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.

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.

A bleak future for criticism – or is this just the overhaul it needs?

The impending “death of criticism” has been forecast with some regularity in recent years, usually by critics themselves – they can’t resist a bit navel-gazing – but the feeling that the profession is in a state of crisis has now been given weight in an unhappily quantifiable way by significant job cuts.

The beginning of last year saw all of The Daily Telegraph’s critics come off contract jobs and go freelance, their rates having been cut by 70% according to one critic, and in the US, 55 movie critics have been fired since 2006.  As newspapers have fewer and fewer staff writers, they can no longer justify employing specialised critics, as the art and restaurant critic Toby Young explained in an article on The Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog, and he anticipates further cutbacks yet.

When Young appeared on The Culture Show in November prophesying a dark future for criticism as a result of printed matter’s inability to compete with ubiquitous, free digital content, I thought he might be missing the point.  One look at the blogosphere shows there has never been more enthusiasm for discussing and dissecting culture and, accordingly, attendance figures at gallery exhibitions and theatres are higher than ever too.

Yes, masses of these bloggers are the amateurs against whom the professionals have to compete, but couldn’t the newly inflated demand for criticism be seen as a positive?  The democratic, DIY ethic promoted by the web has bred an organic blossoming of active engagement among wide audience demographics with what’s traditionally an exclusive, elitist practice.  Such an aberration would never have resulted from deliberate engineering, but if anything can offer the general public a way into the obscurities of contemporary art – a subject of much concern for people in suits who themselves could use a few hints – the internet probably can.