a 1991 project by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey that saw the artists bring a derelict Victorian house back to life with a living skin of grass.
“This was such an amazing indicator of an authentic experience that people just love,” says Stubbs. “That is a large part of my background – working with the site specific and finding new strategies to engage people.”
Stubbs is also excited by the potential of new technology to involve audiences directly as what he calls creative producers. He cites one of his daughters as an example of someone who uses social media and computer programmes such as the game Minecraft to become a creative producer.
He also says that the digital realm throws up some interesting questions for audiences, but also for organisations such as Fact, which, he says, needs to find new ways of making its building relevant in a world where many people connect with each other digitally.
“What does the arts centre/museum become – I find that deeply intriguing and very exciting,” says Stubbs.
Risk-taking, experimentation and using digital technology are part of his plan to find ways for Fact to be as appealing as possible to a broad audience. International work is also important, including Connecting Cities, which aims to distribute artistic and social content across 11 European cities.
“What strategies are we going to use to make things that are really appealing and have a true incentive, rather than just telling people it is good for you?” he says.
“What can we bring to the party that enhances their skills, thinking power and meaning in life? Some of that is about talent development, some is just about having conversations, and having difficult conversations.”
This year is the 10th anniversary of Fact opening its building and has provided the chance for reflection on past achievements but also the opportunity to look to future challenges and ways of working.
The exhibition Turning Fact Inside Out (13 June–15 September) was described as a chance to explore and debate the role and possibilities for the cultural institutions in a post-digital age.
Fact’s final exhibition this year will be Time & Motion Study, which opens on 12 December. It will investigate the eight-hour day and its relevance in a working environment that is increasingly distributed, virtualised and digital.
Stubbs says he will use the exhibition to play with notions of the visitor experience. “I’m quite provocative and I’ve always been interested in ways of challenging people’s assumptions,” says Stubbs.
“Yes, of course we want to provide a really good service and for people to have a really good experience but I want to challenge their thinking at a more fundamental level.”
The Museums Association conference is taking place in Liverpool from 11-12 November
Mike Stubbs was born in Welwyn Garden City and became the director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in 2007.
He moved to north-west England from Melbourne, where he was the head of exhibition programmes at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Stubbs is an artist himself and he has used film, video, mixed media installations and performance. He showed his work at the 1989 Video Positive festival in Liverpool.
Stubbs studied at Cardiff Art College and the Royal College of Art and has been involved with London Video Arts, Chapter Film and Workshop in Cardiff, and Hull Time Based Arts.
The origins of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Fact) began in 1985 when Josie Barnard and Lisa Haskel launched Merseyside Moviola, an occasional project for screening independent, experimental film and video work.
Fact’s founding director, Eddie Berg, joined Moviola in 1987 and established Video Positive, a biennial festival for new media, a year later.
In 1997 Moviola became Fact, and during the following years took on a number of other projects and formed a relationship with the Liverpool Biennial.
In 2000 construction work began on a new permanent building in Wood Street. The £10m scheme was designed by architect Austin Smith Lord and opened in February 2003.
Fact is an Arts Council England national portfolio organisation and also receives funding from Liverpool City Council. It employs 47 staff.
It was a heady time as the Liverpool Biennial was also being held and what seemed like hundreds of cranes punctured the skyline as new shopping and leisure facilities sprung up all around.
One of the people attracted to all this activity was Mike Stubbs, who had arrived the year before from Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image to become the director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Fact), which combines a cinema and art gallery and focuses on film, art and new media.
“It was like coming into a bumper city,” says Stubbs, who started his career as an artist and film-maker. “There was something on every night, the city was heaving, and the traffic was in chaos because the roads weren’t finished.”
On the horizon was the credit crunch that came at the end of 2008 and the subsequent worldwide economic downturn.
Fortunately, projects such as the £1bn Liverpool One shopping centre, the £72m Museum of Liverpool and the £14m redevelopment of the Bluecoat Arts Centre were all well enough underway to be completed.
“In terms of getting that shopping centre finished, getting that museum done, having the new conference centre and the private development around it, if that hadn’t happened then it would have been rubbish because we could have ended up with a building site at the end of it all,” Stubbs says.
He also says that the Capital of Culture was important because it led to the arts being a key part of the city’s strategy for economic regeneration.
“Five years later there is a continued commitment from the city council and the mayor, which is also acknowledged by the arts council, which recognises that Liverpool has really put its money where its mouth is,” says Stubbs.
“Fact gets good arts council support and we get good city council support and then there is a whole slate of commercial income, trust and foundations, and private donations, which we need to grow more of.”
Even though Capital of Culture status made Liverpool attractive for Stubbs, it was Fact itself that was the big draw.
“When people in Melbourne asked why I was moving to Liverpool, I said: ‘I’m moving there because Fact is there,’” says Stubbs. “I think that Fact is an amazing creative project. I still feel privileged to work here.”
Stubbs did have some links to the city, including a grandfather from Bootle. Also, one of his first major exhibitions as an artist was in 1989 at Video Positive, a biennial new media festival in Liverpool that was organised by Moviola.
This organisation, which later became Fact, also ran the Collaboration Programme, which was built on an ethos of crowdsourcing, knowledge-sharing and joint-idea generation. It brought together communities and artists on hundreds of collaborative creative projects.
“Moviola’s Collaboration Programme was imbued with that sense of wanting to democratise the relationship between the viewer and the producer and to break down the barriers people from different backgrounds have to art,” says Stubbs.
Programming strategy
Lots of museums and galleries talk about attracting new sections of the population, but what does this mean for Fact in terms of its programming and the ways it engages its audiences?
Stubbs says the centre is partly helped by the mix of facilities it offers: “One of the things about having cinema within the offer is that it’s great for bringing people into the building who would not go to an art gallery as it’s a much more popular form.”
Having a broad appeal is an important part of its visual arts programme, with one of its four annual exhibitions covering popular culture. This year it was The Art of the Pop Video, which profiled the work of Michael Jackson, the Pet Shop Boys, Madonna and Lady Gaga, among many others.
Staging riskier exhibitions is also important to Stubbs. He points to the 2011 work ZEE, by Kurt Hentschläger, who was born in Austria but now lives and works in Chicago. This artwork invited visitors, who had to sign a disclaimer and be over 18 years old, to enter an immersive and abstract space.
“You were given instructions, and had to guide yourself with a rope,” says Stubbs. “It was full of dry ice, you could not see further than six inches. Word got out and it became very cultish. Someone did trip over and get a nosebleed and someone did faint.”
Taking risks
Stubbs says he is keen on art initiatives that are immersive, experiential and risky. He points to one of his favourite works, the Grass House in Hull, a 1991 project by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey that saw the artists bring a derelict Victorian house back to life with a living skin of grass.
“This was such an amazing indicator of an authentic experience that people just love,” says Stubbs. “That is a large part of my background – working with the site specific and finding new strategies to engage people.”
Stubbs is also excited by the potential of new technology to involve audiences directly as what he calls creative producers. He cites one of his daughters as an example of someone who uses social media and computer programmes such as the game Minecraft to become a creative producer.
He also says that the digital realm throws up some interesting questions for audiences, but also for organisations such as Fact, which, he says, needs to find new ways of making its building relevant in a world where many people connect with each other digitally.
“What does the arts centre/museum become – I find that deeply intriguing and very exciting,” says Stubbs.
Risk-taking, experimentation and using digital technology are part of his plan to find ways for Fact to be as appealing as possible to a broad audience. International work is also important, including Connecting Cities, which aims to distribute artistic and social content across 11 European cities.
“What strategies are we going to use to make things that are really appealing and have a true incentive, rather than just telling people it is good for you?” he says.
“What can we bring to the party that enhances their skills, thinking power and meaning in life? Some of that is about talent development, some is just about having conversations, and having difficult conversations.”
This year is the 10th anniversary of Fact opening its building and has provided the chance for reflection on past achievements but also the opportunity to look to future challenges and ways of working.
The exhibition Turning Fact Inside Out (13 June–15 September) was described as a chance to explore and debate the role and possibilities for the cultural institutions in a post-digital age.
Fact’s final exhibition this year will be Time & Motion Study, which opens on 12 December. It will investigate the eight-hour day and its relevance in a working environment that is increasingly distributed, virtualised and digital.
Stubbs says he will use the exhibition to play with notions of the visitor experience. “I’m quite provocative and I’ve always been interested in ways of challenging people’s assumptions,” says Stubbs.
“Yes, of course we want to provide a really good service and for people to have a really good experience but I want to challenge their thinking at a more fundamental level.”
The Museums Association conference is taking place in Liverpool from 11-12 November
Mike Stubbs at a glance
Mike Stubbs was born in Welwyn Garden City and became the director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in 2007.
He moved to north-west England from Melbourne, where he was the head of exhibition programmes at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Stubbs is an artist himself and he has used film, video, mixed media installations and performance. He showed his work at the 1989 Video Positive festival in Liverpool.
Stubbs studied at Cardiff Art College and the Royal College of Art and has been involved with London Video Arts, Chapter Film and Workshop in Cardiff, and Hull Time Based Arts.
Fact at a glance
The origins of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Fact) began in 1985 when Josie Barnard and Lisa Haskel launched Merseyside Moviola, an occasional project for screening independent, experimental film and video work.
Fact’s founding director, Eddie Berg, joined Moviola in 1987 and established Video Positive, a biennial festival for new media, a year later.
In 1997 Moviola became Fact, and during the following years took on a number of other projects and formed a relationship with the Liverpool Biennial.
In 2000 construction work began on a new permanent building in Wood Street. The £10m scheme was designed by architect Austin Smith Lord and opened in February 2003.
Fact is an Arts Council England national portfolio organisation and also receives funding from Liverpool City Council. It employs 47 staff.