Opportunity and Obstacle: Cultural Infrastructure and Experimental Arts in a Northern UK City from the Late ‘70s to Mid ‘90s

Drawing upon conversation with artist and curator Mike Collier, this text considers the significant wider conditions for experimental art forms that existed in the northern UK. Based at Newcastle upon Tyne’s municipal art gallery from 1985 and collaborating with partners including artist-led organization Projects UK, Collier developed a series of innovative exhibitions of performance, video, and installation, demonstrating how cultural networks, including the regional art schools, were circulating radical practice beyond a London-centred artworld. By the mid-1990s, however, institutional resistance associated with a developing neoliberal administration would significantly reduce the opportunities and spaces for that practice in Newcastle, as elsewhere.