THE FESTIVAL OF PLAGIARISM by Stewart Home

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Footnotes
Further Information

A major achievement of the Festival Of Plagiarism was to show that it is possible to organise an ambitious cultural event without enough money to cover any more than the most minimal of expenses. (At the time the Festival was organised, Harwood and myself were both registered as unemployed and our annual incomes were £1500 each, while Baxter was earning £2000 annually from a book distribution service he ran).

The organisation of the Festival Of Plagiarism (and similar events) is a natural outcome of the realisation that art simply is (and always has been) a question of administration (rather than some inherent quality in the objects elevated to the status of art). The extent to which the Festival was able to 'demystify' contemporary cultural practice was limited by the unwillingness of many 'plagiarists' to take on administrative responsibilities. Many of those who responded to the initial invitation to participate in the organisation of the Festival, replied by asking for money and requesting that they should be found gallery space (400 copies of this invitation were mailed out and a further 300 distributed by other means).

It was Graham Harwood's enthusiasm which provided the impetus for work to begin on the organisation of the Festival, while I carried out the bulk of administrative duties with the steadfast support of Ed Baxter. It was not until we had begun work on the Festival that I discovered Harwood was dyslexic and that this condition would limit the type of administrative work he could undertake. Having discovered this, I desperately sought assistance from other quarters. Baxter stepped in and helped me out at a point when no one else was prepared to shoulder any of the administrative workload; without his aid the Festival might well have become an organisational disaster.

Fitting those who wanted to participate (and who were 'unable' to organise venues for themselves) into the available space became an administrative nightmare.

These difficulties were exacerbated by the way in which work was censored by a number of the bodies who controlled the spaces being used. Also, the largest venue - Chisenhale Studios - was lost because after I had arranged for it to be used (for a group show) during the Festival, and then entrusted its administration to Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks, these two 'friends' pulled out of the Festival and arranged for the space at Chisenhale to be reallocated to themselves at a later date.

Despite all the changes forced upon the organisers during the planning stages, what finally took place was reasonably close to the advertised programme (as distributed to the media and carried in the first edition of "Plagiarism: art as commodity and strategies for its negation"). The 'Plagiarism - Sweet Revulsion' exhibition opened three days late (it was advertised as opening on February 1st) because the participants didn't put the show up in time. The content of the two video evenings differed slightly from what was advertised; ex- Situationist International member Ralph Rumney didn't give his talk scheduled for the second evening because he was laid up in bed with flu. For reasons best known to himself, Richard Barnbrook failed to undertake his planned guerrilla hangings of contentious images over banks and insurance buildings. Stefan Szczelkun's show at M&B Motors, William Clark's participation in the 'Iconoclasm' exhibition and the two talks at the Bedford Hill Gallery were last minute additions and therefore missed inclusion in the lists of events distributed to the press. Such relatively minor changes compare very favourably with the track record of the Fluxus Festivals of the 1960's, which were notorious for bearing little, if any, relation to the advertised programme.

Not unexpectedly, exhibitions and events in Central London were far better attended than those located in 'fringe' areas of the city (where audiences tended to be more 'local' in composition) Despite this, it was heartening that at least some of the participants visited most of what constituted the Festival. On this level, Mark Pawson and Scott Larson (who contributed to the 'Apocrypha' show) proved themselves to be as supportive as Ed Baxter. Others (such as Ben Allen, John Berndt, Franz John, Brian Gentry, Mitch, Malcolm Dickson, Karen Strang and Kenny Murphy-Roud) visited all the exhibitions and events which co-incided with their visits to London and in doing so showed a considerable depth of engagement with the issues raised by the Festival.

PART IV: In Conclusion