Essential media about the arts

We have been back today at the rather wonderful The Hepworth Wakefield (above), filming the installation of paintings by Clare Woods. (There are photos on the museum’s blog.) Her show The Unquiet Head opens on Saturday (until 29 January) and features more than a dozen works created over the past two years. To complement these, the artist has also selected a small group of pieces from public collections by British modernist artists, including Barbara Hepworth. Since 2006 we have been documenting Clare’s work, the preparations for this show and for an Olympic Legacy commission, and now we have to complete an hour-long film before a premiere at The Hepworth on 15 December. We’ll release this film on DVD, but no-one has commissioned or funded it and we have no broadcast sale so far. So quite why are we making the film?

One answer is that I am a huge admirer of Clare’s work. I’m fascinated by the ways these sumptuous paintings engage with landscape and with the landscape tradition of British art, with how they walk a line between representation and abstraction, and with their effect of conjuring up complex and often dark and disturbing emotions. It’s always a great privilege to spend time with any group of paintings, and to look at them with the focus that filming encourages – and these have been particularly rewarding. You can see images of Clare’s work at the web site of her gallery, Modern Art, at the New Art Centre, and there’s a brief intro to her from the Guardian here.

For all the pleasures of being here, Illuminations is not my hobby, and is not in business to offer me the chance to make a film on any subject in which I happen to be interested. We are a commercial production company that aims each year to turn a modest profit from producing and publishing media about the arts. And although it’s never easy, that is what we have been doing for nearly thirty years – as television has been transformed and as digital media has brought a state of permanent revolution to the arts as to so much else.

I hope that we can carry on producing for another thirty years, but clearly making unfunded films about favourite artists is not exactly a convincing business plan or a way of ensuring that we will still be here in 2031 (much as I might like the idea of continuing to produce at the age of 86).

What we’ve tried to do over the past three decades is to respond to the shifts and turns in media, and by doing so we have endeavoured always to find new ways of funding imaginative production. Initially we worked solely for Channel 4. Then it became possible to produce as an independent for the BBC and for other broadcasters, both in Britain and abroad. We flirted seriously with web production and with developing online social worlds, but our real love is imaginative linear exploration of a subject.

As television withdrew around 2000 from a serious commitment to films about the arts, we developed the model of theEYE (all editions of which are available for purchase here) , about which I have written in detail here, here, here and here (2009 entries now preserved in our new blog’s archive). These simple half-hour profiles of contemporary artists collectively offer a valuable record of the visual arts across the 2000s, when television (after the end of The Late Show) had largely given up and before the likes of Tate Shots began to emerge.

Now, with extensive short-form video production with artists from Tate and other cultural organisations, and from the Guardian and other newspapers, it feels like the time to try other models – which is why we are beginning to develop one or two long-form documentaries like the one with Clare Woods. The production costs have been relatively modest, although we have committed a lot of our own time and energy. We will secure a modest return from DVD sales and we ought to be able to make a broadcast sale or two. There will be festival screenings, museum presentations, educational use, all of which will help generate revenue.

One of the key things that I learned as we started to make theEYE was how important it is simply to continue to do stuff – to make productions on however modest a scale and with whatever resources can be cobbled together. Simply looking backwards to moan about the disappearance of particular funding sources or production models is unproductive, and it’s vital to experiment with new ways of working – almost irrespective of where films will be seen or how they will make a return. Almost. Clearly you can’t be cavalier about the bottom-line, but – at least in this business – your practice also can’t be determined solely by its demands. Sometimes you need to make things primarily for the pleasure of doing them, for the love of production – and for wherever they might (unpredictably) lead.

If you make it, the audience will come. Or at least you hope they will. And if they don’t, you need to try again – and fail again. Just make sure you fail better the next time around.