Meet our Guest with Channon Goodwin

Exhibition view of "pant and doorbell thump is wants wants" by Martina Copley & Lou Hubbard. Photo by Christo Crocker.

For this story of Meet our Guest, Guest Work Agency Director and Founder Alana Kushnir interviewed Channon Goodwin, an artist and arts-worker based in Melbourne, Australia. Channon has developed a distinct creative practice focused on collaboration, collectivism and artist-run organisations.  

Currently, Channon is the Director of Bus Projects, founding Convener of the All Conference network and makes films and podcasts for Fellow Worker. He is also in the process of establishing Composite: Moving Image Agency, an Artist-Run agency dedicated to supporting artists’ moving image practices in Australia through exhibition, research, education and distribution. Composite will work in concert with other organisations, initiatives and festivals to champion artists moving image practice to a wide audience.

Channon, we first met when you began your role as Director at Bus Projects, an artist-run organisation dedicated to supporting the critical, conceptual and interdisciplinary practices of Australian artists. I was on the Board of Bus at the time and we were fairly new to the concept of employing someone to run the gallery (like many new, small artist-run organisations, we didn’t have the financial means to do so until many years after the organisation was set up). 

You’ve been with Bus for almost 10 years now, which is quite unique. I don’t think there are many – if any – artist-run organisations that are fortunate enough to be steered with such steady and committed leadership for such a lengthy period of time. Tell me about your past 10 years with Bus. Why have you stayed put? 

My sustained involvement with Bus is the result of a long arc of organisational development that I have engaged in with our Board. After a relocation to Collingwood from our long term venue in the Melbourne CBD, we have gradually built the organisation from one that was almost entirely volunteer-run and funded by fees charged to exhibiting artists, to a much more robust not-for-profit entity. We have three part-time staff and receive funding from all levels of government to deliver a wealth of artistic and educational programs.

The achievements we have made together at Bus have kept me passionate about my work. I am committed to creating a sustainable organisational legacy to pass onto future artists/staff and to the many artists who will present their work with Bus in the years to come. I am inspired by the example of long-running artist-run centres present in Canada, the influential cooperative art spaces in Indonesia, and the serious small-scale visual arts organisations present across the UK. These examples provide arguments for the importance of sustained engagement with organisations over the long term while remaining innovative, changeable, and responsive to criticism.

Can you share a little more about the organisational structures you have set up or worked under? For example, Bus Projects is an incorporated non-profit which is registered as a charity in Australia, whereas the All Conference network, adopts a more informal structure.  

I have become increasingly interested in the (often) invisible bureaucratic systems that shape our working conditions and creative possibilities. I’m intrigued by different forms of incorporation and how this has influenced how groups of artists and arts workers work together, particularly for small-scale arts organisations run by artists. 

I am a sole trader for my art, writing, and videography work; I have worked for state entities such as the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; medium-sized independent arts organisations like Metro Arts (an incorporated association), and I have been involved for over a decade in the founding and management of small-scale Artist-Run spaces (both incorporated associations and company limited structures). All of the organisations I have worked for have been not-for-profit.

The level of formality adopted by collectives and collaborative groups has to match their aims and the internal working atmospheres they are crafting. This can be especially challenging for small-scale entities, as any additional administrative work may overload voluntary committees or even go against the radical agendas they are seeking to establish.  

I engage with these structures to create lasting, ethical entities to provide legal protection to their committees of management and employment opportunities to artists and arts workers. I am interested in creating long term organisational structures that become solid “architectures”, that diverse communities of creative practitioners can present their work within.

A commitment to working with small-scale organisations requires an understanding of the unique value that they provide to the arts ecology. It also means finding ways to campaign for recognition of this value at all levels of the sector. The All Conference network was formed in an effort to do just that. Established in 2016, All Conference is an organising network, formed as a result of a collectivising impulse by a group of 17 artist-led, experimental and cross-disciplinary arts organisations from around Australia, commonly focused on the production and presentation of new contemporary art.  

All Conference members connect these activities to diverse audiences via a passionate localism coupled with significant national and international peer-to-peer networks. The group’s founding members were: Alaska Projects (NSW), BLINDSIDE (VIC), Boxcopy (QLD), Bus Projects (VIC), c3 (VIC), Constance (TAS), FELTspace (SA), Firstdraft (NSW) Kings ARI (VIC), Moana (WA), Liquid Architecture (VIC), Runway (NSW), Seventh (VIC), Trocadero Artspace (Footscray, VIC) and un Projects (VIC). Since our founding, we have added to this group to include West Space (VIC), Outer Space (QLD), and Watch This Space (NT).

In 2019, I edited a book for All Conference entitled Permanent Recession: A Handbook on Art Labour and Circumstance which was published by Onomatopee in the Netherlands.

Pre-COVID you travelled to the UK and the EU to undertake field research on organisational structures for the arts and collective practice. What did you learn? Was this similar or different to your first-hand working experiences in Australia?

I was lucky to be supported by the Australia Council for the Arts to undertake a 6-month residency at Acme in London. The multifaceted residency project was titled "Public Broadcasting: Artists' moving image practice and the common good" and resulted in curatorial and artistic research, professional development and industry consultation. I was fortunate to have undertaken this project before the COVID-19 pandemic, as travel and face-to-face meetings were very important to the process and outcomes of this project. The aim of developing these friendships was to create lasting pathways of knowledge exchange, creative collaboration, and inter-organisational friendship across international borders.

"Public Broadcasting" resulted in a range of real-world outcomes to be deployed within our local context as we continue to come out of COVID lockdown. A key outcome is the development of a new organisation, Composite: Moving Image Agency located at Collingwood Yards, a new, permanent and affordable home for artists and independent arts organisations working across music, visual arts, performance, digital media, creative industries. There are many individuals and entities that specialise in programming and researching Australian video art, new media, and artists film but what I wanted to do, as a result of this research and residency, was position a new organisation that provides a connective tissue between such nodes of knowledge and practice locally and internationally.

Tell me more about your plans for  Composite. How will it work in practice? 

Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank is an Artist-Run organisation. It is dedicated to supporting artists’ moving image practices in Australia, through a dialogue of exhibition, research, education, and distribution. Composite works in concert with other organisations, initiatives and festivals to champion artists film and video practice to a wide audience. 

In its new home at Collingwood Yards, Composite will host a year-round ​calendar of exhibitions, screening events, workshops and education programs. These public platforms operate alongside an emerging database of artists' video, curatorial and archival research projects, a distribution and licensing facility, and a Media Bank of technical equipment available for loan. Coalescing to form Composite, these platforms evolve critical and reflective discussions, aligning sites of collective knowledge in the field of Australian video art.

It’s been a wonderful experience working with you on the legal components for Composite from the ground up. What was your motivator for seeking legal advice at this early stage? What did you learn during the process? 

Although I come at the task of organisation-making from an enthusiasm born of my art practice, I am acutely aware that for a new entity to flourish I need to spend time creating a stable foundation on which to build. It has always been important to me to consult widely and collaborate sincerely when setting out on a new endeavour. This includes not only curatorial and artistic conversations but also engaging in excitingly generative discussions about language, graphic design and branding, legal structures and financial management that interrogate the path forward. The great benefit of working with Guest Work Agency is that their wide-ranging experience and deep expertise is calibrated perfectly to creative organisation-making. They understand the context in which I intend to work, the potential pitfalls and predict exciting future opportunities.

Composite was inspired by the dormant Australian Video Art Archive (AVAA) which was established in 2006 with the aim to: continue building an on-line video archive and a research collection of new and historical Australian video and performance artworks; to allow researchers to borrow the material for educational, research and exhibition purposes; and to transfer old video or film artworks to a digital format to conserve the work and thus assist in the conservation of a significant genre of Australian art history.

Composite sets out to do many of these same things but with a more multifarious remit which helps to retain malleability in its operational and artistic boundaries. This unfixedness is further emphasised in the name -  referencing a composite material which is “produced from two or more constituent materials with notably dissimilar chemical or physical properties that, when merged, create a material with properties, unlike the individual elements. The individual components remain separate and distinct within the finished structure, distinguishing composites from mixtures and solid solutions.”

One of the key operational elements that we’ve previously discussed for Composite is the licensing arrangements, whereby artists will be able to loan their video work to third parties through Composite. In my legal practice I’m becoming more influenced by design-led thinking and we’ve talked about how we can make these arrangements more user-friendly for the Composite audience. What are some of the pain points in video licensing arrangements that you have come across?

There is a general informality in much of the work I’ve observed within small-scale visual arts organisations. This includes a sometimes laissez-faire attitude to legal contracts of various sorts. This is a state of affairs that results from both a limited administrative capacity on behalf of the small organisations but also on behalf of the artists and arts workers to engage with them. Contracting is not a particularly exciting aspect when it comes up and it can often contain language which is unfriendly or even hostile. It can also assert a power relationship between the organisation and individual artists.

When setting out on an organisation-building process that seeks to not only show artists work but also find equitable and ethical ways to distribute that work on a national and international level, licensing and contracting become more important than ever. It is an intriguing prospect to find forms that are friendly, transparent and speak to creative people in ways that build trust and confidence.

What I really enjoy about working with you is that you see the concepts and structures set up by laws, like contracts, companies, licences, as tools that have the potential to better support creative practice. I think this is quite a unique view, particularly given the lack of legal education in the arts sector at the tertiary level. I’m interested to know how you have come about seeing the law in this way?  

Upon reflection, my experience within arts organisations has been profoundly uncreative when it comes to engaging with their own legal infrastructures. The old story is that we only confront these as dusty documents that we consult them in a crisis. Hearing various avoidable horror stories about fracture points in arts organisational histories has influenced my thinking as I incorporate new organisations. It seems a contradiction to me that we put a halt on creative thinking when it comes to the legal support structures that underpin our practices. I am interested in what it will mean to put these concerns upfront as fundamental to making a long-lasting, scalable and creative legal entity that supports generations of artists to make their work, earn money. They are tools to help us live.