Living Today – group show @ GSA

This article was first published in The Skinny on 26 January 2011.

Sporting a title of almost limitless possibilities, the group show Living Today at the Mackintosh Museum assembles works by contemporary artists who explore aspects of the society they live in, and combines them with material from the Orwell Archive relating to George Orwell’s 1937 publication Wigan Pier.

Glass-topped trestle tables displaying excerpts from Orwell’s manuscripts flank the art works, as though to provide a central point of context. Several artists seem likewise to have borrowed their formal conventions from the museum, so that works of fairly wide-ranging subject matter are each dense in content but not overly engaging on the surface; demands on the attention are high if one is to do them all justice.

Eva Merz’s free publication You, Me, Us and Them (2011) brings together a series of interviews about women in prison and criminal justice in Scotland, and looks a promising read, albeit one to take home for later. If Living Today were in a ‘real’ museum, it would be acceptable to merely dip in and out of the exhibits and enjoy looking at an old coin collection without any further edification. Angela Ferreira’s photographs make a visual comparison of the South African rand and the euro, to hint at the differing stabilities of currency and economic system; in this dense forest of information, however, appreciating their aesthetic value was as far as I got.

A quiet, serious-looking work, Matei Bejenaru’s documentary video nevertheless captures the attention and is worth investing fourteen minutes in. Battling Inertia (2010) follows an ex-worker revisiting the library he set up when he and his co-workers established a literary circle in an industrial plant in communist Romania.

Meanwhile, a series of works by Ross Birrell and David Harding extend the exploration into Orwell and Wigan. If one had been hoping for an Orwell-fest that would feed the imagination, one might be a little disappointed; the amalgam of art works and archive material seem to exist in a mental or narrative space that hasn’t quite translated into the gallery – with the exception of David Harding’s text Orwell and Wigan Today. This brief A4 handout is witty, anecdotal, and the closest the exhibition comes to explaining Wigan and its significance. ⎔

Living Today runs 15 Jan – 5 March 2011 at the Mackintosh Musuem, Glasgow School of Art.

Images: courtesy the Orwell Archive, UCL Special Collections.

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.