In October 1999, as part of the In-Site series of projects, PhotoWorks invited myself and Marysia Lewandowska to undertake a year-long residency in the Design Council Archive at the University of Brighton.

Documents was the culmination of that residency, which included an exhibition [with a filmTearing], a publication, a web-browser [sadly no longer available] and conference.

This is from the publication:

Design: Stuart Smith
Publisher: Photoworks: Brighton
December 2000 (currently £5)
ISBN: 1-9037-9600-8


preface

Imagine drawing-up an inventory of every object you use in a day, or every thing you own, or every artefact you value. Any list that emerged would feel at best provisional, at worst it would seem like a futile task. And now if you would, pretend that the exercise was to be conducted on a national scale, and that the resulting document would be used to educate and influence popular public taste in the manufacturing and consumption of the indexed items. This is precisely what the Council for Industrial Design initiated in 1949, in an attempt to drag Britain out of the devastation caused by the second world war.

The Stock List, compiled by various government departments determined selection for the seminal Festival of Britain exhibition and became a template for promoting British products the world over.

Between these covers rests the original Stock List an extraordinary poem to materiality, composed by post Britain's post war ruling class; accompanied by one hundred images of contemporary products, each determined by their arbitrary retail price of one pound.

In 1997, after several years of research I managed to curate a multi-site exhibition, this account is from a reassembled guide..

Collected

26th April - 21 June 1997

Cineclub #1

The Enthusiasts: Outsider Cinema from the 1950–80s.
A selection from the Enthusiasts archive Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.

7:30pm 1st March  2016
Auditorium: Emilia Pavilion, Museum of Modern Art
Emilii Plater 51
Warsaw.
Introduction: Łukasz Ronduda

Cineclub #1 will present  a selection of Polish films made in the thirty year period between 1950 and 1980, specifically those produced in amateur film clubs supported by factories, mines and steelworks of the Polish People’s Republic. The films present a Polish reality of the period as seen through the eyes of the 'worker', a perspective that differs from the 'official'  position adopted by mainstream cinema, propagandistic newsreels, or experimental avant-garde film.

Directors such as Franciszek Dzida, Piotr Majdrowicz, Henryk Urbańczyk, or Engelbert Kral adopted a distinctive narrative style, boldly dealing with topics such as sexuality, consumption, and the relationships between private and public life. They also experimented formally, self-reflectively defining their own position as filmmakers.

On Saturday I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the first time in a long-time….

In the 1990's I used to lead a five week seminar at Chelsea College of Art and Design entitled Adrift in Taste. It was a chance to leave the college to visit other exhibitionary institutions, and also reflect on our -students and staff - habits and practices. Here's the introduction;

This seminar will presume to dismantle some of our prejudices about art, and evolve tools to build some new ones. It will in part, attempt to put `theory' into `practice'.......

On an individual and cultural scale we are described by a bewildering range of clothes, tools, art, trinkets, gifts, cuisine, souvenirs, electronic technology and rubbish. Objects and images are spilling from every shelf, cupboard, display case, television, vitrine, monitor, supermarket, studio, gallery, shop, museum and land-fill site. Adrift in Taste will begin to unpick our learned habits; the values our parents, teachers and friends taught us about art. We will also uncover some of the the wider institutional structures that have evolved to produce, accumulate and classify the stuff -therefore the meanings- within our cultures.