Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
Political Art Now
Convenors:
Dave Beech (University of Wolverhampton, School of Art and Design, Molineux St, WV1 1SB,Tel: +44 01902 321000, dave.beech@virgin.net)
This session will explore the resurgence of interest in politics within the art world in the last few years in terms of projects undertaken and theories relating to them. Political projects: Is ambitious art being combined with radical political intentions, or does one compensate for the lack of the other? Is Michael Landy's Breakdown and Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave an update of political art after Duchamp or a nostalgic spectacularisation of a lost political reality? Have contemporary artists too removed from political activism to have any chance of seriously engaging in political intervention? Is the Art For All? book a sign of an upsurge in political consciousness for contemporary art or a measure of its containment by administration? Were artists right to call for the with-drawal from Austria in protest at the politics of Otto Mühl? Political theories: Are the competing theories for the politics of contemporary art compatible with the politics of the art itself? Are theorists more political than the artists they promote? Is Julian Stallabrass' book High Art Lite and Simon Ford and Anthony Davies's theory of the Culturepreneur a significant contribution to the analysis of the cultural politics in the 21st century, or does it rethink the role of the artist in terms derived from defeat? Is today's political art a resurgence of genuine political activity, or a stylish reworking of a conventional artistic genre?
Politics/Smolitics
Particia Bickers (Editor Art Monthly and University of Westminster, England)
What is political art? Is it different from politically-engaged art? Was one once called "political art with a small 'p'" and the other, presumably, "political art with a big 'P'"? Can political art be effective and if so, is the ultimate definition of political art therefore a retrospective one? Is 'success' easier to gauge in the case of single issues such as AIDS awareness (eg. ACT UP), or the representation of women in the art world such as the Guerilla Girls, rather than, say, Hans Haacke's twin agenda to insert politics into art into the museum and museum politics in art? In an age when society seems to be ideologically adrift, has the power of celebrity replaced politics in art? ('The power of 'A-List' artists - Tracey or Damien - potentially to focus attention on specific political causes, for instance.) Does art that succeeds as politics fail as art? If the artist/citizen is to replace the Romantic/Modernist model of the autonomous artist, what are the parameters of social responsibility? Is art too hopelessly compromised by its symbiotic relationship with the establishment - by that 'umbilical cord of gold' - ever to be politically effective or is it, in the end, 'only art'?
Four Types of Art in Search of a Public: the Political Strategies of Public Art
Mark Hutchinson (artist, England)
I will use a Bhaskarian four stage dialectic to investigate public art and its relation to the audience. The first moment is the simple positing of art in the public realm as statues on plinths etc. The art is confident in its own identity and/or function and in a receptive and/or submissive audience. The second edge inverts this relationship by casting the artist as subservient to the audience, typified by the artist reaching out to the community and working according to the meanings and wishes of the members of that "community". The third level is a form of closure, whereby artist brings a set of knowledges to bear on art's public situation. This is what is known as site specific work. The fourth dimension is to open up the assumptions underlying the first three stages of the dialectic. What control does the artist have over the meaning of his or her work in an overdetermined and open social system? What if the audience is not homogenized but structured, differentiated and contradictory (including an audience of one person)? What if the meanings of public art are socially, culturally and historically determined and radically up for grabs at the same time?
Twin Towers: The Spectacular Invisibility of Art and Politics
J. J. Charlesworth (University of Westminster, England)
Contemporary art in the UK has renovated awareness of the political implication of artistic practice, both in the content of the work, and in critical discussions on the changing institutional determinations governing artistic production. Changes in public policy have accelerated the growth of artistic practice explicitly directed towards social contexts, whilst a new range of political activism defined by its antagonism to post-cold war global capitalism has emerged. This convergence of 'artistic' and 'political' practice recalls earlier periods of avant-garde praxis. The current combination however occurs within a profoundly changed social and political reality. The themes that dominate supposedly radical political discussion tend towards the pessimistic restraint of human intervention in all spheres of human life, from science and the environment, through economics, to social and intellectual liberty. Concurrently with such negative developments, previously marginal artistic practice and discourse has moved to the mainstream, this shift reflecting the consensus culture rather than an effective progressive or 'avant-garde' repositioning of art in society. Whist compensating for an absent progressive democratic process or project, contemporary art dissimulates the moribund reality of progressive culture, through the denigration of 'elitist' cultural discourse and a prioritisation of social integration above artistic liberty and insight.
Art Without Administration: Art Radicalism and Critique after the Neo-Avant-Garde
Jonathan Vickery (University of Warwick, England)
Are the BANK artists right? Have even the most 'experimental' artists in contemporary Britain (and by implication the West as a whole) become mired in a bureaucratic culture industry whose objectives are antithetical to art itself? Have even the most radical forms of 'institutional critique' become absorbed into the art institutions' own programme of self-reflection and self-aggrandisement? Is the answer a collective exodus of young artists from the established institutional mechanisms of art's promotion, exhibition and dissemination? This paper will question whether this is both practically feasible and politically advantageous, and attempt to outline what possible concepts of 'radical art' are left after the era of the Neo-avant-garde. If 'radical' art still exists does it nevertheless need to preserve a relative 'autonomy' from the realms of power and ideology and thus preclude itself from direct political partisanship and activism? I will suggest that much of what stands as 'political' art is political only by theme or association: political art needs a radical re-think of its own concept of autonomy - and the emerging networks of anti-globalisation activists (along with 'globalisation theory') might provide some ideas.
Exodus or Intervention? From I.S. and Autonomia to Contemporary Art
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (Aarhus University, Denmark)
In this presentation I will consider the troubled relationship between art and politics in Internationale situationniste and the Italian Autonomia movement, in which Toni Negri played a huge role. At a moment in which more and more contemporary art refers to and tries to enact a kind of radical politics it is of importance to analyse the abandonment of art in favour of radical action undertaken by the situationists and the split in the Autonomia movement between a more restricted 'political' wing and an 'creative-artistic' wing. The juxtaposition between the situationist and autonomist 'solution' might make it possible to approach the use of politics by contemporary art and analyse the almost jubilatory return to the practices of 'political art' of the late 1950s and 1960s without simplifying the difficult relationship between art, aesthetics and politics in a world characterised by a necessity to rethink citizenship and political community insofar as a global migration is advancing and undermining the nation-state and the trust in capitals self-reform.
Shifting Positions
Ben Fitton (DeMontfort University, England)
In what way does a practice that seeks to achieve some kind of currency risk being undermined by changes in the political and economic sphere? How might it be possible to maintain a position as an artist in the face of a shifting and evasive political field? Is the maintenance of a fixed position a desirable, responsible or necessary act? Is a shifting, adaptive position the most advantageous? To quote Sundance; "Can I move? I'm better when I move." Is it possible to maintain a shifting position in relation to a given situation? Shifting position is an established method of both attack and defence, confusing an opponent and forcing them to reveal their own position, but we are faced with a situation where corporations, governments and terrorist organisations draw from the same theories of decentralisation and adaptation. What place for an oppositional art in a field unified by its desire for change? Is opposition from the margins art's most valuable political function? Is it art's only available political function? What form can opposition take when other oppositional forces pose a far greater threat to the opposed? What are the chances of success - could it be argued that political art's aim is the maintenance of an oppositional position, not some kind of conversion or victory? Can art viably seek the realisation of political ambitions? Does a potentially fake or impenetrable position make for more interesting or successful art? Is the threat of failure or fraud more interesting than the threat of political success?
Dave Beech (University of Wolverhampton, School of Art and Design, Molineux St, WV1 1SB,Tel: +44 01902 321000, dave.beech@virgin.net)
This session will explore the resurgence of interest in politics within the art world in the last few years in terms of projects undertaken and theories relating to them. Political projects: Is ambitious art being combined with radical political intentions, or does one compensate for the lack of the other? Is Michael Landy's Breakdown and Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave an update of political art after Duchamp or a nostalgic spectacularisation of a lost political reality? Have contemporary artists too removed from political activism to have any chance of seriously engaging in political intervention? Is the Art For All? book a sign of an upsurge in political consciousness for contemporary art or a measure of its containment by administration? Were artists right to call for the with-drawal from Austria in protest at the politics of Otto Mühl? Political theories: Are the competing theories for the politics of contemporary art compatible with the politics of the art itself? Are theorists more political than the artists they promote? Is Julian Stallabrass' book High Art Lite and Simon Ford and Anthony Davies's theory of the Culturepreneur a significant contribution to the analysis of the cultural politics in the 21st century, or does it rethink the role of the artist in terms derived from defeat? Is today's political art a resurgence of genuine political activity, or a stylish reworking of a conventional artistic genre?
Politics/Smolitics
Particia Bickers (Editor Art Monthly and University of Westminster, England)
What is political art? Is it different from politically-engaged art? Was one once called "political art with a small 'p'" and the other, presumably, "political art with a big 'P'"? Can political art be effective and if so, is the ultimate definition of political art therefore a retrospective one? Is 'success' easier to gauge in the case of single issues such as AIDS awareness (eg. ACT UP), or the representation of women in the art world such as the Guerilla Girls, rather than, say, Hans Haacke's twin agenda to insert politics into art into the museum and museum politics in art? In an age when society seems to be ideologically adrift, has the power of celebrity replaced politics in art? ('The power of 'A-List' artists - Tracey or Damien - potentially to focus attention on specific political causes, for instance.) Does art that succeeds as politics fail as art? If the artist/citizen is to replace the Romantic/Modernist model of the autonomous artist, what are the parameters of social responsibility? Is art too hopelessly compromised by its symbiotic relationship with the establishment - by that 'umbilical cord of gold' - ever to be politically effective or is it, in the end, 'only art'?
Four Types of Art in Search of a Public: the Political Strategies of Public Art
Mark Hutchinson (artist, England)
I will use a Bhaskarian four stage dialectic to investigate public art and its relation to the audience. The first moment is the simple positing of art in the public realm as statues on plinths etc. The art is confident in its own identity and/or function and in a receptive and/or submissive audience. The second edge inverts this relationship by casting the artist as subservient to the audience, typified by the artist reaching out to the community and working according to the meanings and wishes of the members of that "community". The third level is a form of closure, whereby artist brings a set of knowledges to bear on art's public situation. This is what is known as site specific work. The fourth dimension is to open up the assumptions underlying the first three stages of the dialectic. What control does the artist have over the meaning of his or her work in an overdetermined and open social system? What if the audience is not homogenized but structured, differentiated and contradictory (including an audience of one person)? What if the meanings of public art are socially, culturally and historically determined and radically up for grabs at the same time?
Twin Towers: The Spectacular Invisibility of Art and Politics
J. J. Charlesworth (University of Westminster, England)
Contemporary art in the UK has renovated awareness of the political implication of artistic practice, both in the content of the work, and in critical discussions on the changing institutional determinations governing artistic production. Changes in public policy have accelerated the growth of artistic practice explicitly directed towards social contexts, whilst a new range of political activism defined by its antagonism to post-cold war global capitalism has emerged. This convergence of 'artistic' and 'political' practice recalls earlier periods of avant-garde praxis. The current combination however occurs within a profoundly changed social and political reality. The themes that dominate supposedly radical political discussion tend towards the pessimistic restraint of human intervention in all spheres of human life, from science and the environment, through economics, to social and intellectual liberty. Concurrently with such negative developments, previously marginal artistic practice and discourse has moved to the mainstream, this shift reflecting the consensus culture rather than an effective progressive or 'avant-garde' repositioning of art in society. Whist compensating for an absent progressive democratic process or project, contemporary art dissimulates the moribund reality of progressive culture, through the denigration of 'elitist' cultural discourse and a prioritisation of social integration above artistic liberty and insight.
Art Without Administration: Art Radicalism and Critique after the Neo-Avant-Garde
Jonathan Vickery (University of Warwick, England)
Are the BANK artists right? Have even the most 'experimental' artists in contemporary Britain (and by implication the West as a whole) become mired in a bureaucratic culture industry whose objectives are antithetical to art itself? Have even the most radical forms of 'institutional critique' become absorbed into the art institutions' own programme of self-reflection and self-aggrandisement? Is the answer a collective exodus of young artists from the established institutional mechanisms of art's promotion, exhibition and dissemination? This paper will question whether this is both practically feasible and politically advantageous, and attempt to outline what possible concepts of 'radical art' are left after the era of the Neo-avant-garde. If 'radical' art still exists does it nevertheless need to preserve a relative 'autonomy' from the realms of power and ideology and thus preclude itself from direct political partisanship and activism? I will suggest that much of what stands as 'political' art is political only by theme or association: political art needs a radical re-think of its own concept of autonomy - and the emerging networks of anti-globalisation activists (along with 'globalisation theory') might provide some ideas.
Exodus or Intervention? From I.S. and Autonomia to Contemporary Art
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen (Aarhus University, Denmark)
In this presentation I will consider the troubled relationship between art and politics in Internationale situationniste and the Italian Autonomia movement, in which Toni Negri played a huge role. At a moment in which more and more contemporary art refers to and tries to enact a kind of radical politics it is of importance to analyse the abandonment of art in favour of radical action undertaken by the situationists and the split in the Autonomia movement between a more restricted 'political' wing and an 'creative-artistic' wing. The juxtaposition between the situationist and autonomist 'solution' might make it possible to approach the use of politics by contemporary art and analyse the almost jubilatory return to the practices of 'political art' of the late 1950s and 1960s without simplifying the difficult relationship between art, aesthetics and politics in a world characterised by a necessity to rethink citizenship and political community insofar as a global migration is advancing and undermining the nation-state and the trust in capitals self-reform.
Shifting Positions
Ben Fitton (DeMontfort University, England)
In what way does a practice that seeks to achieve some kind of currency risk being undermined by changes in the political and economic sphere? How might it be possible to maintain a position as an artist in the face of a shifting and evasive political field? Is the maintenance of a fixed position a desirable, responsible or necessary act? Is a shifting, adaptive position the most advantageous? To quote Sundance; "Can I move? I'm better when I move." Is it possible to maintain a shifting position in relation to a given situation? Shifting position is an established method of both attack and defence, confusing an opponent and forcing them to reveal their own position, but we are faced with a situation where corporations, governments and terrorist organisations draw from the same theories of decentralisation and adaptation. What place for an oppositional art in a field unified by its desire for change? Is opposition from the margins art's most valuable political function? Is it art's only available political function? What form can opposition take when other oppositional forces pose a far greater threat to the opposed? What are the chances of success - could it be argued that political art's aim is the maintenance of an oppositional position, not some kind of conversion or victory? Can art viably seek the realisation of political ambitions? Does a potentially fake or impenetrable position make for more interesting or successful art? Is the threat of failure or fraud more interesting than the threat of political success?