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