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Alan Haydon obituary

The Sheet — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:22:56 +0000

Arts administrator who transformed and reopened the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, as a centre for contemporary work

Alan Haydon, who has died aged 61 from cancer, was the director of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, East Sussex, which he transformed into a major centre for contemporary arts. He had a vision for this modernist architectural gem to be a place where the strands of contemporary culture come together, exploring the spaces where art, film, sound and music converge. As he said: "Our task is to allow artists to work within those spaces and to build bridges for audiences to cross." The De La Warr Pavilion is now renowned for an innovative programme and as a special destination for artists, where one-off performances and collaborations crystallise.

Alan arrived at Bexhill in 1999, just as a lottery bid to support the much-needed refurbishment of the Grade I-listed building had been declined and the likes of the Wetherspoon pub chain were expressing interest in the building. At this time I was a freelancer for the De La Warr, co-ordinating a modest and underfunded visual art and education programme. Alan's single-mindedness, staying power and ability to influence secured not only the building itself, but also set the tenor of the future artistic programme. An Arts Council England award of £4.1m was gained, as well as £1.9m towards restoration and repair from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a further £2m raised from private and public sources. He safeguarded the pavilion's future prospects by overseeing the negotiations for matching revenue funding of more than £1m annually from Rother district council and Arts Council England – a previously unprecedented arrangement at this high level of funding.

The building reopened on 15 October 2005 and attracted more than 500,000 visitors in its first year. Alan orchestrated a bold and distinctive programme including Ian Breakwell, Bill Furlong, Jeremy Deller, Andy Warhol, Nathan Coley, Grayson Perry, Joseph Beuys, Michael Nyman, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and the Fall.

Alan was born in Lewisham, south-east London. He attended Eltham Green school and studied at Camberwell School of Art (1972-75), under the tutorage of David Troostwyk, a staunch conceptualist. A flirtation with the commercial art market followed, and Alan did a short stint at Sotheby's, but his motivation was more rooted in the democratic potential of art. He moved into the public arts sector, where he remained for the rest of his career, bringing his entrepreneurial spirit to the role of arts centre manager in the London borough of Hammersmith (1977-80), where he kick-started a new arts community space in Shepherd's Bush that included a ceramics studio, recording studio, cinema and theatre.

This led to roles as visual arts officer first in Hammersmith and then for Greater London Arts, where Alan drew up new policies for gallery development, public art and support for artists. He became strategy and regional development officer there between 1989 and 1991, and concentrated on the role of the arts in urban regeneration. Between 1991 and 1993 he was senior visual arts officer at Arts Council England, charged with promoting new policies to support the professional and economic status of the artist.

In 1993 he took up the post of head of visual arts at Northern Arts. Described by a former colleague as a "master facilitator", Alan carefully empowered colleagues without being overly directive – a very delicate balancing act. Lottery funds were becoming available for the first time with Arts Council England as a distributor, and he helped develop lottery-related projects in the north-east.

Alan set the new policy framework for the visual arts and crafts in preparation for the UK Year of the Artist in 1996. This was a sort of mini Cultural Olympiad, with cities and regions able to bid to celebrate the visual arts. The north-east of England became the host for this national celebration and the resulting programme was inspiring: the region now benefits from Baltic and the Sage in Gateshead and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Audacious large-scale commissions were supported by Alan and his team at the Arts Council; these included the Angel of the North by Antony Gormley and Bill Viola's The Messenger, a potent work made in response to the powerful spiritual context of Durham Cathedral.

Alan was an early supporter and board member of Matt's Gallery, in east London, and Locus+, the Newcastle-based artists' commissioning agency. In 1997 he moved south again, to become director of craft development at the Crafts Council, establishing innovative relationships with the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Creative Industries Task Force. Within two years, he had arrived at De La Warr Pavilion.

More a maverick and less a bureaucrat, his success lay as much in his character as his skill and knowledge. He had great presence, was the very best of company, with a wonderful appreciation of food, wine and lively debate, and had a penchant for beautifully tailored and brilliantly coloured corduroy suits.

Alan is survived by his wife Cat and their son Harvey; and by his son Simon, by his first wife, Eliane.

• Alan George Haydon, arts administrator, born 31 October 1949; died 9 October 2011

• This article was amended on 2 November. The caption to the first picture referred to the De La Warr Pavilion as being in the art-deco style. This has been corrected.

1:1 with the V&A’s Small Spaces

The Sheet — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:27:40 +0000

A teahouse on stilts, a tower of books, a woodland shelter – seven one-off buildings have taken root in the V&A's galleries. Jonathan Glancey gets a sneak preview of a striking new show

Finding a fairytale Japanese teahouse sprouting from wooden stilts in a corridor of the Victoria and Albert museum is an unexpected yet curiously apposite experience. Unexpected, because this bewitching structure is one of seven brand-new, imaginative and full-scale buildings installed through the museum's galleries this week; and apposite because this glorious Victorian pantechnicon is so jammed with curiosities that Terunobu Fujimori's Beetle's House looks almost part of the furniture.

It's not immediately obvious, but there is a powerful thread animating and holding together these seven buildings, commissioned by the V&A's curator of designs, Abraham Thomas. The thread is made of what I'd call resistance – architectural resistance to the ever-growing world of buildings that look as if they have been designed by computers and built by robots.

Like Fujimori's teahouse, each building has been designed both as an escape from the world of one-dimensional, globalised architecture, and as a means of expressing what can be done with a paucity of materials and a wealth of imagination. These are not mere installations but solid buildings (you can walk into and through them), placed within the museum in a way that enhances their architectural host and its kaleidoscopic collections. From the top of a timber book tower, for example, named The Ark and designed by Rintala Eggertsson Architects (a Finnish-Icelandic team based in Oslo), you look across a wall of books and the frame of the tower itself into the hushed reading room of the National Art Library.

Even better is a plaster cast of an ad-hoc living space in Mumbai, squeezed between a warehouse and the architects' office (Studio Mumbai). Walk in, look out through the chutes and slits that pass for windows, and a cast of Michelangelo's David stares you in the face. It's an odd conjunction, and yet this beautifully cast house, with its shadowy, shoulder-high alleys, narrow stairs, shrine for contemplation, sleeping platforms and internal courtyard wrapped around a plaster-cast tree, is at home amid the V&A's haunting Victorian reproductions of Renaissance marvels.

No architect had a hand in the original Mumbai building, and yet an empathetic local firm has been inspired by its improvised architecture. And there is much to be learned from it: the way its narrow, shady corridors open on to a courtyard where the dazzling Mumbai sunshine is cooled by the canopy of a tree. While poor in terms of electrical and mechanical services, a house like this has more soul and beauty – accidental as well as deliberate – than almost any new home in a modern British cul-de-sac. Sadly, the original Mumbai house has been demolished, but its genial spirit now lives on alongside Michelangelo's David.

Bijoy Jain, who founded Studio Mumbai in 1995 after studying in St Louis, Missouri and working in Los Angeles, has said he is confounded by the mysteries of modern India. He is fighting his own architectural resistance movement against an India in which, as he says, local people are trained to speak in faux-British accents in call centres, while highly trained structural engineers email drawings to overseas contractors to realise expensive buildings (some of them designed by British architects) on the cheap. He designs modern Indian buildings. Like all seven architects contributing to this show, he believes in working with his hands as well as his mind and eyes.

Elsewhere, two very different architectural studios – one from Tokyo, the other from Stavanger in Norway – show how computer-aided design and construction can be used to craft new forms of building, combining the most sophisticated man-made and the rawest natural materials. Sou Fujimoto's Inside/Outside Tree, growing from a landing outside the museum's architecture gallery, is a transparent shelter built entirely of sheets of acrylic polygons, held together by white plastic cable ties. Designed with the help of a computer, the structure is based on that of a stylised tree cut from an imaginary cube. If this sounds a little arcane, the result is enjoyably ethereal – especially when the afternoon sun floods through the high windows behind and sets the structure aglow.

Out in the museum's John Madejski Garden, Helen & Hard Architects (based in Stavanger) have created a building named Ratatosk, after Ratatoskr, a mythological Nordic squirrel. This is made from ash trees that have been split apart and then milled by a computer-driven machine. This curious forest building is currently an empty shelter, but it would make another fine teahouse.

Small Spaces is a modest but inventive exhibition with a powerful message about the importance of nurturing local architecture, whether working with traditional materials or the very latest technologies. Architecture should be led by imagination and skill rather than by slick imagery and marketing. Clearly, those of us who believe this have a long fight on our collective hands, but in the design and making of the V&A's seven small buildings, we have at least the beginnings of the necessary ammunition. When this show closes at the end of the summer, I hope the museum keeps these buildings in its capacious fold. The curators haven't yet made up their minds. But even when they become historic curiosities, these buildings will have something worthwhile to tell us.

Jonathan Glancey

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Exhibitions picks of the week

The Sheet — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:07:52 +0000

Simon Roberts, Bradford

In 2007 Simon Roberts set off in a motor home with his old and unwieldy 5x4 field camera to travel through England and record the natives' leisure pursuits. Collectively titled We English, the large-scale prints form a series of petrified tableaux in which grouped figures, set against local landscapes, appear as stills from a theatre of the absurd. There's the Mad Maldon Mud Race, a birthday picnic in some Grantchester scrubland, and golfers dwarfed by the cooling towers of Ratcliffe on Soar power station. The images are compositionally still and appear almost spooky. It is Roberts's contention that what we do in our leisure hours says more about our national identity than what we do at work.

National Media Museum, to 5 Sep

Robert Clark

Leighton House, London

The Victorian artist Frederic Lord Leighton made his name mixing classicism with a swoonsome, pre-Raphaelite sensuality; an aesthetic that reached luscious perfection in his painting Flaming June. Perhaps the most outlandish example of his Romantic opulence, however, is Leighton House, created for the painter by the architect George Aitchison as a palace for art. Reopening after a multimillion-pound facelift, this bijou Holland Park pad features 22-carat gold-leaf domes, a silk-lined picture gallery, and the Arab Hall, designed to flaunt Leighton's priceless Arab tiles. Though his art collection was auctioned off on his death, an exhibition including works by Delacroix, Corot, Constable and Tintoretto helps mark the occasion.

Leighton House, W1, from today

Skye Sherwin

Paul Rooney, Leeds

Filmed at Harewood House, Paul Rooney's Bellevue follows the disorientated ramblings of a character who, while attending an ad company's focus group, becomes possessed by the spirit of a 1930s failed jazz musician voluntarily incarcerated in a New York psychiatric institution due to his history of chronic alcoholism. The piece, also alluding to the novelist Malcolm Lowry's alcoholism treatment at New York's Bellevue Hospital in 1935, deals with themes of addictive indulgence and inspired escapism. As per usual, Rooney displays a knack for combining workaday banalities with hints of poignant psychological undertow.

Harewood House, to 20 Jun

Robert Clark

Mark Wilsher, Norwich

You might say Mark Wilsher is all about team spirit. For his current project, The Yesable Proposition at the artist-run space Outpost, the artist, curator and writer has taken his exhibition budget and used it to make minor gallery improvements: a new toilet seat, a kettle, a magazine subscription for the staff. Meanwhile he'll be printing a book of essays, doing a gallery talk and organising an artist discussion group to spread the word. It's what he calls a win-win situation: he gets a show and the gallery gets new door handles. But there's a steelier critical edge to Wilsher's sense of fair play. This continues the artist's interest in applying business plans to art, a model all too familiar one might think, from arts-based regeneration schemes, where culture is forced to take the place of real government investment.

Outpost, to 21 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Raqs Media Collective, Gateshead

The Things That Happen When Falling In Love is a photo, film and text installation by the New Delhi-based, three-person collaborative group Raqs Media Collective. The collective – writers, researchers and curators as well as artists – are known for their evocative way of juxtaposing found and newly filmed footage, of combining the prosaic with the poetic, of assembling together photographs and text for free-association reverie. Matters of industrial global displacement are overlaid on intimations of emotional vulnerability. This installation – while dealing with love and loss, of ships-passing-in-the-night nocturnes – takes as its thematic anchor a series of photographs documenting the massive Swan Hunter shipbuilding cranes being transported down the River Tyne to be reused along the west coast of India.

Baltic, to 20 Jun

Robert Clark

Martin Honert, London

Visitors to Frieze art fair a few years back might remember Martin Honert's towering polyurethane bearded giants. Based on his recollections of sideshow attractions, they were realised with an exacting, cool-headed attention to detail. Clearly, while the reclusive German artist's subject matter is rooted in his childhood, his concerns are far from mushy self-absorption or confession. Instead, he works a complex riff on formal questions such as scale and realism, treating memories as if they were readymades. Yet Honert fashions his painstaking works in his studio: a time-consuming business that makes his shows scarce. His first UK outing in a decade includes an installation of his school dormitory bedroom.

Bloomberg Space, EC2, Fri to 15 May

Skye Sherwin

Sunil Gupta, Aberdeen

Until July 2009, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, originally constituted by the colonial British in 1860, criminalised same-sex relationships. This political fact, alongside the personal fact of being diagnosed as HIV positive in 1995, has set the context for Sunil Gupta's brave and pioneering photographic work. Gupta titles his exhibition The New Pre-Raphaelites, after the British Victorian artistic brotherhood of like-minded romantic souls. The necessarily closeted history of Gupta's gay life encouraged a camp photographic theatricality comparable with scenes of so many pre-Raphaelite paintings. There's the same posed intimacy, the same exquisite attention to detail, the same air of almost painful sensitivity and aesthetic elegance. But ultimately, there's also the underlying atmosphere of illness and mortality, to set all that posing in a quite touching perspective.

Aberdeen Art Gallery, to 15 May

Robert Clark

Distance and Sensibility, London

In our lightfooted globalised times, the effect of migration on artistic sensibility can be a tricky thing to map. Featuring the work of five UK-based artists – Pavel Büchler, Ergin Cavusoglu, Margarita Gluzberg, Marysia Lewandowska and Lily Markiewicz – originally hailing from eastern Europe, this show moves between cultural pinpoints, universal references and personal concerns. Büchler's light projection of a situationist slogan harks back to his rebellious art student days in Prague. Gluzberg's old '78 recordings of birdsong, communist speech and capitalist-minded lessons in Russian warn of traps laid by cultural convention. As Cavusoglu's moody video installation depicting a foggy border zone between France and Spain suggests, displacement is an ambivalent experience.

Calvert 22, E2, Fri to 13 Jun

Skye Sherwin

Skye Sherwin

Robert Clark

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Video: Artists take over London’s doomed Market Estate

The Sheet — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:17:46 +0000

Tour the condemned housing block in north London, where more than 75 artists have transformed its empty rooms and flaking walls into colourful works of temporary art

Shehani Fernando

Ron Arad finally gets major UK retrospective at the Barbican

The Sheet — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:43:21 +0000

Exhibition by trailblazing Israeli-born designer, architect and artist opens in London, his hometown for more than 35 years

There are bookshelves that bounce and roll, cutlery that pirouettes, a chandelier that you can text and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. In what may be one of the most comfortable exhibitions of recent years, Britain's first major Ron Arad retrospective opens tomorrow.

The Barbican's art gallery in London is following up major shows it has held on Corbusier and Alvar Aalto by devoting three months to a designer, architect and artist still very much alive and working. Arad, who was born in Israel but has been based in London for more than 35 years, said he hoped anyone "interested in things" would visit.

The head of art galleries at the Barbican, Kate Bush, said: "We want to pay tribute to Ron Arad's very special place in the world of design. He is an incredibly important figure and this exhibition lays out his vision and his process as it has evolved over 30 years."

The show is divided into sections with names such as Volumising, Rolling, Superforming and Scavenging, where one of Arad's most celebrated chairs – the Rover chair, which uses a car seat salvaged from a scrap yard – is exhibited.

Then there is the Failing section, displaying designs that weren't taken up, or were misconceived. That includes the "table that eats chairs" in which chairs can be folded underneath the table top. "I think it was too complicated for the manufacturer," said the show's curator Lydia Yee, "but Ron's still confident that someone will come along."

There have been recent Arad shows at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, but the one in London was completely different, said its curator, Lydia Yee. "Ron wanted to do something new in his home town and we wanted … to show his interest in new materials and in new technologies."

There is a crystal chandelier called Lolita which has more than a thousand embedded LED lights and its own mobile number to which one can send texts, which are then displayed.

Arad and his studio have also created mechanical tricks to show off some of the pieces such as a long moving platform for bookshelves called "reinventing the wheel". The idea is that you can roll your bookshelves where you would like them – perfect for the indecisive – but there is a wheel within the wheel so the books remain upright.

For many, Arad will be best known for his chairs, many of which are on display and which are most definitely not for sitting on. A large section of the gallery will, however, contain chairs where visitors can take the weight off their feet and – should they wish – play table tennis on a stainless steel ping pong table designed by Arad to suit his game.

Mark Brown

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