BEING labelled "alternative" perturbs some members of the Belfast artist run group, Catalyst Arts. To them, the label gives funding bodies a licence to allocate small resources to their gallery space and art projects, or to marginalise their efforts to broaden the parameters of art practice in Northern Ireland.
"It's just a dodgy word, alternative" explains Mark Orange, one of those on the group's six member voluntary management committee. "We'd like to claim that what we're actually doing in terms of projects is alternative, but at the same time it allows people to box you in and say. Ach, they're great. They don't need that much money and they'll still battle away because they're passionate and they're not doing it as a job."
Ironically, it is Catalyst Arts's passion about contemporary art that has largely been responsible for its success in, as one local art commentator put it, giving the Belfast art scene a shot in the arm".
Just two years since it was set up by a group of twenty something art graduates, Catalyst Arts has established itself as a credible group which consistently produces exciting art projects on a modest budget.
Modelled on artist run groups in Germany and Scotland, Catalyst Arts operates from a city centre gallery and office space in an unheated, converted shirt factory. For the past two years, it has received an annual grant of £8,000 from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland which was increased to £10.000 this ear.
This core funding is subsidised by specific project funding from Belfast City Council. The group has just been allocated £27,000 from the British National Lotteiy, which will be used to refurbish its gallery, extend the office space and install heating.
Catalyst Arts holds about 15 group and solo exhibitions as well as "one off events" each year, both in the gallery and at various outside venues. It also organises international artist exchanges, offers short term residencies to artists, hosts seminars on contemporary art issues and co ordinates collaborative shows with similar organisations worldwide.
It has around 180 members, mostly from Ireland. While anyone willing to pay the £5 membership fee can join, practising artists make up about three quarters of the total. The rest include musicians, designers, architects or those who are just interested in art". Members are kept informed about forthcoming events and are automatically entitled to participate in the annual members' show. All the exhibitions are curated by one or two members of the group's rotating management committee.
On a freezing morning late last month, several of the committee members seated themselves on chairs among the desks, files and photocopier that cram their tiny office to discuss their work.
"When we went through art college," began Derval FitzGerald, "we were taught that in order to succeed in Belfast, the procedure was to apply for finding, apply for an exhibition in very limited outlets and have an impressive CV. It was all about the artist putting in, putting in, but not necessarily getting anything out. I think it's important that the artist does put in, but there's got to be give and take."
What the members of Catalyst Arts have an independence from the commercial gallery circuit by making things happen for themselves.
"One of the most satisfying things about being involved in an organisation like Catalyst is that you don't to sit around waiting for a small commercial gallery to knock on your door to make you feel part of the arts scene," said Dougal McKenzie.
"It's artists who create the art scene really and certainly we feel we are contributing a lot to the arts scene in Belfast by doing what we do ... We're not saying that ours is a more valid way of exhibiting work but it's just as valid and the fact that it's artist run means you've got your finger on the pulse a bit more as a practising artist and I think that leads to us doing better shows. A lot of the self styled Euro curators, they wear the sunglasses and the fancy clothes, but it's not really about art practice and that's what we're about."
For Catalyst Arts, that practice involves exploring new methods of curating shows as well as creating art work. The management committee selects an open ended, thematic "argument" for its group exhibitions and invites artists to make work which responds to it rather than simply submitting an already completed piece of work.
While such stimulation of practising artists is an essential part of its philosophy, the group is also aware that, a an 89 per cent public funded body, it has a responsibility to the public.
Catalyst Arts doesn't, however, shoulder this responsibility by organising community workshops in deprived areas or hosting work which tries to bridge the gap between "popular" and "elitist" art. Instead, it encourages its members to create art which deals directly with issues about communication and the role of the artist in society.
By then taking this work to venues such as an office building, a former nursing home, a vacant shop unit or a furniture design shop, Catalyst Arts hopes to present the public with both new ways and new places to experience contemporary art.
"We're not under any delusion that you can suddenly make people like certain types of art but you have to at least make them aware of the fact that it's there and challenge them to recognise it as a valid way of making art," McKenzie said.
But not all Catalyst Arts' challenges are met with positive responses, even from its own members. For the current Arts Rebel annual members' show which celebrates the second anniversary of the gallery, each member received a folded box and was invited to return it with their art work inside.
They were told that should they fail to return the box, an empty box with their name on it would be shown to expose them. Some members objected that this was tantamount to blackmail.
It provoked a bit of controversy all right about weather it was the right or wrong approach, FitzGerald said. But there you go, that's what we're about, provoking that kind of question.
