Art 4 Preview: Lucy Skaer and Michael Fullerton

With specialist TV channels sprouting up everywhere you look, Channel 4 has a reputation to protect, as the natural home of the cutting edge. For years it has sponsored the Turner Prize, fashion shows and arts events in London, but now it’s got a new collection up its sleeve. “Up until now our sponsorship has been restricted to the London locale,” says Channel 4’s Arts Editor, Janet Lee, “so we thought that if we bought some art it could tour round all our buildings and it wouldn’t just be capital-centric”.

Art 4’s first batch of works has just been unveiled in the channel’s London headquarters, and of the eight emerging artists, two are Glasgow-based. “That just happened,” says Lee, “it was the strength of the work. We’re very aware that there’s lots of exciting stuff happening in Scotland. Along with London it’s one of the two places where really interesting things are happening. When people talk to me about emerging talent or great art schools often it’s Scotland that they’re talking about.”

And so, Lucy Skaer and Michael Fullerton are among the first to join a collection which will adorn the public spaces in Channel 4 buildings, including Glasgow’s, and will subsequently be lent out to galleries and museums around the UK.

“We won’t keep them and we won’t try and sell them,” continues Lee, “We’ve got no intention of trying to make money out of it at all; it’s a very public service thing to be doing in a way. We’ll spend £20,000 a year on it, which is a reasonable sponsorship budget for any major corporation, so I don’t want to say ‘hey, look at us – we’re so fantastically altruistic’ but what’s special is that we’re daring to buy new and young and emerging artists and we’ve not gone for established names at all. That’s what’s risky about what we’ve done.”

Skaer showed this year at the Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for Beck’s Futures 2003, with a series of posters illustrating public interventions; she hid moth and butterfly pupae in the Old Bailey, for example, hoping they would hatch mid-trial. Channel 4 have commissioned the artist to produce a new poster for them, but they have also bought one of the large-scale drawings which form the main part of her practice.

“Quite often I draw on photo-journalistic imagery,” explains Skaer, “photographs of war-scenes or destruction, and I’m particularly interested in the cadaver. What I am interested in is the brutally that’s inherent in the pictures, and to build on that, to push them over the edge, making them both more aesthetic and more problematic at the same time.”

“The commission is to make a poster which will be an unlimited edition that Channel 4 will reprint when it runs out. People can just take it away. It’s going to be a drawn image, taken from the archive of Channel 4 footage. It’s really exciting for me to think about working with the very recent past rather than these more well-known or digested images.

“It sits really well with things I’m doing in my work anyway, so that feels quite exciting and maybe that’s something they’ve gone for quite a lot in the collection in general. That fits with Michael Fullerton’s work very well as well so I think that they’ve thought quite a lot about how the work relates to what Channel 4 does.”

Michael Fullerton agrees. Two of his Gainsborough-style portraits have been selected, one of Scotland’s first female judge, Lady Cosgrove, and the other of Paddy Joe Hill of the Birmingham Six, founder of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO). “It’s quite good the way they’ve ended up in Channel 4 because a lot of my work is about information, how it goes from one place to the other, about the structures of authority involved. I’m interested in Gainsborough because he makes these persuasive, seductive images and to me that’s a powerful thing. I do feel the mass media is quite like that as well.

“Channel 4 asked the artists to get involved in the selection process,” Fullerton continues, “and because I’d painted these two people and I knew them, I thought they’d be chuffed about it – I was quite chuffed! It’s a good audience – it gives MOJO a plug, and it’s not just going to sit there and gather dust, it’s going to be lent out to museums up and down the country for a long time to come.

“Channel 4 are trying to help artists, particularly people in my position, at the start of their careers. It’s quite nice, there’s something quite benevolent about the whole thing, you know? For instance in terms of Paddy, they thought they were helping me to help him.”

“All the works make you rethink,” says Janet Lee, “and I guess that’s what we’re trying to do with Channel 4 programmes, making people look again at what they’ve always taken for granted – hey have a look at this, this isn’t what you think.”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 16.11.03