Artist Manifesto Performances

Videos of the Individual Manifesto performances from AHM’s State of Play symposium in October are now available to watch on AHM’s blog or alternatively, on Central Station network.

The 27 one-minute manifesto performances were on artists’ personal thoughts on the state of art and culture in Scotland today, and the performers included Ruth Barker, Justin Carter, Dalziel & Scullion, Ellie Harrison, Oliver Metzger, Peter McCaughey, and Shauna McMullan. You can watch mine here.

AHM are currently calling for more manifestos for the next symposium, which will be held in Edinburgh on 2 April 2011. AHM describe the manifestos as an opportunity for artists to give voice to their concerns and ambitions about where they feel visual art stands today and what the future might hold. To contribute, email ahm@googlemail.com. The deadline is 1 March.

AHM’s reflections on their State of Play symposium

Below is a link to AHM’s report reflecting on their State of Play symposium on 9 October 2010 (the first of a series of three). There is a wee mention of my manifesto, alongside Jimmie Durham’s and Chris Fremantle’s! Hopefully AHM will eventually make videos of the whole symposium available online, including the manifestos, as the artists performing missed the opportunity to hear each other’s very clearly.

Read AHM’s report of the State of Play: Art and Culture in Scotland Today symposium

AHM have also created a group that you can join on Central Station network, to continue the discussions set in motion at the symposium.

Art School Alternatives symposium

‘Is school a place, an institution, a set of facilities, a situation, a circumstance, an attitude, or a constellation of relationships of the transfer of acquired, invented, and accumulated knowledge?’ asked Raqs Media Collective in their essay for the 2009 compendium ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century),’ MIT Press.

Taking this meditation as a starting point, the Manchester visual art journal Corridor8 staged an Art School Alternatives symposium at Liverpool Biennial on 7 October 2010 which proposed to explore alternative concepts and structures of learning to a traditional art school education, calling on practitioners and artist-led initiatives from around the North West to speak about their experiences.

Coming at a time when discussions, symposia, and books addressing the future of art education are prevalent, and given the title “Art School Alternatives,” one might have expected some artists to call for radical re-thinks or advocate courses of action, but a common thread among the speakers was that they all viewed their positions as distinct from the zeitgeist. The artist and writer Derek Horton made the very good point that most of these discussions on the future of art education take place within academic institutions and between academics – and as such, may feel irrelevant to artists working outside institutions who have practical considerations.

Dan Simpkins and Penny Whitehead from Disrupt Dominant Frequencies outlined how, through the process of applying for a Masters course, they had begun to question the system and opted out, and were evolving a communal practice that meant they could have an equivalent education outside an institution. This included setting their own (fluid) semesters and organising research trips – actually mimicking the structure of the academic year. Horton suggested that the priority of most of these practitioners is to try to recreate what institutions offer in the way of critical dialogue, but without the debt at the end of it, whilst artist and educator Andy Abbott argued that much-used phrases “DIY” and “artist-led initiatives” are often employed simply to mean “non-institutional,” and signify an ethos rather than a practical approach.

Harry Meadley posited that traditional art school allows students to get used to institutional structures and problems, which are useful beyond graduation and into the real world – an invaluable education, as the presentation by Department 21 illustrated. Graduates of the Royal College of Art Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz explained how they had set up an interdepartmental, cross-disciplinary, social workspace – Department 21 – within the College after finding that all the departments were insular and uncommunicative.

Some of the artists’ positions were underpinned by ethics, but in the main, the discussion wasn’t about how to avoid an institutionalised art education, or utopian models of pedagogy, but was focused on much more expedient issues, such as economic considerations in light of the recession and the fact that formal qualifications are no guarantee of employment. Although many of the practitioners had evolved their work in response to a localised problem or crisis that they perceived in relation to institutions or “the system,” there was no common feeling of crisis under which they had assembled for the symposium. Instead, the day progressed more as a varied collection of presentations of different interests and different ways of working, and had a refreshing plurality of voices.

With the aim, perhaps, of steering such diverse threads back into the discussion, Derek Horton reiterated on several occasions that there needn’t be a polarisation of art schools on the one hand and “alternatives” on the other, and that the important thing is “trying to find ways to do the things you want to do, whether within the system, without the system, or however.” Perhaps feeling suffocated by such expressions of tolerance and equability, an artist from No Fixed Abode collective pointed out in the Round Table discussion that we had yet to mention the content of our curriculum, self-imposed or otherwise: “All this talk about learning, about pedagogy – is just the fact that we are learning really enough?”

It was a good question, and unfortunately one that we barely began to address in the symposium – although as the discussion’s trajectory very much followed the will of the audience, three-quarters of whom were participating as speakers or leading workshops, it would be reductive to see this necessarily as a failing.

The afternoon session was devoted to presentations by artists whose practices are based around communal, collaborative, and social activities, as opposed to having developed in response or reaction to an art school experience. Kate Rich presented her ongoing project ‘Feral Trade,’ in which she trades a range of consumable goods via social networks with the aim of taking responsibility of one’s own imports and exports, and explained, “All this knowledge and discussion is very well, but where does the actual money come from? Otherwise we’re in a strange volunteer profession.”

This interesting talk aside, these presentations functioned more as “show and tell” stock Artist Talks, and it proved difficult to locate their relevance to Art School Alternatives. Heath Bunting presented the “adventures,” involving climbing and raft-building, that he organises with friends, fellow artists and strangers, and which blur the boundaries between everyday life and art, even to the extent that it wasn’t clear what Bunting himself considered them to be.

If the symposium’s aim was to share information and experiences among artists of the practices people are involved in ordinarily and not in response to a current trend, perhaps habitual Artist Talks are perfectly appropriate, but some of them would have benefited from a little extra contextualisation so as to allow outsiders way in. It was, on reflection, very much a meeting of “insiders,” with practitioners composing most of the audience, and – just as academic discussions may be conducted from the ivory tower, so these conversations were distinguished by their grassroots origins.

This review was first published on Interface on 14 October 2010 www.a-n.co.uk/interface and is the result of an Interface and Corridor8 Bursary Partnership.

Photos: Laura Mansfield.

Corridor8 is a Manchester-based annual visual art journal. Its second edition, Strange Weather, is released on 25 October with a launch at Liverpool Biennial Visitor Centre. www.corridor8.co.uk

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Individual Manifesto at the AHM State of Play symposium

Today I took part in a performance at State of Play: Art and Culture in Scotland, a symposium organised by Glasgow-based collaborative artist group AHM (Sam Ainsley; David Harding; Sandy Moffat) as part of their research residency at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios.

As well as keynote lectures by Philip Schlesinger, Christine Borland, Dr. Neil Mulholland, and Sam Ainsley and Sandy Moffat of AHM, the day included an Individual Manifestos performance. This involved about thirty artists presenting their (very diverse) thoughts on the state of contemporary art today. AHM said of the performance:

“We don’t often hear from artists themselves – usually we hear only from art critics, journalists and administrators. The manifesto performance will give the opportunity to 30 artists to express their views, in a public forum, delivering a wide range of thoughts and attitudes reacting to the present condition.”

A film of the day will be posted on the AHM blog in the near future:  http://theahmblog.blogspot.com/

The manifesto I read is as follows:

Claims of a crisis in culture are rife.

Critics pronounce the death of criticism, but in fact what they refer to is the end of reputation as a decoy for informed judgement. Criticism is not dead, but it is bereft of criticality, superficial, and boring.

The real crisis is the lack of interest in and importance placed upon critique by artists, their audiences, and even by writers themselves, claiming priority for the artwork and deeming writing secondary.

But the potency of critique is a two-way deal, dependent on the willingness of artists to respond to the little good criticism that is out there and to give it real agency by making contemporary discourse significant, indeed fundamental, to the development of their work.

The proliferation of social media and digital content is displacing the national mainstream media as the main source of arts criticism for the general public; it is up to artists and writers to capitalise on this opportunity. We must question the writing as rigorously as we do the art, and accept nothing as a foregone conclusion.

Change is imperative, as little and bad critique means poor and complacent art.

Love and Irony in Twenty-first Century Culture

With the onset of the new century, digitalisation spread rapidly and “the user” began to be courted just as “the consumer” had been before it.  Every public and private body in the West hastened to form an online version of itself as communication between the individual and the wider world was construed as vital to both professional success and basic social functioning.

Society became like market research on a mass scale.  Opinions were wanted and audience interaction was plugged at every turn by the media and public bodies, creating a huge, overflowing vat of homogenous talk.  By the late ‘90s, the term “user-friendly” had outgrown its buzzword status, but having permeated society to its core, the concept endured as fundamental to our ideology.

In the last few years, places and spaces devoted to Comment have become ubiquitous, whilst distinctions between professional and amateur commentators have become blurred and in some ways irrelevant.  Comment was invested in as the shiny new commodity – perhaps seen as a perfect, renewable resource because it’s free.

Culture, that useful, catch-all deposit for a plethora of odds and ends, has proved the ideal climate for the growth of Comment, as it supports the increasing tendency towards self-referencing and self-reflexivity that has resulted from the general acceleration of media and information-exchange. The national media has capitalised upon the rapid succession of social networking sites, boosting its prominence in cultural life and, with the near-mania for audience engagement, bringing us closer to it.

Irony

Something about the combination of this new prominence of the media and our culture’s appetite for myth-making proved to be toxic, and everything began to seem unpleasantly “seeped” – as they would say – in rhetoric.  With hyperbole a key element of this, we are perpetually in a state of crisis: off-hand, I recall hearing that criticism, culture, schools, politics and British sport are all in a state of crisis, and this was just yesterday.  Initially, I was devastated, but who knows?  It might be different tomorrow.