What makes artist-run spaces different? The artist-run model and ethos is one which perpetuates alternative (and often non-hierarchical) modes of organisation, a non-commercial approach to producing art and culture, it supports and develops experimental or unrepresented forms of practice and discourse. It proposes a model of social and cultural interaction that could be seen to eschew the roles of producer and consumer. Artist-run spaces play a vital role in supporting artists’ practices at the early stages of their careers, and often have a key stake (albeit a precarious one) in the revitalisation of derelict urban areas.

Alternative and artist-run culture as we know it today can be said to have its roots in 1960s and 70s counter-culture. This culture, that gave rise to a wave of spaces in the 60s and 70s, was anti-establishment in its rejection of dominant structures. These structures either ignored cutting-edge contemporary art – new-media art, female artists, experimental and performance art – or were commercial and driven primarily by sales. Crucially, rather than just acting as a movement of individuals, the proponents of this culture of self-determination and collectivisation opted to locate themselves as groups in spaces: spaces for production, thought, exhibition, and debate. These spaces lay outside prescribed commercial or cultural zones – both ideologically and often literally – situating themselves in run-down inner-city areas which were, like the art forms they represented, largely ignored by commercial, cultural, and political interests of the time.

The common denominator among all of these groups and spaces is that they arose out of a deficit – i.e. there was something missing in the cultural landscape. Artists were dissatisfied with (or unable to access) the established venues, forums, or modes of presentation, and convened to create a new kind of space that addressed their needs. The artists who started these spaces, negotiated their leases, fixed up the premises, and fought against all odds to keep them going, created whole swathes of culture in the process, establishing careers, supporting emerging and experimental art forms, broadening and enlightening their audiences, helping to create new forms of culture. In the cases of spaces such Ikon in Birmingham, or Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin, they also created legacies which today allow people to experience contemporary art in what are now visible public institutions.

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Despite this history however, artist-run spaces might still be described as a largely undervalued ‘cog’ within the field of contemporary art practice. Often going under the radar, run on a voluntary basis, and by-and-large of a transient or precarious nature, their importance and value to the wider viability of critically-engaged contemporary art is overlooked. Equally, the role of these spaces in sustaining the practices of artists, often in the crucial formative stages, goes largely un-remarked. The energy invested in maintaining these initiatives is often used up quickly in the face of a lack of resources, and the finite ability to maintain activities through an economy of sharing and predominantly free labour. As such, the continued though constantly changing presence of an artist-run field of practice, and its value, is by its very nature difficult to quantify and record.

This has been redressed to a degree over recent years, and the subject of artist-led practice is now being seen as worthy of further study and debate. Recent published examples include Decentre – Concerning Artist-run Culture (YYZBOOKS, 2008), Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960-2010 (Exit Art and MIT Press, 2012); Artist-Run Spaces – Nonprofit Collective Organizations in the 1960s and 1970s (JRP | Ringier, Les presses du reel & Zona Archives, 2012); Self-Organised (Open Editions, 2013) and the Institutions by Artists conference in Vancouver and subsequent publication (Fillip Editions, 2012), all of which have added greatly to current discourse. Additionally, artist-run events have also proliferated such as Artist Run (festival), Copenhagen, and Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, and Sluice Art Fair in London, which bring together international pockets of artist-run practice, and rather than focussing on sales, afford artist-run and independent spaces from different countries a locus to meet and connect.

More often, the artist-run presence becomes visible in the wider (art) world only in cases where large institutions and museums have sought to collaborate with artist-run spaces, or include them in survey-type exhibitions in order to present a ‘whole picture’ of a period or art scene. The exhibition Life/Live at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1996, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Laurence Bosse, included spaces such as Glasgow’s Transmission and London’s City Racing. For the 2002 Gwangju Biennale in Korea, curated by Wan-Kjung Sung, Charles Esche and Hou Hanru, the inclusion of artist-run spaces “championed artist-led activity as a counterpoint to pervasive Empire, the local influencing the global”. While Charles Esche’s Baltic Babel – in which eight cities were represented through their artist-led initiatives – is described as “the most explicit understanding yet of the role of artist-led initiatives in local communities and their political potential”. [1]

Other instances have afforded further currency to spaces, in so far as presenting current work, if in some cases not paying them at all. Tate Modern’s “highly unconventional celebration”[2] of its first decade No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents is perhaps the most high profile and large scale of these (with over 70 groups contributing), yet was deeply problematic in not paying any of the contributors, and according to Stine Herbert in Self-Organised: “received harsh criticism for its barely-concealed exploitative undertones”[3]. She goes on to point out, however, “that most of the participants so readily accepted these terms demonstrated […] an important lesson about how the institutional art world sustains itself.”[4]

While it seems clear that institutions gain from drawing from the artist-run well – and equally what attracts the spaces to participate (institutional support, bigger budgets, exposure) – these crossovers have done little to alter the precariousness of the position of the artist-run. Often seen as dispensable, perhaps because of a perceived notion that they are inherently short-lived as a defining feature (supported by the likelihood that another artist-run alternative will surely pop up to carry on the work), or because of their voluntary nature, the value of their labour remains difficult to quantify. 

Why is it important to have different art spaces? In his essay ‘On De-Organisation’, Barnaby Drabble points to the structural diversity of the artist-run: “the diversity of [descriptive] terms alone reminds us just how broad a spectrum of activities the term self-organised has come to be applied to”. This in turn describes the flexibility of form by which these spaces mould, incorporate, or invent their organising structures. Differentiation is key to this; artist-run spaces choose their own form in answer to their own needs, and the needs of the culture as they see it at a particular time. 

The question of time, duration, and its relationship to organisational structure and precarity is also at the crux of the problematic issue of artist-run sustainability. The recent report that resulted from the Footfall Research project, conducted by 126 Artist Run Gallery, states: 

It was proposed during the discussion that precarity may be ‘situational’, in that precarity may be needed for artist led spaces to come about. However, it was qualified that artists do not need to be poor […] With short-term artist led spaces being the ‘default stance’, it was agreed that a broader conceptual base for thinking about sustainability is urgently required.[5]

If an artist-run space is to sustain itself, more often than not the voluntary roles that brought it into being need to be phased out, as voluntary labour in the long term is unsustainable in most models. If voluntary labour is removed, funding or other revenue streams are required to replace it, and to a large degree, if funding is applied, a new level of bureaucracy and a standardisation of organisational structure is generally insisted upon. Therein lies the catch-22 of duration and the artist-run. In most cases, for an artist-run space to be sustainable, it needs to homogenise its structure and appoint a director, curator, administrator, and technical staff. Artists may retain some oversight or advisory role, or may be jettisoned entirely: to succeed in the duration stakes, artist-run spaces often have to cease being artist-run. By current metrics, a successful artist-run space is one that ‘grows up’ to become an institution. As noted in Institutions by Artists, “the ‘failure of the self-determination paradigm’ became apparent once artists […] no longer seemed to have control over the institutions they created”, an eventuality predicted by artist AA Bronson in his 1983 essay ‘The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-Run Centres as Museums by Artists’.[6]

The question of institutionalisation is approached by Jeff Khonsary and Kristina Lee Podesva, in their introduction to Institutions by Artists citing Andrea Fraser’s ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’ (2005)[7]: “it’s not about being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalise, what forms of practice we reward, and what kind of rewards we aspire to.” This position poses important questions for the future of the artist-led. In Barnaby Drabble’s essay ‘Assembled Thoughts on Artist-Led Culture in Zurich’, he cites a 2006 article by critic and curator Burkhard Meltzer, “in which he argued that Zurich’s artist-run spaces were no longer fulfilling their critical [subcultural] role but instead simply emulating commercial and institutional spaces, albeit in a “micro” format.”[8] This potential “shift in thinking about the institution of art… wresting it from the gallery and museum”[9], becomes problematic however in light of the tendency to turn ‘successful’ artist-run spaces towards established structures, thus aping the institution in miniature. 

A further problem occurs. To define artist-run practice as ‘institutional’ brings with it modes of evaluation that are plainly unsuitable for smaller arts organisations. Anne Szefer Karlsen is correct in saying that the “field of self-organisation is […] more complex than the conventional separatist approach entails. It has moved beyond a process of simply dissolving boundaries between institutional and non-institutional platforms to create new possibilities.” However, purposefully taking alternative positions to recognisable institutional forms can still provide a necessary and useful distinction for what artist-run practice is (and isn’t). An enforced perspective in which artist-run spaces are required to emulate other ‘defined’ institutions in order to ensure sustainability is a real problem – though not necessarily of artists’ own making – and one that has yet to be adequately addressed.

The issue of representation, recognition, and the visibility of artist-run spaces and their contributory value, is tied into the question of what artist-run spaces add to our culture. In Self-Organised, Anne Szefer Karlsen points to the growing number of books and seminars showing an active engagement with the historicisation of the artist-run field by the very same people involved in it, suggesting, “[a]n absence of competing accounts has allowed the practitioners to write themselves into history – ironically, often employing the same strategies as their institutional cousins.”[10] One might ask the question, ‘if not us, then who?’, an example being Gabriele Detterer & Maurizio Nannucci’s Artist-Run Spaces, which has its genesis in Zona/Zona Archives, Florence – of which Nannucci was co-founder – and gathers together extensive research on international pioneering examples which are vital to a broader understanding of contemporary art practice and its indebtedness to alternative, artist-run spaces.

According to Sarah Thelwall writing for Common Practice’s Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value, Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organisations, “small organisations act as an unofficial support mechanism” to the wider field of contemporary art and its institutions, while “research exposes the inapplicability of current metrics to measuring this ‘deferred value’, which means that smaller organisations will appear less successful, since the majority of the value that they create is not visible”[11]. The follow-up conference to Size Matters, entitled Value, Measure, Sustainability: Ideas towards the future of the small-scale visual arts sector, equally found issues with some of the language that defines and typecasts the role of organisations at ‘different levels’.The study found problematic the perception that “small arts organisations form a natural and fitting part of a continuum of development [that] implies a linear progression up the rungs of a ladder”. It also admitted that in the case of the Size Matters research, which looked primarily at small arts organisations such as the members of Common Practice[12], this ladder metaphor left the role of artists and artist-run organisations to “function as the proverbial ‘bottom rungs’”.

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In order to allow a fuller understanding of the characteristics and roles of artist-run spaces, we need to embark on a self-reflexive, critically questioning process, discussing and analysing what position artist-run spaces occupy within the field of contemporary art today. Should they stand in opposition to museums and commercial galleries, or in parallel to other art-world structures? How is value ascribed to these often transitory practices, and is this value recognised within the field? How are these spaces organised, and can artist-run spaces develop and be sustained in the longer term without becoming institutionalised? How important, intrinsic, or problematic is the voluntary nature of much artist-run practice? What do artist-run spaces add to the ecology of the civil society? What are the main practical issues or problems faced by artist-run spaces? Does precarity have to be a defining feature? Can recognition of the alternative and specific type of value that artist-run spaces provide allow for a specific approach to the funding and support of these organisations? What can we say about future (or hoped for) trajectories?

It is important to remember that artist-run spaces are at their core, as Gabriele Detterer reminds us in Artist-Run Spaces, “mutually supportive organisations” that mitigate an artist’s isolation in social and economic terms[14], and in the words of Jason E. Bowman, “challenge exclusion [and] circumnavigate the market-driven art-world”[15]. In essence, an alternative. It must also be acknowledged that alongside the many current or surviving examples of the artist-run are hundreds of others, underground or under the radar, defunct or forgotten, who have done their part in creating, supporting, and sustaining our visual art culture from the ground up. In that previously and often-used analogy, whereby your place in the art-world can be gauged as being on a certain ‘rung’ of the ladder, artist-run spaces tend to be seen as the ‘bottom rung’. If however, we were to use an alternative analogy, one that more accurately represents the vitality and adaptability of the artist-run, then these spaces and practices could instead be described as being the vital roots upon which everything else in our contemporary art culture can be borne and sustained.

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Gavin Murphy is an artist and curator based in Dublin, where he is joint artistic director of the artist-run space Pallas Projects/Studios. This text is an abridged, edited version of the introductory essay for Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, originally published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016. Reprinted, Set Margins, 2023.