All this week Yuck 'n Yum are writing a guest blog over at the Liverpool-based art and design site Mercy. Today's post features Gayle Meikle, and you can see the post here or below:
As you might have read from the cover artist’s post, Yuck ‘n Yum provides opportunities for artists. Of course one method is our quarterly artzine another is our events, and it these I will be focusing on in this post.
Yuck ‘n Yum was established in 2008 when Andrew invited Ben and I to help him take his ‘bedroom’ zine from an ad-hoc form to a fully fledged quarterly artzine. Through our union and personnel interests Yuck ‘n Yum grew into what it is now, a curatorial collective focused on the distribution of art.
From the beginning we have always hosted launch parties for the new issue; this is/was a platform for artists/performers to be showcased and quite simply an excuse for a knees up in the name of art. The entertainment has ranged from live art with food colouring, eggs, cardboard and sausages, death metal bands, to yucky and yummy pies. All performers are artists and use these performances as their artwork.
Our first major project was the Yuck ’n Yum Art Distribution Unit at the Cupar Arts Festival in 2009. Here we commissioned artists, who are past contributors to the zine, to create limited-run special edition artworks ranging from pots of marmalade to prints which were then given away free to the public of Cupar. The artists were: Luke Collins, Sanna Dyker, Derek Lodge, Anna Orton, Sam Spreckley, Amy Todman, Kevin McPhee, Nadia Rossi and Ewan Manson. The works were distributed to the general public by the Yuck ‘n Yum Art Distribution Agents [YYADA for short]. The distribution team comprised of volunteers, who shuttled between the festival venues, each easily identifiable by their Yuck ‘n Yum branded skip hat, knapsack and sunny disposition. The agents handed out the free art whilst informing the public of the ‘artist of the day’ and the festival.
We kept a blog of the volunteer’s experience during the festival which can be found HERE
We then went to Inverness where we were asked to create an artwork in a public space as part of a larger exhibition called Getting Up commissioned by IOTA. Again borrowing techniques from the marketing industry, YNY invited artists to create a video or sound work to be transmitted via bluetooth in the Old Town Rose Street Carpark in Inverness. Turn Your Bluetooth On comprised of Holger Mohaupt, Jason Nelson, Edward Shallow, Roger&Reid, Sam Spreckley, Kim Walker and Catherine Weir. All works were screened on the opening night of the exhibition and also displayed in Yum! cafe adjacent to the carpark alongside back issues of our zine.
Using the same technology as Turn Your Bluetooth On we then made a mixtape for experimental audio and video festival Kill Your Timid Notion this can still be downloaded from our website. This leads me on to our annual AGK which Andrew will tell you more about later in the week.
What I like about our approach to events is how we think of alternative ways to platform and distribute artists’ work engaging the public with contemporary art whether it be from person to person or more ephemerally.
Kisses
Gayle
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