Today I read an article by artist Anthony Schrag called The Benefits of being a bit of an asshole, [which i cant share with you because its on one of those academic publications that wont let me....you have to pay - maybe someone will take note of his point and scan it in..!]. I've read your post about Ruskin and art not doing enough. Yesterday i typed up the first 25 minutes of the validation conversation we did with Axisweb's Mark, David Gilbert and Amanda Ravetz, which has a lot of me going - why? whats it for? Then i watched the unedited film from the Back to the Future Gainsborough project and a film of Alisair from MIMA on the Axis facebook page talking about the artworld and being useful... and it all made me want to come on here and think a bit about things.
The asshole article is interesting in part because its saying similar to what we say - which is what can art do here and our role as artists is to ask difficult questions and challenge the instrumental-isation of participatory artwork. But also its his efficient writing up of the connection between the rise/popularity of participatory practices amongst artists and organisations and the 'social' politics of both New Labour and the Lib/Con coalition [funding v austerity]. I suppose i had hoped that people were in some way coming to this way of working in reaction against neo-liberalism/capitalism - ie get out of the gallery and go into the world and challenge something. Of course I knew some of this wasn't street born based activism but 'activism as subject' or the social as subject', but still he underlines another layer : that social practices have risen not against governments but thanks to them and that even with money going in via Labour it was given so as to address 'exclusion' and used artists as service providers for a type of social engineering. Then the Coalition took money out and promoted the Big Society so as to get communities working together as a cheaper solution to investment. Both resulted in organisations focusing on "providing a substrate to support participatory practices on the condition that they too leaned towards the social".
Our funded work of course is complicit in this - we write the bids with huge participant numbers attached in the knowledge that it gets us somewhere towards success. I suppose though what i continue to see in Anthony's work and the stuff Alistair is trying to do, is the thing i hope we try to do and that's say - yes we will take the money, but when we've got it be a bit 'disobedient' and use it to reach people, but not in the creation of 'isnt it all nice' things, but in the opening of spaces for critical thinking that leads to an eyes open awareness of the powers we work under. So in Gainsborough we're working with an estate that no ones identified as anything other than ideal for play. In the Simple Stories programme we are questioning a Ruskin rose tinted legacy, The Poly-Math work is challenging what useful cpd can look like and i hope all the partners are being asked to consider how they go one in the world.
How to sum this all up? I am pleased we are questioning who has the power, who has the knowledge, who should be in charge and what art should look like - i suppose im proud to be a little bit arsey!
The asshole article is interesting in part because its saying similar to what we say - which is what can art do here and our role as artists is to ask difficult questions and challenge the instrumental-isation of participatory artwork. But also its his efficient writing up of the connection between the rise/popularity of participatory practices amongst artists and organisations and the 'social' politics of both New Labour and the Lib/Con coalition [funding v austerity]. I suppose i had hoped that people were in some way coming to this way of working in reaction against neo-liberalism/capitalism - ie get out of the gallery and go into the world and challenge something. Of course I knew some of this wasn't street born based activism but 'activism as subject' or the social as subject', but still he underlines another layer : that social practices have risen not against governments but thanks to them and that even with money going in via Labour it was given so as to address 'exclusion' and used artists as service providers for a type of social engineering. Then the Coalition took money out and promoted the Big Society so as to get communities working together as a cheaper solution to investment. Both resulted in organisations focusing on "providing a substrate to support participatory practices on the condition that they too leaned towards the social".
Our funded work of course is complicit in this - we write the bids with huge participant numbers attached in the knowledge that it gets us somewhere towards success. I suppose though what i continue to see in Anthony's work and the stuff Alistair is trying to do, is the thing i hope we try to do and that's say - yes we will take the money, but when we've got it be a bit 'disobedient' and use it to reach people, but not in the creation of 'isnt it all nice' things, but in the opening of spaces for critical thinking that leads to an eyes open awareness of the powers we work under. So in Gainsborough we're working with an estate that no ones identified as anything other than ideal for play. In the Simple Stories programme we are questioning a Ruskin rose tinted legacy, The Poly-Math work is challenging what useful cpd can look like and i hope all the partners are being asked to consider how they go one in the world.
How to sum this all up? I am pleased we are questioning who has the power, who has the knowledge, who should be in charge and what art should look like - i suppose im proud to be a little bit arsey!
Activism as subject is interesting - I like the bit in your paper on drawing where Johan writes in the footnotes about the English not understanding the dialectic - I spoke to Amanda about it at the time as it seems so critical. There is a letter between Adorno and Walter Benjemen where he talks of the dielectic as two parts of the same piece of paper that when Torn apart and put back together don't quite ad up to what they were before. So art as Activism is only possiblle if Art and Activism are a Hegelian dialectic - in a way a totality - two parts of the same thing in conversation with themselves - the fact that language becomes nonsense as we try to speak of it confirms the problem with English and it's floors in describing dialectical thinking - That why we say Gestalt and try and choose German words when we try and talk about it. I'm not sure we are doing Art as activism and if we were it would perhaps just be activism - state funded activism sounds quite good.
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