LONDON.- Before embarking on a year of solo shows in 2009 tank.tv will, this month, take a look at videos made and commissioned by Grizedale Arts - an organisation where collectivity and participation are central to the production of work in communities both in the UK and abroad. At once loud, rude, urban and improvised as well as quiet, rural and orchestrated this selection looks at a range of approaches to collaboration and group practice.

The work includes chaotic performances and night time happenings - often recording the (sometimes) awkward coming together of the ordinary man-on-the-village-street and artist (inevitably dressed as maniac, Shaolin monk, dinghy). Moments of successful synthesis, most notably in Marcus Coate’s ‘Out of Season’ and Bedwyr Williams’ ‘Satterthwaite Nite Live’ are contrasted with other awkward confrontations such as those resulting from the preparation of human sausage during Grizedale’s sprawling and decidedly messy show ‘Romantic Detachment’ at PS1. A quieter event is recorded in Pablo Bronstein’s ‘Paternoster Square’ in which the artist directs a group of dancers to assume the poise and poses of “ornamental citizens”, the baroque ideal of the city dwelling mob. This balletic elegance is absurdly parodied in Kerry Stewart’s ‘Swan Night’ in which a 10ft swan eerily circles Coniston Water, making use of its uncanny ability to breathe underwater and suggesting nothing of the prosaic apparatus that makes the performance possible. Each video is a record of the best, worst and every-day of making art beyond the solitary confines of the studio, whether out in the countryside or in the big smoke of the city.

Grizedale Arts is a complex network of projects and activity that is orchestrated from its headquarters on the historic hill farm of Lawson Park in the English Lake District. This programme of residencies, commissions, exhibitions, events and activity connects local society, politics and culture with the cultures of the wider world. The network exists in local villages, exhibition spaces, in villages from Germany to China and Japan and, more recently, online.

Over the last eight years Grizedale has evolved a way of working that doesn’t just aim to make contemporary art more interesting, with new and pertinent material, but also strives to make real social and political impact on the local communities through a long and deeply engaged relationship with its residents. Such a participatory approach is now common in the world of art, but what distinguishes Grizedale Arts is its ambition to move away from the Romantic model that has dominated international art style for so long and make artists more useful.

With the process and activity based nature of the organisation and the fact that it works with very specific and targeted groups of people, video and film have played a central role in allowing access to the work of Grizedale and demonstrating the extant reality of rural Britain.