Stefan Szczelkun Attic Archive material

Reference:GB 254 MS 339/7
Dates of Creation:198-2014
Name of Creator:
Physical Description:

Scope and Content
Box ‘DATA’ containing correspondence from Szczelkun to Pete Horrobin, Marshall Anderson and Peter Haining includes fliers, forwarded correspondence, cuttings etc, 1985-2009, box of CD ROMS 2007-2009, 4 DVDs c 2014
Administrative / Biographical History
Following the death of Marshall Anderson, Peter Haining was born on 01.01.2000. It was his aspiration to spend 10 years living in the south of Ireland where he could experience a Catholic culture, one diametrically and theologically opposed to his Protestant upbringing. In order to establish a foothold there he applied for a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin – IMMA – which at the time was hosting the Monika Kinley collection of outsider art. It was Haining’s intention to research this international collection then carry out his own audit of autodidactic artistic expression in the whole of Ireland, thereby perpetuating research that Marshall Anderson had carried out in Scotland during his decade. Haining laboured as an agricultural worker to raise the money for his journey to Ireland and in March 2000 he left Dundee by bicycle to travel to Cairnryan. He crossed to Larne and began to cycle round the north coast of County Antrim. In Carnlough he came across the eccentric and individualistic installation of Moscow Joe McKinley, which he photo-documented. From this first encounter a relationship was cultivated and a later video was recorded. Haining’s residency at IMMA commenced on 01.09.2000 giving him ample time to zig-zag and detour through the country before arriving in Dublin. When the residency at IMMA ended in January 2001, Haining moved to another residency at Cill Rialaig in County Kerry. Here the doors closed on him in March and with snow on the hills he was back in the saddle, touring and documenting naïve painting and sculpture, as well as decorated cottages, of which the Republic of Ireland had many. These being a distinctive Catholic expression and therefore mostly absent in Scotland. The IMMA residency had been valuable in several ways. It had given a stipend which Haining saved to continue funding his itinerant lifestyle, and it also helped open doors to art organisations, which offered opportunities to give public lectures introducing his research to the general public. In 2004 Haining moved across the border and rented property in Enniskillen. This was paid for by labouring part-time as a gardener. During this period he self-published his research into autodidactic art as a limited edition computer disc. Various problems in the attic in Dundee coupled to a feeling of completion in Ireland urged Haining to return to Scotland. His research was catalogued as "HIBERNIA – Haining’s Irish Biketour in Eire and Round Northern Ireland Arts" – and is now archived at the National Irish Visual Arts Library in Dublin. Back in Dundee Peter Haining took up residence in the Attic Archive where he began a series of works, completing some DATA projects and filing the material relating to the Marshall Anderson decade. He fabricated folios from Anderson’s clothing to contain drawings and constructed boxes from recycled cardboard to secure correspondence, periodicals and publications. He also invested in a powerful desktop Mac with film editing software so that he could produce a series of DVDs based on video footage recorded in Ireland, as well as digitised analogue VHS recordings and current video shot in Fife. The resulting collection of 36 DVDs was boxed in 2 editions and archived in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and Artpool in Budapest. Before finalising his decade on 31.12.2009, Peter Haining had to set in motion the selling of the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, and with that resolve the problem of what to do with its multi-various collection of artworks, books, objects, ephemera, packaging, and toys.
Pete Horobin was born in 1949 in Hammersmith to Peter Horobin and Elizabeth (Betty) Haining. He lived in various locations in England until moving to Scotland with his mother and siblings in 1959. Pete Horobin began his habit of meticulous self-documentation in 1975, after graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee that same year. His initial experiments took the form of small boxes filled each month and sealed – not to be reopened until some time in the future. These boxes, long since destroyed, contained ephemera, packaging and personal notes. After returning from a hitch-hiking journey to France in 1977 he commenced a project entitled The Accessibility of the Art Object, which distributed collaged postcards randomly through the post and small products, such as badges books and collages, through Scottish art galleries. These products were sold for as little as 50 pence up to a few pounds. The Accessibility of the Art Object prompted a short-lived grouping with other artists collectively known as Visual Arts Promotions. In 1979 Horobin initiated Junk Into Art/Art Into Junk, a large-scale collective recycling of waste materials, realised in collaboration with the Dundee Group Artists (Ltd) based in Forebank Studios. Participating artists came from Scotland and Paris, where Horobin had met an artists’ run collective called Cairn. The documentation of the Dundee event was later exhibited in Cairn’s space in Paris. Both of the above projects were carefully documented and are now held in Dundee University Archives. At the end of 1979 Horobin turned 30 a conscious ageing which precipitated a 10-year artwork, DATA – Daily Action Time Archive – 01.01.1980 to 31.12.1989. DATA has been referred to as a self historification project; it may also be described as a large bookwork comprising many chapters, that is an artwork which is the sum of its many parts. During this intense period Horobin became involved in the mailart movement and an international grouping of artists styled as the neoists. From 1971 Horobin had been based in the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, and as his documentation process gathered momentum and continued growing exponentially he began to refer to his space as The DATA Attic – a repository for his DATA and earlier documented projects, as well as all his correspondence and collaborations with other artists. When DATA came to an end the life of Pete Horobin was terminated. DATA was catalogued and the resulting A4 document of 373 pages, listing over 10,000 items, was self-published. Copies are archived in The National Library of Scotland, Dundee University Archives, and Artpool in Budapest. The end of DATA and the death of Pete Horobin did not however bring documenting and archiving to a conclusion – both activities persisted energetically. Accordingly the remit of The DATA Attic expanded to encompass new artworks and projects, therefore it became necessary to consider the domestic studio space as The Attic Archive, which through time contained 3 10-year artworks plus all associated correspondence, publications, ephemera and packaging. In addition objects from Horobin’s childhood and adolescence were also archived along with many student paintings and drawings. Each of the 3 10-year artworks was made by a different personality, these being – Pete Horobin, Marshall Anderson, and Peter Haining.
Marshall Anderson came into being on 01.01.1990 and expired on 31.12.1999 in Kirkcaldy where he had been based throughout his lifetime. He was an anachronism who styled himself on a highland estate worker, dressed in tweeds and shod with shepherd’s boots. Bearded and with his hair tied in a ponytail, his persona was distinctive. He was perhaps the last of the Scottish romantics. His objective was to live in the Scottish landscape and use those open spaces as his studio. His approach to landscape was traditionally analogue and non-photographic. As much as possible he walked everywhere keeping the old routes – drove roads, military roads and rights of way – open and accessible. Although itinerant and based in Kirkcaldy, he used the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, as a repository for his plein air drawings, bookworks, daily journals, and correspondence. Throughout Anderson’s decade the attic was rented to art students for a nominal rent which helped supplement monies earned by writing freelance for newspapers, art magazines and periodicals. He also curated three exhibitions – 'Soloists: outsider art in Scotland', for art™ in Inverness; 'The Ultimate Rock Garden: ceramics and photo-documentation by Lotte Glob', for McManus in Dundee; and "Women’s Work: decorated coffins", co-curated with Lynne Nealon and exhibited in Roseangle Gallery in Dundee. Film maker Doug Aubrey interviewed Anderson for his road movie 'Victim of Geography - from Sarajevo to Cape Wrath' – where his ritualistic pyre for a greylag goose closes the journey. Collaboration was an important part of Anderson’s working practice. His many interviews with artists, who each communicated their personal relationship with the land, were treated as collaborative dialogues, not just a simple question and answer formula, from which an article would be published. Many of these articles introduced relatively isolated artists to a wider Scottish public for the first time. Examples being Steve Dilworth, James Hawkins, and Danish-born ceramicist Lotte Glob who lived in Durness when writer and artist met. Anderson’s and Glob’s ideas converged so strongly that an intimate working relationship developed. She introduced him to the Danish avant-garde and CoBrA and he made her aware of the flexibility and durability of the book as a medium for expression. Their books of the land were exhibited in Glasgow and some of the surviving examples are archived at the National Library of Scotland. Others were returned to the land and photo-documented as abandonments.
Born Hammersmith, London in 1948. "Lived an isolated life in a bedsit at the top of Regents street until we moved to Feltham when I was 3. Later I was a mod; then a reluctant architect; then a happy artist. Since then I've been in ten collectives or networks of cultural producers from the Scratch Orchestra to Exploding Cinema. With one of these groups I built my own house in Kennington (finished in 1995)."
Stefan Szczelkun worked on the MA in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster before his recent retirement. He completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2002 on the legitimation of collective sites of cultural production and their value within a democratic culture. The particular focus of this research was Exploding Cinema, an underground film and video showing collective that has been active in South London since 1991 [1].
In the Seventies Stefan had his three Survival Scrapbooks, Shelter, Food and Energy published by Unicorn Bookshop and Schocken Books NY after an architectural training at Portsmouth Polytechnic. He then 'dropped out' and lived in a van whilst playing with The Scratch Orchestra - the British version of Fluxus. On returning to London he took new dance and bodywork classes at X6 in Butlers Wharf and did extensive research into the elements of human ability. Published as Sense-Think-Act; first as a mediawiki and more recently as an ebook.
Stefan is an artist with a particular interest in publishing both in traditional book format and more recently in multimedia and digital video. In the Eighties he organised two groups relating to identity issues. The first was Bigos: Artists of Polish Origin which was a open group which was interested in putting on made-to-measure shows: now archived by Tate Archive. The second, ‘Working Press, books by and about working class artists’, supported artists to publish offset-litho books under a collective imprint. Working Press published a trilogy about his experience as a working class artist - Collaborations which was raw documentation, Class Myths and Culture, a book of polemical essays and Conspiracy of Good Taste, a history and theory review which led to academic teaching and research. The Working Press archive was acquired by UCA in Farnham and has recently been activated during a four week residency (2016).
In 2012 Stefan published the third in a series of DVDs concerned with London people-power and the counter culture of the Nineties. The DVD title is 'Creating a movement: the struggle for Inclusive Education'. Another collaborative project, Agit Disco, was on the web before in became a book later in 2011. After that he worked on a large scale activation of the archives of Brixton Artists Collective that ran Brixton Art Gallery 1981 – 1986. As part of this he produced an oral history video and working with a group of artists from London Underground called ‘Out of Uniform’. This was in partnership with 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, supported by Arts Council, Heritage Lottery grants and Westminster University. See Brixton50 for more detail.
Pedagogic research interests included the use of video in teaching. One module used phone cameras and a YouTube channel as part of the students tools for data gathering and critique. He has supervised three students to complete their doctoral studies and was an external examiner of MA Cultural Industry at Goldsmiths College.
Now retired from academic work and publishing work with Routine Art Co his collaborative imprint. And making video works.
Taken from https://monoskop.org/Stefan_Szczelkun
Acquisition Information
Stefan Szczelkun
Note
Following the death of Marshall Anderson, Peter Haining was born on 01.01.2000. It was his aspiration to spend 10 years living in the south of Ireland where he could experience a Catholic culture, one diametrically and theologically opposed to his Protestant upbringing. In order to establish a foothold there he applied for a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin – IMMA – which at the time was hosting the Monika Kinley collection of outsider art. It was Haining’s intention to research this international collection then carry out his own audit of autodidactic artistic expression in the whole of Ireland, thereby perpetuating research that Marshall Anderson had carried out in Scotland during his decade. Haining laboured as an agricultural worker to raise the money for his journey to Ireland and in March 2000 he left Dundee by bicycle to travel to Cairnryan. He crossed to Larne and began to cycle round the north coast of County Antrim. In Carnlough he came across the eccentric and individualistic installation of Moscow Joe McKinley, which he photo-documented. From this first encounter a relationship was cultivated and a later video was recorded. Haining’s residency at IMMA commenced on 01.09.2000 giving him ample time to zig-zag and detour through the country before arriving in Dublin. When the residency at IMMA ended in January 2001, Haining moved to another residency at Cill Rialaig in County Kerry. Here the doors closed on him in March and with snow on the hills he was back in the saddle, touring and documenting naïve painting and sculpture, as well as decorated cottages, of which the Republic of Ireland had many. These being a distinctive Catholic expression and therefore mostly absent in Scotland. The IMMA residency had been valuable in several ways. It had given a stipend which Haining saved to continue funding his itinerant lifestyle, and it also helped open doors to art organisations, which offered opportunities to give public lectures introducing his research to the general public. In 2004 Haining moved across the border and rented property in Enniskillen. This was paid for by labouring part-time as a gardener. During this period he self-published his research into autodidactic art as a limited edition computer disc. Various problems in the attic in Dundee coupled to a feeling of completion in Ireland urged Haining to return to Scotland. His research was catalogued as "HIBERNIA – Haining’s Irish Biketour in Eire and Round Northern Ireland Arts" – and is now archived at the National Irish Visual Arts Library in Dublin. Back in Dundee Peter Haining took up residence in the Attic Archive where he began a series of works, completing some DATA projects and filing the material relating to the Marshall Anderson decade. He fabricated folios from Anderson’s clothing to contain drawings and constructed boxes from recycled cardboard to secure correspondence, periodicals and publications. He also invested in a powerful desktop Mac with film editing software so that he could produce a series of DVDs based on video footage recorded in Ireland, as well as digitised analogue VHS recordings and current video shot in Fife. The resulting collection of 36 DVDs was boxed in 2 editions and archived in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and Artpool in Budapest. Before finalising his decade on 31.12.2009, Peter Haining had to set in motion the selling of the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, and with that resolve the problem of what to do with its multi-various collection of artworks, books, objects, ephemera, packaging, and toys.
Pete Horobin was born in 1949 in Hammersmith to Peter Horobin and Elizabeth (Betty) Haining. He lived in various locations in England until moving to Scotland with his mother and siblings in 1959. Pete Horobin began his habit of meticulous self-documentation in 1975, after graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee that same year. His initial experiments took the form of small boxes filled each month and sealed – not to be reopened until some time in the future. These boxes, long since destroyed, contained ephemera, packaging and personal notes. After returning from a hitch-hiking journey to France in 1977 he commenced a project entitled The Accessibility of the Art Object, which distributed collaged postcards randomly through the post and small products, such as badges books and collages, through Scottish art galleries. These products were sold for as little as 50 pence up to a few pounds. The Accessibility of the Art Object prompted a short-lived grouping with other artists collectively known as Visual Arts Promotions. In 1979 Horobin initiated Junk Into Art/Art Into Junk, a large-scale collective recycling of waste materials, realised in collaboration with the Dundee Group Artists (Ltd) based in Forebank Studios. Participating artists came from Scotland and Paris, where Horobin had met an artists’ run collective called Cairn. The documentation of the Dundee event was later exhibited in Cairn’s space in Paris. Both of the above projects were carefully documented and are now held in Dundee University Archives. At the end of 1979 Horobin turned 30 a conscious ageing which precipitated a 10-year artwork, DATA – Daily Action Time Archive – 01.01.1980 to 31.12.1989. DATA has been referred to as a self historification project; it may also be described as a large bookwork comprising many chapters, that is an artwork which is the sum of its many parts. During this intense period Horobin became involved in the mailart movement and an international grouping of artists styled as the neoists. From 1971 Horobin had been based in the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, and as his documentation process gathered momentum and continued growing exponentially he began to refer to his space as The DATA Attic – a repository for his DATA and earlier documented projects, as well as all his correspondence and collaborations with other artists. When DATA came to an end the life of Pete Horobin was terminated. DATA was catalogued and the resulting A4 document of 373 pages, listing over 10,000 items, was self-published. Copies are archived in The National Library of Scotland, Dundee University Archives, and Artpool in Budapest. The end of DATA and the death of Pete Horobin did not however bring documenting and archiving to a conclusion – both activities persisted energetically. Accordingly the remit of The DATA Attic expanded to encompass new artworks and projects, therefore it became necessary to consider the domestic studio space as The Attic Archive, which through time contained 3 10-year artworks plus all associated correspondence, publications, ephemera and packaging. In addition objects from Horobin’s childhood and adolescence were also archived along with many student paintings and drawings. Each of the 3 10-year artworks was made by a different personality, these being – Pete Horobin, Marshall Anderson, and Peter Haining.
Marshall Anderson came into being on 01.01.1990 and expired on 31.12.1999 in Kirkcaldy where he had been based throughout his lifetime. He was an anachronism who styled himself on a highland estate worker, dressed in tweeds and shod with shepherd’s boots. Bearded and with his hair tied in a ponytail, his persona was distinctive. He was perhaps the last of the Scottish romantics. His objective was to live in the Scottish landscape and use those open spaces as his studio. His approach to landscape was traditionally analogue and non-photographic. As much as possible he walked everywhere keeping the old routes – drove roads, military roads and rights of way – open and accessible. Although itinerant and based in Kirkcaldy, he used the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, as a repository for his plein air drawings, bookworks, daily journals, and correspondence. Throughout Anderson’s decade the attic was rented to art students for a nominal rent which helped supplement monies earned by writing freelance for newspapers, art magazines and periodicals. He also curated three exhibitions – 'Soloists: outsider art in Scotland', for art™ in Inverness; 'The Ultimate Rock Garden: ceramics and photo-documentation by Lotte Glob', for McManus in Dundee; and "Women’s Work: decorated coffins", co-curated with Lynne Nealon and exhibited in Roseangle Gallery in Dundee. Film maker Doug Aubrey interviewed Anderson for his road movie 'Victim of Geography - from Sarajevo to Cape Wrath' – where his ritualistic pyre for a greylag goose closes the journey. Collaboration was an important part of Anderson’s working practice. His many interviews with artists, who each communicated their personal relationship with the land, were treated as collaborative dialogues, not just a simple question and answer formula, from which an article would be published. Many of these articles introduced relatively isolated artists to a wider Scottish public for the first time. Examples being Steve Dilworth, James Hawkins, and Danish-born ceramicist Lotte Glob who lived in Durness when writer and artist met. Anderson’s and Glob’s ideas converged so strongly that an intimate working relationship developed. She introduced him to the Danish avant-garde and CoBrA and he made her aware of the flexibility and durability of the book as a medium for expression. Their books of the land were exhibited in Glasgow and some of the surviving examples are archived at the National Library of Scotland. Others were returned to the land and photo-documented as abandonments.
Born Hammersmith, London in 1948. "Lived an isolated life in a bedsit at the top of Regents street until we moved to Feltham when I was 3. Later I was a mod; then a reluctant architect; then a happy artist. Since then I've been in ten collectives or networks of cultural producers from the Scratch Orchestra to Exploding Cinema. With one of these groups I built my own house in Kennington (finished in 1995)."
Stefan Szczelkun worked on the MA in Visual Culture at the University of Westminster before his recent retirement. He completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2002 on the legitimation of collective sites of cultural production and their value within a democratic culture. The particular focus of this research was Exploding Cinema, an underground film and video showing collective that has been active in South London since 1991 [1].
In the Seventies Stefan had his three Survival Scrapbooks, Shelter, Food and Energy published by Unicorn Bookshop and Schocken Books NY after an architectural training at Portsmouth Polytechnic. He then 'dropped out' and lived in a van whilst playing with The Scratch Orchestra - the British version of Fluxus. On returning to London he took new dance and bodywork classes at X6 in Butlers Wharf and did extensive research into the elements of human ability. Published as Sense-Think-Act; first as a mediawiki and more recently as an ebook.
Stefan is an artist with a particular interest in publishing both in traditional book format and more recently in multimedia and digital video. In the Eighties he organised two groups relating to identity issues. The first was Bigos: Artists of Polish Origin which was a open group which was interested in putting on made-to-measure shows: now archived by Tate Archive. The second, ‘Working Press, books by and about working class artists’, supported artists to publish offset-litho books under a collective imprint. Working Press published a trilogy about his experience as a working class artist - Collaborations which was raw documentation, Class Myths and Culture, a book of polemical essays and Conspiracy of Good Taste, a history and theory review which led to academic teaching and research. The Working Press archive was acquired by UCA in Farnham and has recently been activated during a four week residency (2016).
In 2012 Stefan published the third in a series of DVDs concerned with London people-power and the counter culture of the Nineties. The DVD title is 'Creating a movement: the struggle for Inclusive Education'. Another collaborative project, Agit Disco, was on the web before in became a book later in 2011. After that he worked on a large scale activation of the archives of Brixton Artists Collective that ran Brixton Art Gallery 1981 – 1986. As part of this he produced an oral history video and working with a group of artists from London Underground called ‘Out of Uniform’. This was in partnership with 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, supported by Arts Council, Heritage Lottery grants and Westminster University. See Brixton50 for more detail.
Pedagogic research interests included the use of video in teaching. One module used phone cameras and a YouTube channel as part of the students tools for data gathering and critique. He has supervised three students to complete their doctoral studies and was an external examiner of MA Cultural Industry at Goldsmiths College.
Now retired from academic work and publishing work with Routine Art Co his collaborative imprint. And making video works.
Taken from https://monoskop.org/Stefan_Szczelkun
Appraisal Information
All kept
Custodial History
The material was originally sent by Stefan Szczelkun to Pete Horobin / Marshall Anderson / Peter Haining. It was kept in the Attic Archive and when the Archive was dispersed and the Attic sold Haining catalogued the correspondence and returned it to Stefan Szczelkun in a DATA box. Haining had already sent dvds and cds to Szczelkun as part of his digitisation project as Haining.
Additional Information
Published