Artists and Writers...

http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/500493

On Student Protest

I tried to write this for over three weeks. Yet every time I got back to it something unsettled me. Questions spun around in my mind: what do I really want to say about the student protests? Why am I so interested in them? Is it because these students and their issues are relatively close to me – in age, ambition, class, and fury?

My starting point: the coalition governments’ proposal to increase university tuition fees to £9000 a year. Not only is this causing a dramatic rift within the inter-party dynamic, but has caused mass student protest on university campuses and other public spaces across England.

During an antagonistic and wine-induced debate I had recently, I was informed that there was no point in a government that did not have ‘realistic’ policies with respect to our education system. ‘Why’, my date fumed, ‘should the government support a young person who wants to do Media Studies at Middlesex University?’ It was only during my attendance at the organised protest on Milbank on 10th November did I realise how ridiculous his incredulity really was. It isn’t about what one studies, but about having the right to study in the first place. Simply put: if the government supports an increase in student fees, a class divide in Britain based on the rich and educated versus the poor and undereducated will inevitably expand. It will add fuel to an archaic class system that is both unique to the UK and out of control. Not only will young people from less fortunate economic backgrounds be forced to enter the workforce rather than have an opportunity to learn for learning’s sake, but those who do have the resources to go to university will be alienated more than ever from achieving a harmonious engagement with the rest of society. The future implications of this: a country less able to communicate, and a society more fractious and disillusioned with its parts, lacking solidarity within its whole.

My ‘attendance’ at the student protest was entirely accidental. I had arranged to meet a friend at Tate Britain in order to see the Turner Prize. Having imagined us sitting on the gallery steps supping Americano in the cold sunshine, we were instead ambushed by thousands of spotty students waving placards. Some of these same students were to make the front pages of every newspaper in the country the next day, accompanied by the headlines: “Biggest riot seen in the capital since 1990”. The media, ever present to document and escalate a furore, have pandered to the notion of a load of students drunkenly chucking fire extinguishers about. I felt reminded of Simone de Beauvoir’s words on the students protesting in Paris in May 1968, designated by the media “as enrages, hotheads, from an early date”. But the difference with the international student uprising of ’68, if it can be helpful to look back, is the alliance then shared with the working classes. “The students, grown more and more numerous and seeing no future ahead of them, formed the focus at which the contradictions of neo-capitalism exploded: this explosion meant that the entire system was at stake and this directly involved the proletariat”. Our situation is different. We suffer collectively from a general disbelief in our power to effect political change, and at the same time we are restrained collectively, by our social and economic differences, to share a common goal. There is no longer any such thing as the working classes, to paraphrase sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s words, it is “freedom to mobility” that defines our class system. Figures such as the tourist and the vagabond/refugee are the new class categories of our era. Similar to the issue of who has the right to traverse geographical frontiers, socio-economic factors affect who has the right to cross intellectual ones. Who is entitled to the option of going to university, to spend time studying, gaining knowledge? For too long our obsession with economic and social status have bound us to choosing certain life paths. Our differences should be used in our fight for free education for all. And to be clear on this: it is not that I believe that everyone should go to university, but that everyone should have the option to go.

My friend and I concluded at the time that it was better to go and check out the Turner Prize than get too involved in the general revelry of protest. Surely it couldn’t be genuinely productive, we concurred. But of course it was! Even if only to both engineer and reinforce a mutual anger, a sense of injustice, and to realise the communal capacity for creating disorder in somewhere as ordinarily ‘orderly’ as Milbank! As Elie Wiesel said “there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest”.

Here’s a vision: free universities cropping up everywhere. Lecturers and pedagogues teaching on the sly, for free, at the back of cafes, libraries, art galleries. More discussion and argument across the board about our right to free university. Knowledge sharing seen as a human right, not as a privilege to those who can afford it. A more creative and lateral thinking coalition!

In the meantime, I’ve a good mind to put on an art exhibition with only half of each artwork on display. The other halves were left unfinished but I couldn’t afford to put them in the gallery space anyway. A queue of artists can stand in the corner next to a make-shift Jobseekers' booth. I might join them.

A response to Richard Taylor...

Kindly or otherwise, the Glasgow based artist Richard Taylor has cited my last post ('Rewind', 15th October 2010) in his article published yesterday on the following art blog: http://cca-glasgow.com/blog/?p=1104.

What follows is my email response to Richard's article, which hopefully raises some further questions around the issue of how to be an artist and an activist at the same time.

"Hi Rich,

thanks for this - and for quoting me!! Very flattering...haha.

So here are some reactions to your piece on the CCA website. I think the question of how artists are supposed to "act" is a very valid one, and one which I struggle over a lot also. Personally, I would be really interested to know a little more about why you consider it a 'diluted' reaction to be part of protest marches and more mainstream public activism generally. Why? Is it not possible to maintain a certain artistic distance/integrity whilst also being a part of a larger activist movement? Is not this balance quite fundamental to the very 21st century concept of "participation"??

What I was saying about Duchamp in my article was that he envisaged the artist as medium, as a part of the artistic journey, rather than as some sort of genius observer (although I'm not insinuating at all that this is how you consider yourself! It's just a fine line, you know?). I think Joseph Beuys might be a good inspiration for how it is possible to be an artist whilst also being a meaningful activist. If it's about not becoming just another drowned-out voice amongst the million others then I completely understand. But surely it's worse not to speak at all? Or to just speak into an empty art gallery?

And I like the way you reflect and reiterate what I was trying to pose too - do we have to rewind? I think perhaps we do. But then, I went to the Gauguin retrospective at the Tate Modern today... why were there hoards of people there? What is so truly fascinating about Gauguin to contemporary audiences? These audiences are ambushed by the cuts, and the war and the cult of celebrity??? Gauguin was a globe-trotting artist...he dealt with issues of God in Tahiti...he caught syphilis...and he did some bloody good paintings...but still, what's the political relevance? I left feeling cold...like the whole exhibition was just about trend: the cult of the white middle class masses who read 'Homes and Gardens' and watch 'The One Show'. Sorry, not only do I digress but am scathing to boot!!!!! Anyway, hopefully the above adds some fuel to the fire...let me know how you get on and stuff.

Soph x"

Rewind

Rewind! Has it ever occurred to you that most contemporary art galleries are asking us to rewind? “Look back”, they seem to say, “take a look at all the art that shook the world during the twentieth century! Look at its political agendas, its dense conceptualisation, its experimentalism, its radicalism, its craziness, and its out-of-this-worldliness! Can any of you struggling artists create anything better, potent, or more profound? We think not!”

Clean and perfectly formed contemporary art galleries of the world unite: theory rules OK. The concept of artist as genius creator is not just dead, but has been reincarnated and slaughtered again several times. Technology and the capitalist mode have replaced you artists! We don’t need you to paint pictures or take photos or make nice films, we have it all already – on YouTube, on Twitter, on Sky Arts - we’ve already got the cultural distractions we need thanks. Why do we need more new art? Our artistic fulfilment can surely be met in the countless retrospectives of all those Great Dead Guys: Warhol, Duchamp, Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Pollock, Beuys…

But for a moment, let us ‘rewind’ to Duchamp, to whom, granted, we do owe something. In 1957, he spoke of the artist as a medium. As a part of the sentence rather than the full-stop. He said that the meaning of a work of art would accrue in the course of its existence. This implies that an artwork is not determined by the initial creative gesture as much as in the realm of the spectator, and ultimately in the work’s historical reception. Surely the task of all these retrospectives at contemporary art museums is to help us look forward by looking back; to provoke new ways of perceiving political situations and temporality and so highlighting what’s going on in our own dreadful present? Obliquely it might be possible for us to study our own ‘realm’ by focussing on realms of the past.

Recently I went to the Reine Sophia Contemporary Art Gallery in Madrid. An intimidating sprawl of crisp white rooms awaited me. One temporary exhibition was entitled: ‘New Realisms: 1957 – 1962, Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle’. White cube after white cube pummelled me with information about the strategies of a group of artists, including Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Jean Tinguely and Duchamp himself. These guys were trying to figure out how art could possess a meaning in a world capable of constructing the atom bomb. How could we still claim to be creators when there is something so much bigger and more powerful than us that can at any moment obliterate our whole existence? The thought processes of these artists was obvious and necessary. But it left me thinking: what are we responding to now? The war in Afghanistan? Our obsession with reality TV and with the culture of celebrity? With climate change? With material goals? Corrupt politicians? Poverty? Why do I feel that every time I go to a show by young artists in London their messages are confused and spiralling into a cacophony of issues? Is this the fault of the spectator or of the artist? Has our desire to sell art overtaken our need for it to forge new ways of thinking?

Artists! I ask you:

What is our realm?

How can we enlarge upon it or re-engage its boundaries?

How do we wish the future to respond and ‘historicize’ our art?

Surely if our realm is too multi-faceted and confusing to fit the gallery space then let us remove our work from it rather than put up with the confusion. There is a grave danger in art only being encountered when inside a gallery. Let us challenge this vague normalisation of ‘Art’ that reigns supreme in these big white spaces where anything goes as long as it is on the inside. Let us rewind to Christo, who wrapped up his museum, or to Daniel Buren, who sealed it up, or to Robert Barry, who just put up a ‘Closed’ sign.

On another floor of the Reine Sophia I came across the work of a German artist who grew up in the GDR. Having never previously been exposed to American advertising, Hans-Peter Feldman set about collecting as many images of commodified goods as possible. These consist of anything from lips, to women’s legs, to lampshades. In the final room of his exhibition Feldman had collected and framed as many newspaper front pages of 9/11 as he could find. In a myriad of languages the viewer observes that commonplace image of the collective 21^st century psyche: the twin towers going up in smoke. The viewer of 2010 instinctively gets the impression that this is our realm. There was a silence in that room. Feldman’s work was both a tribute and a declamation of our most precious image distributor: the media. In the static presence of those front pages that said everything and nothing, that were content-less but also pregnant with meaning, I was forced to think about our realm.

The Art Opening

Last night I went to a party on a Peckham car park rooftop.
Everyone was there.
It was an art exhibition opening you see,
And it was a perfect evening: the sun bore down on all of us,
blessed ones.
The Champagne and Campari was overflowing and
a Charlie Parker inspired band strummed in the corner,
setting the mood.

All the boys wore stripy t-shirts, and
boating shoes with rolled-up slacks.
And when I looked around all I could see was
face upon face with
cool dark shades attached.
A sea of Ray-bans;
those glasses from another time,
another politics,
an earlier life.

Everyone was looking at everyone else,
like a mass of pigeons brooding and
pecking at one another,
but like birds their movements
were slow and semi-static,
as though from the side.
Taking me in, and me taking them in.
Until suddenly you realised the undercurrent.
Of disdain, of disinterest, of self-interest.
No one was good enough to look at for too long.

Girls strutted and tossed their messy hair
from side to side,
emaciated and tanned from a diet of
cigarettes, gin and expensive holidays.

A little later,
and Martin Creed (remember? The Turner prize winner)
and his band took to the stage.
They sang a song whose only lyrics
were every number from one to
one hundred.
This was followed by another linguistic feat:
called 'Fuck You'.

A cool evening breeze descended upon us all,
drunk but still clucking, still preening,
still talking nonsense.

A girl, possibly the curator,
made a speech over the tenoy about how lucky
they were to have their corporate sponsors,
and how important it was to use such diverse spaces
for the display of art.
Good for 'culture' in London.

And then I thought of what was going on down below.
About Peckham Rye High Street:
the smell of the yams and the giant snails
being sold in the yards of bare-windowed shops.
The African braids lying straggling and
abandoned on the pavement.
I thought of their realness,
their struggles, but then our superficiality:
only a stone's throw away.
Our pretense to the past.
To 'cool'.

Earlier we had gone into MacDonalds'
to use the loo.
Hundreds of black families filled the tables
eating supper.
Whilst at the top of their local multi-storey
Nicholas Serota and Jay Joplin
ate free salmon canapes and quenched
their thirst on Campari,
so genorously donated
by our corporate sponsors.

'Necessary Illusions': A Response

It was on a dank, windy and miserable Sunday that I stumbled hung-over along London’s Southbank to see ‘Necessary Illusions’: Central Saint Martins’ MA Fine Art interim show at the Bargehouse in Oxo Tower Wharf. A friend involved in the project had asked me to give a written response to the show, and I was curious to see how a group of emerging artists and curators had responded to the raw and eerie space of the Bargehouse – an emotive “Art Deco edifice”[1] that stands slightly back from the cultural thoroughfare of the Southbank parade.

As a recent art graduate saturated with the theoretical rhetoric of Goldsmiths’ College and its ilk, I struggle with notions of criticality, self-reflexivity and the problem of how to write about art, especially art only half-made. The words which follow will attempt to describe my sense of the CSM show, to act as a witness statement, and a subjective account of my mental and physical interaction – my spiritual encounter if you like – with the ‘Necessary Illusions’ exhibition.

Despite the cold and hostile surrounds of the Bargehouse, the first room of the exhibition gave the impression that this was to be an exciting and ambitious show. Several brightly coloured human-sized tubes hung suspended from the ceiling, accompanied by a board of photos documenting a performance piece by Ruben Montini that had used these weird props on the opening night. The photos depicted assorted performers stripped naked bar these fabric tubes draped over their bodies. Much like the strange remnants left behind from a Paul McCarthy performance, one could discern the recent occurrence of an event despite the industrial gloom. It was to be the first of many pieces, I realised, that implicitly sought to challenge a hierarchy of power.
In the corner stood a sculpture by Antonis Tzikas; a conical jumble of found objects and discarded rubbish, a hurricane rendered motionless and in fierce opposition to the performance piece. Later I was to find a similar sculpture by another artist, Kirsten Linning, in an upstairs room, both works igniting ideas of transition and of flux: of art still in its emergent stages, under construction; a concept that echoes behind the curatorial foundations of ‘Necessary Illusions’.

Moving onwards and up the first flight of uneven cement stairs, a cacophony of sights and sounds bombarded me, and with difficulty I tried to look at all these fragments individually and with a critical eye. Work after work maintained an experiential element: one had to walk through or around, listen in or watch. There was a significant emphasis on the idea of the observer and the observed. Films various showed supermarket shoppers purchasing groceries, or depicted bird’s eye views of Indian streets, or watched people facing one another blankly, as in the four screen projection by Josephine Reichert. I felt that this focus on observation made the viewer more aware of their own actions in this chilly space; how they were looking, how they appeared to others while they looked, and ultimately: how their look affected the work and its meaning.

Seven itineraries had been created by the MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice students from Chelsea College, the purpose of which was to suggest alternative journeys through the exhibition according to particular illusory meanings such as ‘modern myths’, ‘logocentrism’ or ‘architecture’. I appreciated the ambition of this task – the sheer audacity of trying to classify artwork-in-the-making according to these huge conceptual perimeters – and felt it an intelligent way of recognising the borderless intellectual confines which influence the making of art. I also liked the way these guides proposed different journeys into and around the Bargehouse space, whilst highlighting the political and creative connections between seemingly disparate artworks. It seemed that the Chelsea students, like me, struggled with the popular insinuation that the role of curatorial practice and art writing is to impose meaning or a structure of thought onto a visual artwork. They had responded sensitively with these tentative pathways through the art space, and had focused upon the seven alternative “fictitious constructs” as a “necessary illusion”[2] that highlighted the ephemeral nature of the show.

The ‘Necessary Illusions’ exhibition problematizes the plight of every emerging artist: how to make work despite the perpetual crescendo of political and aesthetic dogma. Once upon a time I believed that all art must have a message and that it should instruct in some way, helping us to realise something new about the world. Inquiring exhibitions such as this one counteract that belief. They brazenly recognise that art is much more than any imposed meaning, that it is something deeper, soulful, and more penetrating. Words and language are like the echoes that ricochet off the hard concrete walls of the Bargehouse; empty, yet always there in order to challenge and disarm us from experiencing the art in any pure or uncorrupted way.
In other words, I felt that it was the theoretical content of the itineraries – their unabashed failure to find a grand narrative and an overarching passage through the exhibition – that ultimately reinforced the strength of the works in and of themselves.

As I walked back along the Southbank, my thoughts turned to the piece I would shortly be writing about the show. ‘How does one accurately write about an art exhibition?’ I thought, ‘and how does one convey in words the subjective experience of walking through an art space?’ I would have to accept, I realised, that my piece could be nothing more than another illusory representation of the experience of walking through, yet another alternative to navigating the ideas and the work.
But that was probably enough, for now.


[1] From An Architecture of Illusory Meaning, a Necessary Illusions Itinerary
[2] http://criticalism.org/news/necessary-illusions

Art Comment! - the experiment...

So, at the weekend I finally decided it was time to actualise a project I've been imagining for some time called 'Art Comment!'. The idea was to make a series of two minute films which would consist of me sprinting around London and standing around outside art galleries attempting to pretend to be a critic. Sort of like a critique of the critics... I wanted it to be quite impromptu and experimental, and so hadn't scripted these short sequences.

The idea for 'Art Comment!' stemmed from an interest in how art is discussed in the mass media, and consequently how/why the public are encouraged to see certain exhibitions etc. over others. I wanted to attempt to make my own sort of mini art reportage, and see if I could ever find a place for myself as an acclaimed art orator like Andrew Graham-Dixon or Matthew Collings or Brian Sewell (note: why are they all men??). In addition, I wanted to try and make sense of the meaning of art (!!!) in my own head, namely by focussing on what was happening in these galleries, while being brutally personal about myself and my own feelings, and then also looking at what was on the front page of the newspaper on that particular day. I suppose I was hoping to sort of reveal things in a new way; a grand attempt I know!

We (my brother Joe and I) began in the Southbank Centre, moving on to Trafalgar Square where a protest was going on. The protest was being made by amateur photographers under the slogan 'We are photographers, not terrorists'. From there we gadded over to a pub in Russell Square before heading to the British Museum. The journey finished back at the Southbank Centre where we had tickets to see Circus Klezmer which was part of the London Mime Festival. Although I'm embarrassed of the short films we did make, I feel that they were vital experiments for me all the same. I found that I lost all notion of why I wanted to do this project or what the ultimate point was as soon as the camera was on me, and I struggled to keep going throughout the day. Nevertheless, as a first attempt and as a series of experiments I hope that they might prove useful in helping me find my voice.

Please go to the YouTube links above to view some of these attempts...