Radical, Generative, Affirmatively Bizarre Margins

by Alex Niven

On joining the Corridor8 team and being asked to write something for the Substack it seemed like a good idea to begin at the beginning, as far as I was concerned, by writing about the first art exhibition I ever went to. But then this wasn’t such an easy task. Growing up in rural Northumberland in the Eighties and Nineties didn’t offer much scope for engaging with contemporary art – at least, not so far as I could recall. Prior to a sixth form trip to the London Tate galleries in 2001 I remembered one or two visits to the Laing in Newcastle (the only fair-sized gallery in this part of the world until the Baltic opened in 2002). Other than that, nothing very much at all. It seemed after all that I might have grown up in one of the northern cultural wastelands of metropolitan cliché.

My childhood had in fact been filled with art of all kinds – it’s just that the forms and contexts of these encounters didn’t have much to do with the capital-letter Exhibition culture of major geographical centres.