Are we engaged?

It's funny as I often wonder if people think we are a couple - not because we we get on so well but because we argue quite a lot in public.  So the title of this post is not an offer of marriage it is rather a question that came out of our conversation about the engage conference next week. I remember having a really interesting discussion about how we present ourselves.  I said that we must try not to disagree with each other.  I then laughed and remembered Unlucky Alf the character in the fast show who always used to have really bad things happen to him - at the end of the sketch he would turn to camera and say "Bugger" .  Perhaps there is a need to accept that there is essentially something about the friction that is important - two years ago we wrote in the Poly Manifesto

Conflict can be generative: Work hard to learn the difference between good conflict and bad conflict. But like cholesterol its difficult to know the difference between the good and the bad until it’s too late.

I am never sure about the strap lines they seem like a joke in fact the whole idea of an arts manifesto is a bit ironic but like many things that persist it has developed a bit of a life of it's own.  I have a copy of the communist Manifesto by my toilet - I've not read it for a while but I think it's proximity  has rubbed off on me.

After our chat I went off to be interviewed about a project I did 18 months ago for the department of community and local government.  The man interviewing me was really nice and was trying to find a way to find common ground and asked me if I was an artist who would describe himself as disruptive.  It seemed to me that to agree with this statement would be a problem. Partly because when you are at school being disruptive is very bad, I spent most of my dyslexic school years trying to be invisible.  The main reason though was to be disruptive - to not accept any label that people wanted to identify me with.  Then I remembered this blog and all the thinking and writing and work we do and I said. "At the Poly-Technic we see ourselves as artists who define themselves by what they do" then I quoted Isaak Babel and said -Banality is counter-revolution. I think I may need to get some less radical literature next to the toilet.