Arts in Society conference, Sydney

OpenCity's proposal for a workshop has been accepted as part of the Arts in Society conference which will take place in Sydney Australia in July, 2010.

OpenCity: Performing Community

Led by artist-project OpenCity, this workshop presentation investigates the critical/creative potential of collective action within public performance, through dialogic exchange between practice-based enquiry and theoretical/philosophical ideas around collectivity/subjectivity/participation. Within this workshop, delegates are invited to collaborate with OpenCity in a live investigation of the critical/creative potential of collective action within public performance. OpenCity (Andrew Brown/Emma Cocker/Katie Doubleday) is a practice-led project that explores how public space and its societies are conceptualized/organized through interrogating how daily actions/behaviours are conditioned/controlled. OpenCity will reflexively present/contextualize their recent research activity, before working collaboratively with delegates to investigate how collective performance might intervene in the public sphere through the production/creation of ‘counter-publics’; new social formations for rehearsing or testing alternative–ethical/political/critical–forms of citizenship/subjectivity. According to Michel Foucault, subjectivity/subjectivization involves a process or practice, a critical operation that must be activated on a daily or life-long basis. Architectural theorists Arakawa+Gins similarly suggest that personhood/subjectivity is not a guaranteed property of human existence rather it requires nurturing: ‘to person’ is a verb; it has to be performed. Whilst such philosophical opinion perceives subjectivity as a contingent state of being which is actively and critically enacted by the individual, this ‘project’ or endeavour has become evermore difficult to realize, as a consequence of the increasingly legislated, controlled or homogenized templates–of society/citizenship–within which contemporary existence is expected to operate. OpenCity’s research examines the capacity of performance as a ‘tactic’ for refusing, resisting or circumnavigating the negative processes of societal normalization/homogeneity, through the development of active strategies for increasing/augmenting an individual’s affective capacity, their potential for becoming an ‘organism that persons’ (Arakawa+Gins). OpenCity will put theory/research into practice through a participatory workshop that interactively questions how collective action might augment an individual’s capacity to act or be affective. Through a synchronized/choreographed performance involving ipod technologies, the workshop will interrogate/explore how an individual’s decision-making process within participatory/collective performance might also increase critical decision-making at a societal level, in relation to wider social rules, instructions or expectations.

 

Conference background

The annual International Conference on the Arts in Society (the Arts Conference), The International Journal of the Arts in Society (the Arts Journal), and the Arts in Society Book Imprint and News Blog create fora for discussion and publication of innovative theories, practices and critical commentaries in the arts. The Arts Conference, Journal, Book Imprint and News Blog acknowledge the need for critical discussion on issues in the arts, and specifically as they are situated in everyday life, culture, economics and politics. Linked to critical cultural discourse, creative acts of engagement are called for that respond to the needs of our times. What is called for is no less than ‘free speech zones’, which have become ever more pressing in present-day contexts of globalisation, and its social, economic and political artefacts of cultural homogenisation and commodification. More information here

 

 

 

 

 

 

FrenchMottershead

I have been commissioned to produce an essay on the work of FrenchMottershead for a forthcoming publication linked to their recent residency and exhibition at Site Gallery, Shops. Artists Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead have been travelling to Brazil, China, Turkey, Romania, Slovenia and back to Sheffield to engage with a wide range of communities and audiences as part of their Shops project. The Shops project invites owners and their customers to become involved in an artwork through the process of participation and exchange.

Image: FrenchMottershead, Dusanka Sulejmalli, Laura, Ljubljana, 2009

The book will feature essays that have been commissioned in association with the Shops project in each of the countries, and will include local writers, journalists and critics; an essay by Peter Jackson from University of Sheffield which will give the perspective from his research as a social/human geographer, and a piece by Tim Etchells linking to the project they will be working on in Sheffield. The essay will enable me to potentially interrogate some of the ideas that have been emerging in relation to an AHRC application (currently in development) which explores ideas of 'invented' or temporary community (Kwon,2004&Turner); the blur or slippage that occurs between individual and the collective or community experience, as well as ideas around participation and collectivity within ritualized (everyday) performance.

Liminal Landscapes

 

My paper Exit Strategies – Beating the (invisible) Boundary has been accepted as part of the 
Liminal Landscapes symposium which is going to take place at Liverpool John Moores University
 1st July 2010. The paper develops some of the ideas I have been exploring in previous symposia (including PSi Interregnum, 2008 and Living Landscapes, 2009) around certain artists' inhabitation of the 'liminal landscapes' emerging at the interstice of physical and virtual worlds.  
In particular I am proposing to further explore the work of Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting, for whom the navigation of space–physical and/or virtual–becomes inherently bound up with the navigation of subjectivity and questions of social identity. Within their practice the liminal landscape becomes the location or terrain within which (and according to whose terms) the formulation of the self and one’s place in the world becomes mapped out and defined; or else might be navigated differently to dominant ideological expectations. 

 

Background to conference


Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 


 

The Semiotics of Shipwreck

My paper abstract 'Not Yet There: Shipwreck as Suspended Potentiality' has been accepted as part of the forthcoming conference, 'The Semiotics of Shipwreck:
 A Symposium on the Representation and Resonance of Maritime Disaster' which will take place at the National Maritime Museum, London (19th-20th November, 2010
)

Image: Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous

Abstract excerpts:

"This paper will examine the resonance of the shipwreck motif within selected visual art practices since the 1960s by reflecting speculatively upon how it has been reclaimed from the vaults of Romanticism and reinvested with critical significance within a conceptual lexicon ... Here, the shipwreck motif serves to articulate/represent the suspended potentiality of the ‘irresolvable or unresolved quest’; teleological imperative forever poised at the point of non-attainment or anticipation, a disrupted narrative in which closure or completion is indefinitely deferred. The shipwreck belongs to the borderlands; like the ruin it has a liminal status where it remains ‘no longer and not yet’. It is also a curiously ambivalent anti-monument – a contradictory or inconsistent signifier. Shipwrecks possess the complex aporetic properties of an adventurer’s deflated dreams, functioning both as evidence of endeavour/resignation; hope/failure; possibility/impossibility; the trace or remainder of something now absent, the paradoxical visualization – like the phantom – of a disappearance or of loss. The paper thus shifts from ‘locating’ interest in the shipwreck motif within the context of Romantic Conceptualism, towards attempting to posit that it is its dislocated or unstable conceptual properties that form part of its ongoing fascination for artists" 

Context: Background to the conference

Ever since human beings first began seafaring, they have been fascinated, and haunted, by shipwrecks. For maritime societies especially, these tragedies at sea have been a constant source of anxiety, since they are disasters that potentially devastate not only individuals but also the community or nation as a whole. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that shipwreck is also one of the oldest motifs in art and literature. It can be traced as far back as the second millennium BCE, when a fragmentary Egyptian papyrus tells of a sailor shipwrecked on an island that is home to a giant snake. Thereafter it becomes a key topos in the romance genre, from Heliodorus to Shakespeare and beyond, and recurs frequently in poetry, from Homer's Odyssey and Horace's Odes through to Byron's Don Juan and Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. It has a Biblical presence, for example in the account of St Paul's shipwreck. In painting, meanwhile, shipwreck and its aftermath have been taken up by artists ranging from Vernet and Gericault to Sydney Nolan. And the shipwreck scenario may fairly (if a little paradoxically) be said to have launched the modern novel, in English at least: shipwrecks are of course central to both Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. This fascination with the shipwreck scenario continues right down to the present day, notwithstanding the fact that shipwrecks are today much more infrequent than they were in the past ... Over the years, accounts and metaphors of shipwreck have taken diverse forms and served various purposes; the iconicity that attaches to the shipwreck motif has also varied significantly across time and between different cultures. Thus in some forms it is fused with Protestant traditions of spiritual autobiography, and comes to denote a cataclysmic, transformative event in the life of an individual. In others, meanwhile, the topos is informed by Horace's famous metaphor of the ship of state, and becomes associated with an act of collective memorialization and mourning. The aim of this symposium is to explore the shifting and multiple semiotics of shipwreck; to trace the evolution of the shipwreck motif over time and across different cultures; and to trace the circulation of accounts and representations of specific shipwrecks (eg the Titanic, the Grosvenor and so forth) through culture.

The Yes of the No!

My text, The Yes of the No!, was launched on 9th October at Plan 9 as part of their final event marking the closure of The Summer of Dissent. The text is the culmination of a writing residency undertaken during the Summer in Bristol in conjunction with the Summer of Dissent. Drawing on my discussions with artists involved in the programme, alongside my experiences of participating in many of the events (from witnessing Debord's Game of War to crafting a bow and arrow in the woods with Girl Gang), the text provides a framework and overview of the themes, concerns and issues raised by the Summer of Dissent and its participants. I hope to reflect on the value of the 'thinking space' provided by this kind of residency model in relation to my practice as an art-writer in a forthcoming article for a-n (as one of their commissions on critical writing).

The text is structured around the following chapter headings:

The Yes of the No!

First – “Steps towards dancing solo”

Second – “Becoming the cause”

Third – “If everything has been done, then what is left?”

Fourth – “Prepare for the unexpected”

Fifth – “Make do”

Sixth – “Know your limits”

Seventh – “Embody knowledge”

Eighth – “Fall beneath the radar”

Ninth – “Am I bothered?”

Tenth – “Going overboard”

Eleventh – “Being in two minds”

Twelfth – “Without rhyme or reason”

Thirteenth – “Bide your time”

Fourteenth – “Opting in”

Fifteenth – “Hope springs eternal”

Below are a series of images of the publication:

AN ASSEMBLING

Image: Pete McPartlan - Readers Block(s)- Mapping Misunderstanding(s)

 from the publication, An Assembling. ed. David Berridge

As part of the Essaying Essays project, I am including a new text work as part of the first publication from this project, ESSAYING ESSAYS: AN ASSEMBLING No.1.

ESSAYING ESSAYS: AN ASSEMBLING #1

Now available for free PDF download, featuring experiments in essaying from:

 David Berridge; Rachel Lois Clapham; Emma Cocker; Alex Eisenberg; Fiona Fullam; Alex Hardy; Éilis Kirby; Jenny Lawson; Patricia Lyons; Pete McPartian; John Pinder.

Assembled by David Berridge as part of ESSAYING ESSAYS: A TEMPORARY COLLECTIVE OF READERS, one of seven projects by the FREE PRESS collective exploring economies of ideas and alternative modes of dissemination and exchange.

Download your copy here

FREE PRESS: AN ASSEMBLING no.1

ASSEMBLING adopts another project by Richard Kostelanetz in the 1970's. Invited contributors submitted multiple copies of their contributions, which Kostelanetz then assembled and distributed. ASSEMBLING is an experiment in temporary collective publishing, exploring relations of writing, publishing and print and online distribution. ASSEMBLING is published under the CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE. The work (see below) takes the idea of 'essaying' as a trial or endeavour in order to compile a  list of impossible, improbable, abstract or absurd quests and searches. Each entry is a 'found quest' having been obtained from searching the British library database for publications containing the words 'in search of... ' and then attempting to edit or remove any real sense of teleological or measurable outcome. Drawing together the factual and fictional, the searches in the list operate at the point where ‘legitimate research activity’ collapses into the quest for rather more indefinable or speculative (or alternatively Romantic or even quixotic) objectives.

To try, to tentatively attempt

In search of (1) clues; (2) a new life; (3) a method; (4) quality; (5) a psychic economy; (6) the perfect stranger; (7) Enlightenment; (8) a gust of wind; (9) power and politics; (10) principles; (11) complications; (12) the dream people; (13) life on Mars; (14) a withering community; (15) love; (16) the lost; (17) the origins of life; (18) a guru; (19) animal consciousness; (20) a scapegoat; (21) God and some lesser tales; (22) mathematical truth; (23) remarkable trees; (24) silent spaces; (25) gold paved streets; (26) life on other planets; (27) the origins of art; (28) the edge of the world; (29) hospitality; (30) a permanent peace; (31) strategic performance; (32) the lost feminine; (33) the living dead; (34) Dracula; (35) a poetry of specifics, (36) thought, (37) matter and experience; (38) identity; (39) the real and right; (40) normality; (41) order in life; (42) the perfect drug; (43) wonder; (44) the true self; (45) great coffee; (46) cultural unity; (47) excellence; (48) the origins of his evil; (49) a non-dogmatic theology; (50) ghosts; (51) empirical evidence; (52) exceptionally difficult constraint satisfaction problems; (53) shelter, subjectivity and spaces of loss; (54) greatness; (55) common ground; (56) clusters; (57) an impotent man; (58) the meaning of sex; (59) madness; (60) universal values; (61) the human mind; (62) order; (63) true wisdom; (64) answers; (65) a glorious death; (66) rigour and relevance; (67) the teller of tales; (68) a symmetry bond; (69) human origins; (70) authenticity; (71) quality; (72) solutions; (73) more solutions; (74) solutions to the problem;  (75) intimacy; (76) infinity; (77) humanity; (78) a border pedagogy; (79) lotus feet; (80) a new world order; (81) the lost ladino; (82) prevention; (83) what makes us human; (84) the rules of the new games; (85) healing; (86) a better world; (87) Schrödinger’s cat; (88) Schopenhauer’s cat; (89) connections; (90) happiness; (91) learning; (92) a cure; (93) the kite runner; (94) the good life; (95) flowers of the Amazon forests; (96) congruence; (97) a new state; (98) a role; (99) a past; (100) a deity; (101) liquidity; (102) an alternative; (103) meaning; (104) the hidden meaning; (105) our mothers’ gardens; (106) direction; (107) stability; (108) lake monsters; (109) ancient astronomies; (110) a new creation; (111) the melancholy baby; (112) Peter Pan; (113) the Pied Piper; (114) the secret of the universe; (115) genetic origins; (116) the precious pearl; (117) the inner man; (118) Europe’s borders; (119) the perfect house; (120) structure; (121) white crows; (123) silence; (124) the existential pathway; (125) magic; (126) integrity; (127) their conscience; (128) a script; (129) a character; (130) two characters; (131) proof of his existence; (132) the cheddar man; (133) the magic bullet; (134) text syntax; (135) light; (136) power; (137) wonder; (138) promise; (139) truth; (140) hot water; (141) the great northern diver; (142) a future; (143) a soul; (144) weather; (145) independence; (146) an authentic vision; (147) insight; (148) justice; (149) legitimacy; (150) legibility; (151) civic order; (152) a new majority; (153) control; (154) reusable rocketry; (155) human mastery; (156) an eternal identity; (157) an empire; (158) interplanetary travel; (159) world domination; (160) the earthly paradise; (161) inclusion and participation; (162) the conditions of life; (163) keystones; (164) autonomy; (165) reality; (166) self-knowledge; (167) security; (168) the secrets of sex; (169) English windmills; (170) aerodynamic stability; (171) the elements; (172) a theory; (173) the ultimate theory; (174) a new theory of cosmic origins; (175) superstrings, symmetry and the theory of everything; (176) comedy; (177) intelligence; (178) the Holy Grail; (179) autonomy, (180) democracy and development; (181) reasonableness; (182) responsibility; (183) personal fulfilment; (184) leadership; (185) ecstasy; (186) transcontextual criteria; (187) alien planets; (188) productivity growth; (189) moral authority; (190) competence; (191) balance; (192) medical certainty; (193) understanding; (194) an ultimate explanation; (195) public identity; (196) freedom; (197) authority and honour; (198) value; (199) biological origins; (200) the North West; (201) Elvis; (202) Eastern promise; (203) the pleasure palace; (204) the pleasure principle; (205) the substance of substance; (206) unity and integration; (207) the present tense; (208) a super-reality; (209) power and liberty; (210) lost knowledge; (211) comfort; (212) a populist modernism; (213) absolute zero; (214) the dream; (215) nonesuch; (216) utopia; (217) a rigorous science of philosophy; (218) a physiological signature; (219) a third way; (220) a historical movement; (221) ultimacy; (222) optimals; (223) the supreme principle; (224) individualized therapies; (225) what saves us; (226) life in the universe; (227) ancient DNA; (228) extraterrestrial intelligence; (229) a usable past; (230) modern human origins; (231) free energy; (232) new ways; (233) the essence of the west; (234) the ideal society; (235) a paradigm shift; (236) the good; (237) an ideal development model; (238) wisdom; (239) the gamma ray; (240) civility; (241) the missing science of consciousness; (242) the materiality of experience; (243) a patriarchal ideal (244) authentic words; (245) skyscrapers; (246) enemies; (247) allies; (248) a livable world; (249) who we are; (250) the missing gene; (251) endless energy; (252) healing; (253) Eve; (254) the Odyssey; (255) a unifying principle; (256) the missing mass and the ultimate fate of the universe; (257) a true self; (258) a new stability; (259) distant relatives; (260) the beginning of time; (261) substantive rules; (262) our beginning; (263) common ground; (264) practical solutions; (265) sustainable futures; (266) precursors; (267) a saint; (268) the miraculous; (269) shipwrecks; (270) vindications; (271) selective interventions; (272) the affluent reader; (273) certitude; (274) transcendence; (275) nonformal alternatives; (276) explanation and social relevance; (277) mental hygiene; (278) lost time; (279) plenty; (280) the foreign policy of the Bush administration; (281) reaction pathways; (282) a normative order; (283) the neutrino; (284) eloquence; (285) the last human cannonball; (286) failure; (287) sanity; (288) myths and heroes; (289) psychoactive drugs; (290) labour-saving inventions; (291) a cause; (292) open skies; (293) an audio-visual language; (294) non-relativistic systems with dynamical symmetry; (295) a permanent fixture; (296) the best strain of bees; (297) treasure on the desert island; (298) pastures green; (299) artificial intelligence; (300) hope, faith, and a six-second ride               

Below is a PDF of the publication: