Means and ends

Cheltenham's Meantime has tried to shine a light into the artistic future during the past seven or so years. Now that light has gone out, following tonight's closing party: for it, more than 50 artists who had worked at Meantime contributed pieces to a final show.

All strength to Sarah Bowden's elbow as she strives to find some new outlet for her considerable energies! This most versatile of upper rooms is destined to become someone's living space, no doubt, in the redevelopment.

"A community of Women"

I haven't been to Meantime for a while, but was glad to be able to pay a visit this morning. Vicky Hodgson, a Worcestershire photographer, has mounted an exhibition of images of women who work in the somewhat run down area immediately surrounding the workshop/gallery, tucked in near to Cheltenham's High Street.

This is a woman's view of women. There's no glamour angle. The subjects are posed, after discussion and with agreement, their clothes carefully chosen, their look directed at the lens. It's a cooperative venture, in other words, one perfectly underlining the usefulness of Meantime's role as a reflection on, of and for its neighbourhood.

The end-of-residency discussion last night drew in some of the "models": Herefordshire artist, Anna Falcini, who has written interestingly about Vicky's residency, also attended. I was sorry to miss it. (We were supposed to be at the RNT relay of Othello, but I made a right muddle over our tickets: red faces when an email arrived from Cineworld this morning, hoping we had enjoyed it.)

Leaders of Men

26-year-old Jonathan Kelham has been working at Meantime for a few weeks, and tonight he unveiled - under the above title - the most curious body of work I have yet seen there.

It seems to me a sort of artistic equivalent to Second Life. I listened in to a more or less unintelligible conversation Jonathan was having in the downstairs gallery, in which hangs just one work: it's a sideways map of England, it appears; but its significance entirely escapes me.

Upstairs, there are quite good (and recognisable) portrait sketches alongside pages of local newspaper advertisements: Jonathan inserts random small ads round the country. When I asked him whether he'd ever had a reply to one, he said "No". Very odd.

I returned home looking forward ever more eagerly to our departure for Italy in a week's time.

Breathtaking

Emma Critchley works with free-diver models in creating still and moving images under water. She begins a residency at Meantime with her talk tonight, reviewing the work she has done during her short career to date. It's impressive.

"The fear of falling" stills sequence shows Sophie Lewis (costumed as an 18th Century lady) gradually taking off her elaborate outer garments. The slower pace of pre-Industrial Revolution life (hand-made clothes etc.) echoes a certain suspension of time under water, the model being as it were rooted in the present. "In holding your breath," Emma said, "you channel your thoughts inwards."

Contrasted with this was an agonisingly long (5 minutes plus) video of a couple diving down and coming together in a kiss: erotic at first, but making the viewer gradually aware of the increasing risk to both lives as the strength of their mutually-exchanged breaths depletes.

Emma doesn't manipulate her images, so to contrast with her monochromes, I've put this snatched shot through the mangle.

"Tactile Love Propaganda"

Artist Kate Lepper gave this title to her residency at Meantime, which Caroline and I visited this morning. The words of her beautifully assembled work are "There Is A Cure For Capitalism Inside Your Imagination That Wants To Get Out."

We were glad to have Kate to ourselves for some "capitalism" discussion up in the gallery - and glad also to meet Chie Konishi, who has written - perceptively - about Kate's project.

Meantime represents something very valuable for Cheltenham - including an escape from the link that binds art to money. (It's a nice irony that it butts up against that symbol of Cheltenham materialism, the Brewery complex, whose jobsworth minion prevented us parking our bikes on its precious private pavement!) The question is, how to get more people to engage with Meantime's challenges. Is there, I wonder, potential synergy between its commitment to art for the community and Transition Cheltenham's vision of a resilient town, with renewed heart and soul?

"Stone Music"

Meantime, hub for Cheltenham's alternative art scene, is currently presenting something of a cross-cultural show. Downstairs, eight Gloucestershire artists exhibit their postcard-sized interpretations of the relationship between stone (and in one case lead) and music: I particularly liked Jacki Storey's take - scenic views, collaged with OS map sections and perforated by a hole punch, to echo Gregorian chant. Upstairs, Mike Adcock supervised a mixed-age bunch, conjuring up a soundscape out of different-sized slates - a primitive gamelan.

Back to Meantime

15 months ago, I reported on a previous visit to Cheltenham's experimental visual art centre, Meantime. This weekend's "show" is if anything more perplexing than the last. In her residency, Felicity Hammond has put together "Constructed Reality: The Remnants of Ephemeral Art". In it, she claims to be responding "to the exploration of what it means to archive," and asks: "Do we lose even more authenticity through secondary representation?"

Meantime is on two floors. What you see in the ground floor is a display of architectural plans in two dimensions; and a short video depicting something going on down the steps in the basement area of the building - or rather the next door building, formerly the printers I used to go to, Hayman's. Upstairs, there is another video projected on the end wall of the gallery, with a third shown on an adjacent TV screen. Both these include images of the artist, doing things.

I only found one of the three videos of any aesthetic interest: the camera had been set up at night in the illuminated upstairs gallery, facing the full-length doors seen on the right of my photograph of the outside - the room had presumably been used as a storage loft originally. Felicity, dressed in black and I imagine wearing a black hood, then opened the doors slowly, so all you could see of her was her hands moving.

Her residency essay concludes, "The archive may echo the original performance in its content, but takes on a new reality and validity as being read as a part of our external, present reality." I ask, what is the use of such experiments if they do not result in an evident display of virtuosity?

Meantime

MEANTIME is described as an independent arts platform for the production and presentation of new work, dialogue and exchange, supported by Arts Council England, Arts Development and Virtual Arts Centre at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, and the University of Gloucestershire.

Its entrance, tucked away behind the multiplex cinema, is not promising, but belies a useful first floor space - perhaps the only one of its type in central Cheltenham since the closure of the Axiom. Its occupant/exhibitor these last couple of days has been a young artist, Ben Garrod, with his "Photounrealistic Painting" show.

Ben bafflingly - to me - introduces his work as follows: "Taking a JPG from the MT website, I made it a BMP & using MSP pixelated a section with the simplest resizing operation possible. Thus losing much of the already sparse 411. With an R285 @ BSU it went from RGB to CMYK. & @ the DDC the colours were re-photographed and mixed into the appropriate VM bases. So through the process described above PBW became 15 others, mainly 30BB38037 & 1015R70B with some Martian Skies. This piece is concerned primarily with the creeping dissolution of the space between space & information & is inspired in part by Gregg Egan's PKD award winning novel Permutation City."

What it really seems to amount to is that he's taken part of someone else's digital photograph of MEANTIME's North end wall, blown it up, and painted the resulting pixels as equivalent panels with approximately the same colour in Dulux paint. Ben will correct me, no doubt if I've got quite the wrong end of the stick.

During my visit this morning, the sun shone obligingly in just the way it had done when the original photograph was taken.

Despite Ben saying the process was more important to him than the end result, that was of course all I could judge - and I liked it.