Last saturday I stood outside the Camden Centre, where the ‘Europe against Austerity’ conference took place. I handed out my hand made booklets, my “Instructional Guides for Difficult Times”, to anyone who would take one. I didn’t dare try to charge, I just wanted people to take them. I thrust them into their hands. It felt good when people took my “art”.
But I’m not really sure where the art is in what I’m doing. Have I actually stopped doing art? Am I now a political activist? Or worryingly, because I don’t belong to any political group or organisation, have I become like that man who used to walk up and down Oxford Street each day, predicting the end of the world? Or the man who used to hand out leaflets warning us all not to eat eggs? As the financial crisis has got increasingly urgent and desperate, I have been sucked into it. I feel a moral duty to understand the subject, and to do something about it, to fight back. The best way, the natural way, for me is through my creative skills – to inform and explain and empower. In this way I’ve become obsessed with making critical commentary on the financial and political crisis. For me, this is both political action and artistic expression, but I’m not sure if it’s art I’m making. What do you think? _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
