Monitor has been finding appropriate venues for distributing the badges. Some of these have been found by the artists, others we've had more of a hand in organising. In doing this we have already started to enter into discussion about the badges and what they throw up with regards to their postcode area. Below is an email discussion with Artist House in Holbeck whom we approached to distribute Simon Canaway AKA Supernaught LS11 badge.

From Bryan@ArtistHouse, 3rd May 2007

Hi lucy

We are happy to be involved as we are keen to support monitors work, however
what is the poster like? I don’t really agree with the ls11 badge, and would
be uneasy about putting this image in our window.

Perhaps I have misunderstood the badge’s meaning, is it, as indicated on the
blog about prostitution? – it seemed to me to be saying that the heroin
addicted women working in street prostitution were ‘cheap night life’ and
that all the office workers were perverts? I believe that the issues are a
little more complex and important than this. Am I reading to much into it?

Either way we could do with knowing what the artist was intending to convey
as people will undoubtedly ask us.

Bryan

A reply from Monitor, 4th May 2007

Hi Bryan

OK here is an edited summary of the Monitor response to your email:

Firstly your reading of the badge was totally different to how any of us read the work. The badge initially gave us associations of `cheap’ as in Holbeck Urban Village being the inexpensive way to move to the city centre (but trying to look flashy). Somehow the idea of a tall building fits with the idea of aspirational, glitzy night life but which Holbeck doesn’t quite live up to. We discussed the badge more in relation to Leeds as a whole and the outside response you get that Leeds has got great night life, but in fact it is pretty cheap and nasty and tainted when you are in the city centre at night – and that Holbeck Urban Village is selling the idea of living in the city but not really changing it.

“I also would not have come to that conclusion, said somewhere before I think the badge comments more on the mix between expensive high rise flats and the really run down parts that can be literally yards apart, or the fast and possibly cheap construction of the flats that then sell for lots of money.”

Your comments do seem to fix a meaning which is uncomfortable and difficult and made us all step back a moment. And reading Simon’s blog, he does talk about prostitution being there for the office workers in the afternoon.

This is tricky…Simon responded honestly to the area he was allocated. What he has discovered there, whether or not a comment on the prostitution in Holbeck is intended,it is what he has seen there.

It is an uncomfortable and sensitive topic and maybe Simon’s first impressions of Holbeck do not deal with the issue as sensitively as someone living or working in Holbeck but he has done what we asked him too. I don’t feel that we should begin to tell Simon what he can and can’t discuss about the area. In fact we encouraged him to not sanitise his response to LS10 into a fakely positive image of the area, unless that is what he wanted to say.
One of the main aspects about the project is that these are individual impressions of the area – and we are encouraging people who make the trip to collect the badges to do the same. To explore an area for perhaps the first time, who knows what they will find?

Perhaps we haven’t analysed the `Cheap Night Life’ badge independently of the collection of designs Simon proposed, but since your comments we feel more and more that Simon’s badge has a strong place in our collection because it does draw out this discussion and it poses a question about how an outsider reads an area, and who after all is placed to comment?

On a more practical note – the poster would not have to be displayed in the window, just in the space, so that people can see that this is a monitor badge collection point.

Please let us know what your conclusions are

best wishes
Lucy

Of course we also asked the artist to respond:

Monitor email to Simon@supernaught, 4th May 2007

Hi Simon

Lucy here. I wanted to let you know that we have had a bit of a discussion arise from your badge in trying to arrange the venue for it to be distributed. We asked some artist friends of ours who have a space called Artist House in Holbeck – it is part of the Round Foundry. It has other work on show that is part of the Situation Leeds festival, although it isn’t exactly a gallery – please see www.artisthouse.org.uk for info.

Pasted below is Bryan’s response to our request to have Artist House as your venue and our response to him. He has said he’d be happy to have it up on the blog (his idea) as part of the discussion of the work but I wanted to let you see it and have a chance to reply too, before i do that.

This is what Simon has to say:
From Simon@Supernaught, 8th May 2007

Hi Lucy

Apologies for a delayed response, I have been out of the studio until this morning.
It was interesting to read both your and Brian’s responses.

I am a little perturbed by Bryan’s not really agreeing with the badge design, surely artwork is a subjective platform upon which you place your own meaning and experience – this is how one invokes collected, and at once, personal responses.

I do however appreciate his position as an artist / distributor, and being that LS11 is his local geography can understand that he wouldn’t want ‘all the office workers (to be) perverts’.

I believe that the perceived discomfort has arisen from fixating on one comment from my observations. I am not going to ignore that the unfortunate sex trade exists amongst the redevelopment, and being raised in Teesside, having lived and worked in Leeds for three years and now residing neighbouring to Byker in Newcastle, I feel I do sensitively understand the complex and devastating social issues which gestate such a tragic depreciation of human existence – and is this not the very core of what the artwork is indeed about?

The central motif of the set was about the commodification of social space and its inhabitants in its many incarnations. I agree with your perspective regarding aspiration manifesting in materialism and status over spiritual and moral well-being. I feel that perhaps by viewing the selected badge as a single object as opposed to its proposed position of one of four designs, we do indeed – as we discussed – make the text and image relationship far more symbolic than area specific. This is beneficial in making the potential audience more global than local, but evidently it can and will invoke very heartfelt responses proportionate to emotional and geographical attachment.

I would urge you to post all of this dialogue on the project blog, I feel its a very fascinating and very important perspective of the manner in which art is consumed once it ceases to be the creators property.

Do please let me know if you feel this is inappropriate, I certainly would not want to put you or Monitor in any precarious situation with a friend and an arts organisation because of my work.

Best regards

Si


In conclusion - Monitor felt it was important that all of this dialogue (with complete consent from all concerned) was posted here. Artist House have agreed to distribute the badge from their space in Holbeck. We'd like to know what other people think about this discussion and the issues raised in Si's badge.