Hiyas!
An interesting discussion.. Thanks!
I think, like Edward Picot's agreeing and disagreeing at various
junctions/points, in my mind these are questions that increasingly need
to be communally voiced and articulated.
The link between art associated practices and power, per Simon's
illustration in this context, and lazy thinking - seemingly more
pervasive when one has power and as consequence lost energy - per one of
Edwards' points..
or
The art linked activities and the need to allow the radicality of
imagination be fearless - else we lose both imagination and its
radicality. (..an Ardent based radicality, btw..)
and perhaps also
The rise of elements/spaces/associations who's relatives once - eg 60's
to 90's - were indeed tied with artistic connected processes, but
contemporary versions have diverged and maybe seek their own autonomy.
eg, hackerspaces' occasional strict censorship of potentially artistic
linked stuff in their midst via emphasis of craft traditional values.
Or political elements censoring art associated stuff on the ground that
it is not politically clear - or even not clearly propagandistic enough
- let alone questioning the imagination of said political elements..
Perhaps am associating too wider a range of stuff with that fairly
strictly contextual narrative of artangel and the estate.. Perhaps this
draws too much upon a mind linked with the hierarchical use of pyramid
metaphor in art accepted stuff, like in Kandinsky's text about the
spiritual in art.. And angels, biblical sequenced entities, coming from
above.. Tended to remind me colonial trajectories..
Cheers and all the very best!!
aharon
xxxx
On 2014-04-21 14:17, Simon Mclennan wrote:
Interesting to me personally, not least because I had the dubious
privilege of living on the Heygate for 11 years. Harrumphh...
Some good analysis in the article. Organisations such as Artangel
always make me suspicious. Why? Because they hold power over artists
in as much
as they decide what and who to fund.
This reterritorialising is the same old story.
Art is indefinable by its nature. It is invisible and hides itself in
the cracks of
crumbling monstrosities such as Claydon.
Sprouting like a vine or flowing like a bleeding wound, within the
corporate concrete these impossible rickety Paul Klee
structures of nonsense are merely a reaction to life. A fantastic comic
opera.
The best art ain’t art mate - gettit. but Getty will never get it, nor
Artangels nor even the likes of Lighthouse in Bton.
For they are merely the administrators and purveyors of privilege.
Best to fart about in the streets like Vonnegut said - or self
organise.
Simon
On 21 Apr 2014, at 15:04, Edward Picot <[email protected]> wrote:
Extremely interesting article! I found myself both agreeing and
disagreeing with it at various points. I've never been a believer that
art should have to be politically correct as a first condition of
existence, and in fact I don't think it's a weakness for art to be
deliberately ambiguous and create a space which people feel obliged to
fill with their own interpretations. There are points where this
article seems to be suggesting that ambiguity isn't good enough - you
have to take sides and state your political position loud and clear -
anything else is a cop-out. On the other hand, I do share a distaste
for "monumental" works of art which are "airlifted" into policitally
sensitive situations in order to borrow a suggestion of "relevance",
without engaging with the people or the issues on the ground. As the
article says, "Ignorant of their own class power and the cultural
capital that oils it, they [Artangel] still want to place art wherever
they choose, even when told quite forcefully why it’s insensitive and
dodgy by those who suffer the material consequences of demolition."
Of course this is a one-sided account of the project and its eventual
collapse, but it does leave you with the distinct impression that
Artangel were simply lazy. They had an off-the-shelf project and they
were looking for a "suitable" space into which they could plonk it,
and it was too much like hard work for them to get in touch with the
locals at the outset, get them on board, and risk having to revise the
project to take account of their views. But the subtext of the article
is that the underlying reason for this failure is that the
art/business/local politics nexus from which organisations such as
Artangel draw their financial support has the long-term effect of
gentrifying them and detaching them from community engagement. No
doubt this is an argument in which Mark and Ruth are both extremely,
perhaps even painfully, interested, as they're so conspicuously trying
to tread a different path, and finding it a financially difficult one.
- Edward
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