Go Robson Go!

Robson Cezar, who I worked with for the Eat, Use, Destroy ;) exhibition, has just appeared on the front page of the Internationl Herald Tribune.

The image shows Robson holding one of his bottle-top pieces, featuring the word 'strike'. He was at the time curating an outdoor exhibition in support of the Occupy London protests, despite previous insistence that his work itself is not politically concerned. The open air show was entitled 'everyone is an artist', in homage to Joseph Beuys. Participation meant that you had to hold or wear your artwork. During the event Robson also spent time creating bottle top pictures with participants.

In terms of Cezar's practice, this front page is a gift - an artwork engaging with the strikes has been absorbed into the main medium through which the strikes are perceived, the media. Is it opportunistic however, a jump onto the Occupy bandwagon? I'm under the impression that some see polite protest as an affront to 'real' protest - the angry protest that gets things changed in truly dire situations. I think Cezar's project was earnest, and characteristicly playful, touched as ever with his Brazilian identity. I'd like to think there's a place for polite, as well as more radical, protest.



http://www.gorobsongo.com/

http://londonist.com/2011/11/everyone-is-an-artist-at-finsbury-square.php

Hadas Tapouchi at BLANK SPACE

still from The Salute (= Hebrew = Moel-Yad). Hadas Tapouchi

I saw this video exhibited at Blankspace in Manchester recently. Unless I've totally misunderstood it, the artist is just plain wrong. It was exhibited with a similar description to the one which follows (emphasis added):

This presentation, an analysis of Israeli society, is a social experiment that provides an insight into Israeli past and present...


...The man stands in the center of Tel Aviv in 2009 and observes those passing by; men, women, and children of Sephardic and Ashkenazi backgrounds, arabs & jews...


...This presentation examines the ignorance of people towards an image that suggests a negative connotation, but does not in fact present so explicitly...


Although the observers are unsure of the true meaning of the presentation, they are inclined to follower their instinct in feeling that this presentation is an offence to them as Jews. The viewers show a type of satisfaction in being able to express their anger and hatred toward this symbol when given an external explanation by another observer. They express their frustration and feel it is validated.


It is interesting to discover to what extent people are loyal to symbols who's origin are ancient and stems from their faith, but have undergone a social interpretation.


This soldier is engaging in the act which we identify as the solute to Hitler, but in fact, it is a solute which originated in the Old Testament of the Bible in the Book of Nehemiah. It describes the audience reaction at the words of the Torah ready by Ezra "Ezra blessed the Great God and the people responded by saluting and saying Amen".


This salute, which was practiced by the Romans, was later adopted by Italy during the fascist regime and then by Nazi Germany. Due to its use in Nazi Germany, the salute is now identified with the Nazi regime and other fascist regimes. This form of salute is also popular with Arab terrorist organizations, and with large military militias such as Hezballah and Hamas. For these reasons salute is prohibited in most countries and in some places, its use is punishable by law.


The video shows a young man in a traditional European military uniform, standing in a public place, holding a salute. He looks straight ahead and says nothing. People around him can be heard asking him to leave, asking him what he's doing.


The artist seems to be trying to ignore the actual current cultural meaning of this particular salute by making a reference to one ambiguous hand gesture in the Torah. Her claim that it does not explicitly refer to Nazis is undermined by the fact that she put the man in a German - style military uniform, obviously anticipating a negative reaction. She also talks about people's satisfaction in being able to express their anger. I thought the public in the video were actually quite polite, a policeman asks the artist and man in costume to 'please leave' to avoid upsetting people. No one in that market square knew the artist's point, they thought she was just trying to upset them. And she was, wasn't she, to prove her point?

I'm willing to be proved wrong here...

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

Symbols

Click to enlarge the photos

St. George's Cross / England world cup squad / Sky TV

Kasabian's lead singer advertising the English away football shirt.

Its odd that every time I see the St. George's cross, I see it as a 'Christian cross'. England used to be officially Christian, but now the red cross is a symbol of us - the English. But I still see it as a symbol of Christ, which is weird on adverts and taxi's and thugs. 

Obviously symbols change meanings - my little sister was wearing rosary beads for a while because the person who had given them to her got them from a prison chaplain. She thought wearing them made her look rough and glamourous. When my mum told her they were prayer beads she didn't believe her.

I recently met a 22 year old Iraqi living in Manchester. He was a really nice guy. His family, which moved to the UK 2 years ago, is unusually Christian. He told me that after the war began in Iraq life became much more difficult for Christians there. Churches started burning down. He said this was partly to do with the end of Saddham Hussein, who as a relatively secular, nominal Muslim, was more liberal with minority faith groups. It was also because the western invasion of Iraq was seen as a 'Christian war'.

Plastique Fantastique at 1-2-3-4

Plastique fantastique is a variable art collective, described by the artists (David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan) as 'a mythopoetic fiction - an investigation of aesthetics, the sacred and politics - produced through comics, performances, text, installations and shrines and assemblages'. I see them as part hyper-fashionable, part appealing to teenage subculture and part mock religion. 'Inversion Ritual (against the Plague that is Capital)' was a performance at 1-2-3-4, Brighton in 2009. Other artists included Martin Creed and Bob and Roberta Smith.

The performance's script notes that it occurs in a deconsecrated church. During the 'ritual' a 'demon' is summoned, via projection screen (see below). The demon rants angrily about the viewers 'stupid habits and ROO-TEENS, your vegan-campers and organic-converses (I DESPISE your socalled life-styles)'. It chews up pop music/ culture references and spits them back out - 'So, all you Beyonces and baby dolls, and lucy loos, you independent ladies, wave your hands in the air like YOU JUST DON’T CARE'. 

Its a clever way of relating to culture, appropriating a religious format allows them to transform viewers into members (religious angle) or participants (art angle). It also allows, through use of ritual or worship, the speech to not have any particular point. Although political, it has no propositions like a manifesto would ('I HAVE NO MESSAGE'), its just focused opposition, anti-worship of capitalism. The speech is full of repetition, which suits it's content ('Again and again and again you will do the same thing'). I didn't see the performance but just looking at the script, its pretty dark.

The least hopeless part of the script is not spoken by the Demon, but one of the summoners:

'Goods will become SHADOWS!'

Plastique Fantastique

Inversion Ritual script

1-2-3-4

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..