UK Underground Comix: Ar:Zak, the Birmingham Arts Lab, and Streetcomix #4 (2 of 3) by Maggie Gray

Figure 3. Hunt Emerson. ‘Birmingham Arts Lab 1970s’. Back cover, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, The Birmingham Arts Lab: The Phantom of Liberty (1998). © Hunt Emerson

The Birmingham Arts Lab

It’s useful to take a step back and identify what an arts lab was – an accessible, collectively organised, multidisciplinary, experimental arts space. Originating in London in 1967, they sprang up across the country in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, bringing together film and video, theatre and performance, music, dance and visual arts, as well as compound multimedia forms. The idea was to give artists a freer, more open space to develop and present their work; to facilitate experimentation in and across different forms and media through skills-sharing; to transform the way art was consumed via collaborative and interactive relationships with audiences; and to make the means of creative production more widely accessible and affordable.

The Birmingham Arts Lab was established in 1968 by a group of artists who decamped from the local council-funded Midlands Arts Centre to fundraise for a new, less creatively restrictive environment. In 1969 they acquired use of a building that had previously been a youth centre on Tower Street in Newtown, a working-class area of the city. They transformed the space with materials donated by local groups and appropriated from nearby building sites, creating a cinema with a home-made projection box (which screened a wide range of international arthouse films), a performance area for theatre, music, poetry and alternative comedy (adapted for immersive lightshows using hinged panels), workshop and rehearsal spaces and a coffee bar. Happenings and performances were also staged on the roof (where a show by visiting theatre company Sweetness and Light involving nudity caught the attention of the local papers), as well as in the city’s streets and open spaces. There was an emphasis on play and experimentation across disciplines, for example with a screening of René Clair’s Dadaist film Entr’acte accompanied by live piano, ballet dancers and experimental electronic sounds. Like many labs it also operated as a kind of commune, with members and touring theatre companies sleeping in the storerooms, water tank and even the spaces between the floors. Altogether it was an appealingly chaotic place, as captured by foundational Ar:Zak member Hunt Emerson in an illustration for the 1998 book The Birmingham Arts Lab: The Phantom of Liberty, which collated participants’ recollections (Fig. 3).

The Birmingham Lab was run on a co-operative basis and aimed to create an inclusive artistic space where ordinary people could get involved in creative practice, by making what was usually prohibitively expensive equipment publically accessible. It had strong ties to the local community, organising collaborative events and festivals with local arts organisations, colleges and community groups, running creative play sessions for neighbourhood children and involving local youth in an Arts Lab football team (Wakefield 2015). This was a key part of how the Lab connected to wider social movements, grounded in the conviction that creative autonomy was linked to political empowerment – that the ability to independently participate in cultural production was crucial to the self-determination of different social groups. Like many labs, Birmingham’s had a strong feminist presence, with a Women’s Art Group that organised exhibitions and participated in mail art projects like Portrait of the Artist as A Young Woman (and whose magazine, MAMA: Women Artists Together, Ar:Zak published and core member Suzy Varty illustrated). They also had close connections to local communities of colour, for example affiliated to The West Indian Narrative, a group exploring a distinctively Afro-Caribbean aesthetic.

Figure 4. Photograph by Derek Bishton, title page, Streetcomix #4, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press, p.3. © Derek Bishton

Probably the most important way creative practice was made accessible to local people was via the Lab’s workshops, which included dance, music, sound, poetry, theatre, environmental performance, music and painting. Many of these workshops acted as a stimulus for broader community arts activity. For example, the film co-op based at the Lab initiated the Birmingham Film Workshop, which, by providing equipment, training and resources of production, distribution, exhibition and critical discussion, served to catalyse local filmmaking, notably film that engaged with the experiences of black and South Asian communities, such as the work of Yugesh Walia (see Long, Baig-Clifford and Shannon 2013). It was through involvement with such workshops that several key players in Ar:Zak  first got involved with the Lab – with Emerson joining Jolyon Laycock’s avant-garde sound workshop and Varty attending the dance workshop.

Thus involvement with the workshops opened doors to participation across the various artistic activities undertaken at the Lab and involvement in a range of creative outputs. This collaborative, interdisciplinary approach, and its connection to a broader community arts ethos, is also evident on the title page of Streetcomix #4. Above the colophon and beneath the table of contents is a photo by Derek Bishton (Fig. 4), a photographer and journalist who was the Lab’s publicist and involved in its photography activity. Bishton was highly engaged with community photography in Birmingham, establishing the design group Sidelines in 1977 with Brian Homer and John Reardon. Based in Handsworth, a multicultural area with significant British Asian and Afro-Caribbean populations, they worked with community groups producing reports, booklets and newsletters on issues like housing, unemployment, policing and racism, as well as projects like Handsworth Self Portrait, which enabled local residents to produce their own photographic portraits. They also began producing the magazine Ten.8 at the Lab, which showcased local photography while also discussing critical issues of politics, race and representation, strongly influenced by the work of figures like Stuart Hall at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Streetcomix often featured such other, ‘non-comics’ work coming out of the Lab, including Siobhan Coppinger’s etchings and sculptures, illustrations by poster artist Ernie Hudson, and articles by poet and performer Nick Toczek and comedian John Dowie - evidencing the role played by Arts Lab Press publications in communicating and cohering the Lab’s identity as a multi-/interdisciplinary space. By the same token, Ar:Zak members also participated in collaborative work across different media, with Varty making costumes and props for the performance Dogman written by Paul Fisher (which then appeared in comic form illustrated by Emerson).  As Emerson later put it, ‘the Lab was always like that. People would suggest something and you would get involved and find yourself knocking together a film set out of rubbish’ (2013).

Maggie Gray lectures in Critical & Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. Her latest book is Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance and Dissent, Palgrave (2017). She is a member of the Comics & Performance Network and CoRH!, the Comics Research Hub. With Nick White and John Miers she co-runs Kingston School of Art Comic Club.