Freee at Eastside Projects

"The Freee art collective have been commissioned to spend a year working with Eastside projects to devise a range of innovative ways in which to generate and maintain a dissensual presence within the public sphere."


The Event:


I went to the opening evening of this year long commission, which consisted of a reading of Freee's manifesto-type document 'The Whistleblower's Pocket Guide to Dissent in the Public Sphere'. Basically the artists and visitors to the gallery (including me) stood in a circle and read the document out loud. I had printed the document beforehand and underlined parts that I agreed with; these were the only parts I spoke out loud. This was according to instructions. At 20 pages, it took 40 minutes to read. It was only a small group, less than ten, but it was still noisy. It took concentration to follow the words with people in and out of time with each other. I found it interesting, having first read it on my own, to now hear the authors (and others) read it aloud. It made it more believable.

I got a lot more from it since going away and reading the vorticist manifesto, 'blast', of which it is basically a re-writing. Freee update the swearing and use a lot of words I'd never heard before like 'biopolitics' and 'aesthete', apparently borrowed from thinkers like Hardt & Negri, Rancierre and Badiou, to underline their political theme. It sounds intelligent, and angry.

It seems to call for better art, and better artists. Better art seems to be defined as that which is radical, which doesn't allow market forces to commodify it. I'm not exactly sure where I stand with it.

Excerpts from 'The Whistleblower's Pocket Guide...':

"The self organized alterglobal anti-capitalist resistance to the professionalization, marketization and bureaucratization of art does not mean a new wave of amateurism, a politically inflected affection for kitsch or a naive defence of outsider art and the tastes of uneducated people, as some of you will say. Nor does it mean being aesthetically or intellectually shoddy. It means art courageous enough to be monstrous to its core. And this means, among other things, not accepting the official knee-jerk denigration of amateurism, kitsch, the outsider, the uneducated, the shoddy and the monstrous."


"We are against the ethical victimization of the multitude, as we are against their financial exploitation, violent repression, political deligitimation, cultural denigration, medical ghettoization, geopolitical reterritorialization, and educational instrumentalization.


It is not necessary to be an outcast, to be unkempt or poor, to be an artist, but it is necessary to be in league with the outcast, unkempt and poor to be a revolutionary artist of the monstrous multitude. It is possible to be rich and handsome and, at the same time, to be an artist, but to be an artist who takes their cues from wealth and glamour is to dissolve art into globalization. Art is nothing to do with commodities, spectacle and (celebrity)"

Response:

I find with Freee that I can't pin down their exact position on things, and I don't think they'd agree with much of my thinking, but there always seems to be space for me within their work. Maybe there's a simple explanation in something I saw written about the vorticist manifesto, explaining that it contradicts itself by adopting opposite sides to blur single perspectives. Which is postmodern pluralism isn't it?

At the time of the spoken choir, I came away with an odd feeling. As soon as the radical manifesto ended, everyone became really polite to each other; chatting, having a drink, thanking people for coming. It was a bit like being at church. Everyone speaks a creed together, something hard to believe, and then afterwards everyone is really nice to each other. I came away wondering if Freee really believe their manifesto, or if they don't have to because it's art. I wonder if what they say they think actually influences every bit of their life. Which might be unreasonable for me to ask. I came up against a similar idea soon afterwards at 'Object Lessons', an exhibition at Islington Mill, Salford. The show displays everyday objects (chairs, mugs, carpets) from the Working Class Movement Library. It's only when you look closely at the stuff that you realise it's all covered in Marxist sayings and images, or linked to Marxist organisations. The objects were originally a couple's personal collection, which totally engulfed their house and life.

Blast manifesto
Object Lessons
Eastside Projects

Liverpool Biennial

I went to Liverpool for the first day of the Biennial and this is a slightly jazzed up version of what went in my notebook:

John Moore's painting prize

'Protest' - Nicholas Middleton

Looks like a history painting, with a crowd of people carefully arranged in chaos. Although it also bears the style of a painting made from photographs. This contrast is also seen in the detail of a 'crime scene' sticker shown next to an engraving on the 19th century monument. It makes the G9 protest scene look beautiful, which makes me think of freee - 'protest is beautiful'. There's all sorts of people - a grinning couple, business women, lots who look like passers by which have become involved, and lots with cameras.

'Somewhere Between Prayer and Agenda' - Cara Nahaul

Painting presents a mingled body of people, who look like largely undefined Muslims in prayer. The loose, ambiguous style playing with our idea of 'Muslim' as a visual category (cues in painting include hats and beards)?

'Spectrum Jesus' - Keith Coventry

Hard to see the portrait because the whole painting is dark blue. It's also glossy paint, and in a glazed frame. I thought this was the whole point of the work - a literal portrait of Jesus, yet you can't actually see who he is etc. Then I read the wikipedia entry on Coventry and realised that the painting is one of a set, that forms a rainbow. It also relates to fakes and forgeries - it is itself based on a forged painting. I suppose it suggests that religious stories and texts are unreliable on their own.

As a child I was a Roman Catholic. Every Sunday morning at seven o'clock I had to go to church where I had a few minutes to look at the texts that I had to read for the service. The image of Jesus is like a container for all sorts of ideas. Maybe subconsciously I thought of theTurin Shroud as well, how the image is just barely visible - which itself is meant to be a fake. It's not a natural thing, but yet, I'm neutralising it as an image by making monochromes.

(Coventry quote from Wikipedia)

I think the phrase  'Jesus is like a container' Coventry uses is very accurate in describing the multitude of theories, theological and otherwise, that have been applied to Christ. It suggests a blank sheet to which you bring your own ideas, which relates formally to his monochrome paintings, and also presents a popular postmodern(?) idea. You could also see a container as something which holds its various contents together.

Other than that I saw Freee's window installations - commercial style window-sized stickers with their own slogans. Most of them were old pieces, so I thought it looked like a 'greatest hits' selection. I actually bumped into one of freee (Beech) on the train on the way back and apparently he'd said something similar to the organiser - 'you're the first person to give us an album, we've only has singles before'.

Freee at Zoo

[italics re-posted from freee.org.uk]














Following an elaborate series of scripted ceremonies, Freee and a small group of invited ‘witnesses’ took to the streets of Cambridge to rename a selection of the city’s streets along a route from the Court to Kings College.

Existing place names such as King Street, Jesus Street and New Street are renamed by the group through secular ‘christening’ speech acts temporarily occupying the streets of Cambridge with the names, anecdotes and legacy of those 18th century activists who were inspired by the French Revolution to engage in radical political movements in the UK.

The script divided the participants into ‘chalk-holders’ and ‘witnesses’, the former responsible for writing the new names of the places on a blackboard held near to the existing place name; the latter responsible for acknowledging the renaming and proclaiming their assent to the new name in a spoken exchange amounting to a secular christening.

Having studied with Dave Beech from FREEE for a little while, I hardly dare to say anything about this, because I know I'd get rinsed! I suppose its quite neat that they can't actually rename the streets, they have to just make the gesture, because obviously once a street is named after something the meaning of the name is forgotten. Naming a street 'Jesus Street' could probably undermine christianity as much as promoting it.

The weird red hats give it some sort of currency(?) as a performance, I don't know if they have significance but they must have had balls of steel to wander round wearing them!

Its appropriating Christianity in the loose western (rather than religious) sense in that it uses 'christening' as a cultural reference point to explain what they're doing. You wonder why they couldn't have just said 'naming' though? I suppose christening suggests a link to something greater (union with God?) which maybe in this case is something else.

The post goes on to say that through the presence of 'witnesses' to the event, a 'temporary counterpublic' was created, which seems to be the most important thing. I get the feeling that its a really clever link between participatory art and radical politics..