Hi all,
Some on the NETTIME list may be interested in reading the plain txt
version, of a recent interview I did with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon
about their collaborative publication, A Users Guide to (Demanding) the
Impossible on Furtherfield (www.furtherfield.org).
If you are interested in reading the interview with images:
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/we-demand-impossible-interview-john-jordan-and-gavin-grindon
'A Users Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible'
Published Published by Minor Compositions.
http://www.minorcompositions.info/
--------------------<plain txt version heres>...................
We Demand The Impossible:
An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon.
By Marc Garrett - 19/07/2011
"This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It’s a match struck
in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path
through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies
of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: “Art is not a mirror
held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Marc Garrett: In the introduction of your publication it says that it,
"was written in a whirlwind of three days in December 2010, between the
first and second days of action by UK students against the government
cuts, and intended to reflect on the possibility of new creative forms
of action in the current movements. It was distributed initially at the
Long Weekend, an event in London to bring artists and activists together
to plan and plot actions for the following days, including the teach-in
disruption of the Turner Prize at Tate Britain, the collective manifesto
write-in at the National Gallery and the UK’s version of the book bloc."
I think readers would be interested to know how the 'teach-in
disruption' and the 'collective manifesto write-ins' went?
John Jordan: I was not at the first Turner teach-in so can't give first
hand account. From what I've heard it was a wonderful moment where the
sound of the action penetrated into the room where the Turner Prize were
being held, as the back drop of the channel 4 live link up. Kind of
perfect, because it was a sound artist who got the award.
As for the National Gallery event - this was held during the evening
after one of the big days of student action. Having spent the day being
trampled on by her majesties police horses, a load of us went up to the
National Gallery and mingled in front of Manet's Execution of Emperor
Maximillian, opposite a corridor that held a Courbet painting. It was a
perfect placement as Courbet of all the 19th artists was really the one
who understood the role of art within an insurrection, putting down his
paintbrushes to apply his creativity directly to the organising of the
Paris Commune of 1871 just as the impressionists fled the city to the
quiet of the countryside. Only to return a few years later when
Impressionism was launched, as a kind or artistic white wash over the
massacres of the Commune, a return to normal bourgeois representation.
Courbet had used the rebel city, a "paradise without police" as he put
it, as a canvas to create new forms of social relationships and new ways
of public celebration, including the destruction of the monument to
Empire and Hierarchy, the Vendome column.
Several hundred artists and art students at a given moment sat down and
occupied room 43, telling the staff that we would leave once a
collective manifesto had been written. Which is what happened. Small
groups of 10 or so were formed as the guards and director of the gallery
paced up and down unsure of how to react, each group worked on points
for the manifesto which were then read out and merged in 'The Nomadic
Hive Manifesto' - http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=998 - it was
an extraordinary moment of collective, emergent intelligence, a
reclaiming of a public cultural space from the realm of musefication and
representation.
MG: 'A Users Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible' features quotes by
individuals and groups, who have inspired many of us in the networked,
Furtherfield community. But, I am also aware that you may be part of a
younger generation, presently experiencing the brunt of education cuts
imposed by the current government coalition. Could you explain how these
cuts are effecting you and your peers?
JJ: Well I wish I was a younger generation !!! I’m 46 years old, it was
written for the youth !! You should talk to some arts against cuts folk,
I can put you in touch if you need to?
Gavin Grindon: I'm not exactly 'the younger generation' either, but I
guess I'm in a strange position between. I recently finished my PhD, so
a lot of my friends are either students or just becoming teachers. There
aren't many jobs about, academic or otherwise, and most of them are
doing multiple part-time, short-term jobs to make ends meet, without the
assumed security or career progression of a generation before, and the
cuts are only going to exacerbate that situation. I guess what's new is
a recession on top of these kind of precarious work conditions, which
extend far beyond the University. With part-time, hourly-paid and non
fixed positions, replacing real jobs.
Of course it's damaging, but it's also been inspiring to see students
responding to turning over lessons to discuss the cuts and seeing them
on the streets. It's politicised a lot of young people, and there's an
opportunity there. At one of the University's I work at, it was great to
see the art students working together to make protest banners, not in
their studios but in the foyer, where other people could see and join
in. And when I started talking with them, we began to realise that with
all the technical resources of an art school at their disposal, it was
possible to be much more ambitious and imaginative than just making
banners or placards, the standard objects of protest. But the history of
a lot of art-activist groups who had these kind of ambitions isn't
taught, never mind the more popular history of the arts of social
movements itself. And it's not just about knowing and being inspired by
some great utopian tales of adventure, or understanding yourself as part
of a historical legacy - it leaves you strategically disadvantaged about
what can be done. So starting a conversation with these students, was,
as JJ says, kind of the idea behind the guide.
MG: There are various other creative protest groups such as UK Uncut
(http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/) and the University for Strategic Optimism
(http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/), whom I
interviewed live on Resonance FM, December last year
(http://www.furtherfield.org/radio/8122010-university-strategic-optimism-and-genetic-moo).
Are you connected to any of these creative activist groups, and are
there any others in the UK you would like us to be more aware of?
JJ: Yes - I've worked with UK Uncut, and was unfortunately arrested in
Fortnum and Mason, whilst recording the BBC 4 afternoon play, but that’s
another story! There are lots of interesting groups that work on the
edge of art and activism, right now a space to keep an eye out for and
to visit is THE HAIRCUT BEFORE THE PARTY -
http://www.thehaircutbeforetheparty.net/ - set up by two radical young
art activists who have opened a hair dressers that offers free hair cuts
and political discussion about organising and friendship, rebellion and
the material needs to engage in it. The salon is in 26 Toynbee Street,
near Petticoat Lane and open till November. It's an interesting example
of a medium to long term, art activist project that attempts to create
new forms of relationship and affinity, and sees itself as building
radical movement and not simply representing them.
GG: Yeah, again the idea of the text was to build on the connections
that are already there, which THBTP does too in a more informal, social
way. And for sure, you shouldn't be seen at the June 30th strikes or UK
Uncut's support actions without a flash new haircut. I should also get a
plug in for Catalyst Radio - http://www.catalystradio.org/ a new 24/7
DIY UK-wide activist radio station, which started up the other week and
is still growing, and brings together a lot of radical radio projects
from around the country.
MG: Do you share a mutual empathy and respect for other protesters
elsewhere such as those in Spain, in Greece, and in the Middle East?
JJ: Of course. Although it feels like the camp protests are lacking a
conflictual approach and without the mixture of conflict and creativity,
protest can easily be ignored, which is a bit what has happened with all
the European camps. Although sitting here in the British library its
easy to be critical ! Whatever happens, those involved in the camps will
have tasted politics, new friendships, alternative ways of organising
etc... As for the middle east, its all still in flux, who knows what
will happen and the role of artists and musicians has been pretty key in
setting the powder kegg alight there..
GG: Yeah, though I think there's a tension between the symbolic
solidarity of occupying city squares and the strategic differences
between activist practices in different countries. I think solidarity
between these struggles is massively important, though I'm personally
not sure how it's best to manifest that here right now.
MG: In the User's guide, it mentions the workshops in art and activism
at the Tate Modern, held by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination (Labofii), entitled it ‘Disobedience makes history’. And
that Laboffii "was told, in an email, by the curators that no
interventions could be made against the museum's sponsors (which happen
to be British Petroleum) [..] decided to use the email as the material
for the workshop. Projecting it onto the wall they asked the
participants whether the workshop should obey or disobey the curator’s
orders."
What I find interesting regarding this episode is both that a big
institution would take the risk of inviting in art and activist culture
to their usually, protected environment whilst being sponsored by
British Petroleum; and the different forms of controversies reaching the
public from such situations. I am surprised that Laboffii would even
consider doing such a project in the Tate Modern in the first place, but
also pleased, because of the dialogue that has come out of the clash of
different political contexts. So, isn't it the case that we need to
explore issues of corporate corruption further within these big
institutions so that those who would not usually consider such things
are suddenly faced with the issues?
GG: I'm sure JJ has plenty to say about this. But more generally, it
depends *how* they function as a platform. An art gallery or a
university can be a great discursive space to explore issues, but the
bounds of that debate are also strictly limited in lots of ways. This is
a problem with the idea of a bourgeois public sphere. Most often, that
boundary is that you can debate whatever you like but questioning the
basic systemic assumptions on which such spaces rest isn't possible, at
least not in a practical way. The lab's workshop at the Tate tried to
question exactly that kind of assumption about what culture is for, and
who it benefits. But for many activists from social movements, who have
less faith in the public sphere and its institutions to resolve issues
by discussion, that neutered debate is more of a problem than a
benevolent gift to the public, and they have to take a different
approach. Its not necessarily opposed to those institutions as a whole,
but just asks them to make good on what they claim to be.
JJ: It's a long story, but the key is to be able to put one foot inside
these institutions and to be not frightened to KICK. But not to KICK
symbolically, to really kick, to really shake them up and to be able to
let go of one's cultural capital. The Labofii will NEVER be re-invited
to do anything at the TATE, bang goes all our chances of a retrospective
in the fashionable art activism world !!! ;) But, what we gain is that
we were free ! When the curators told us that we could not do anything,
could not take action against BP and we refused to obey them, we were
free, we could do what we wanted because they could not give us anything
in return. The Zapatistas say, "we are already dead so we are free" -
when power can give you nothing you want, you can do anything.. this is
a very powerful moment. To see the faces of the curators, the head of
public, the head of security etc during the meeting where they tried to
censor the lab, was priceless - they had always had power over artists,
because artists will normally do ANYTHING to get their work in the Tate,
but we did not care, we cared about the politics, about the actions,
about climate change and social injustice - we were more powerful than
the institution in that moment because we were no longer dependent on
them.. it was one of the most beautiful moments... and now the movement
against oil sponsorship is spreading everywhere. The message is simple,
give up your cultural capital throw away your dependence on these
institutions and be free...
MG: I come from a background of hacking, social hacking and D.I.Y
culture, and instead of going to University I chose to be self-educated,
creating alternative groups for self discovery and art with dedication
to social change. And even though, many are fighting the education cuts
right now, what are your own ideas around self-education, do students
really need to go to college now that there are so many different forms
of information and ways in creating one's own place in the world 'with
others'?
GG: A lot of experiments with autonomous self-education have sprung up
recently which ask just this question, like the Really Free School
(http://reallyfreeschool.org/), there are even some more institutional
business-model experiments online with peer-to-peer education. But at
the same time the catchment of both of these is relatively narrow at the
moment, so I think there's still a place for these kind of education
institutions, and there are interesting radical experiments going on all
over, either by individuals or whole departments, although the cuts to
institutional funding for education by the government changes the
playing field again, so there's an opportunity for something like this
to become less marginal, both inside and outside the university.
MG: JJ, In 2005 you wrote, Notes Whilst Walking on “How to Break the
Heart of Empire”, in it you write "Radicals are often vulnerable souls.
Most of us become politically active because we felt something
profoundly such as injustice or ecological devastation. It is this
emotion that triggers a change in our behaviour and gets us politicised.
It is our ability to transform our feelings about the world into actions
that propels us to radical struggle. But what seems to often happen, is
that the more we learn about the issues that concern us, the more images
of war we see, the more we experience climate chaos, poverty and the
every day violence of capitalism, the more we seem to have to harden
ourselves from feeling too much, because although feeling can lead to
action we also know that feeling too much can lead to depression and
paralysis..." How the hell do you remain positive when you know how many
horrible and disgusting things are being done to decent folks and the
planet all of the time?
JJ: Unfortunately there are no magic recipes that can protect us from
such feelings, a lot depends on context on our particular situations
etc. But here are a few tips that have helped me keep the despair of
capitalism at bay:
1) Resist the spell of individualism that capitalism tries to weave
around us, a spell that chains us to the fantasy of autonomy and keep us
in a state of sadness and paralysis. Break this spell and its toxic
chains by realising that you are part of a greater whole, that working
with others gives us strength, that seven minutes making real
friendships (face to face) is more political than seven days glued to a
computer browsing social networks in a trance, that inevitably fails to
shake the loneliness of modern life.
2) Build a gang, a group, a collective, a crew - remember the joy of
plotting things together, the power and possibilities when work and
imagination is shared. In fact, imagination finds it's insurrectionary
potential when we share it, when it's freed from the privatised ego,
escapes from shackles of copyright and the prison's of the art world.
3) Learn the skills to work together with others, consensus decision
making, group facilitation, conflict resolution etc. We need to re learn
collective working methods, capitalism has destroyed all our tools of
conviviality and we need to reclaim them back, recreate new forms of
being together.
4) Redefine Hope. Not as something that will come and save us, like a
saviour, but as something that comes from not knowing what will happen
next, something that takes place when we act in the immediate moment and
don't know what will happen and trust that history is made from acts of
disobedience that did not necessarily have any idea of what the next
step was...
5) Remember that victory is not always what happens, but what did not
happen. Social movements tend to forget this. Look at all the nuclear
power stations that WERE not built, all the wars that did not happen,
the laws that were never passed, the free trade agreements that were
never agreed on, the repressions that the state could not get away with,
the gmo's that were never planted. One of my favourite books, what I
call prozac on paper, is Rebecca Solnit's HOPE IN THE DARK
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28048.Hope_in_the_Dark) - it's a
lovely little book which redefines hope in the most beautifully
optimistic way, recommended reading when capitalism seems irresistible.
6) When everything appears useless, try to change your conception of
time... think deep time, not shallow modern now time, but think about
the generations that went before you and those that will come after you.
Try to imagine what the generations of the future will think about your
actions, imagine those from the past that fought for the emancipation of
slaves and yet never saw the results of their actions, those who died
for the eight hour day, for the right to build a union, the right to
vote or publish an independent magazine. Spend time imagining how those
alive in 50, 100 years will view your life and work...
MG: In the publication, you mention Marx and Debord. "We can all be
engineers of the imagination"..."that our “general intellect”, all the
collective knowledge and skills we use in making things, are taken away
from us and embodied instead in the machines of our work. What would
happen if we somehow re-engineered these machines if we did what Guy
Debord argued and started, “producing ourselves... not the things that
enslave us." Do you see the recent cuts across the board as an example
of how the powers that be are actively dis-empowering the working classes?
GG: Definitely. The cuts aren't just about an experience of 'austerity,'
however long term, but constitute a historical attack on poor and
working people. They're an attempt to technically recompose the material
of the institutions, structures, ideas and habits people live through,
in order to limit their ability to resist and remake them for
themselves. In factory production, that involved the local restructuring
of machine-labour, but later at a wider level Keynesian economic
restructuring. This neoliberal restructuring of education is an
extension of capitalist discipline into a new area, an attack on a
social space which has historically been a base for social change. The
government has made this pretty clear by, for example, David Willetts's
dictate amidst these massive cuts, to the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, that the Tory party's vacuous advertising slogan "the big
society" become a core research area, replacing the less ideologically
narrow area of 'communities and civic values'; and the Department for
Business and Innovation's concomitant rewriting of the 1918 Haldane
principle, that research directions are best decided by researchers
through peer review.
The optimistic take on this is not that it's an inevitable recuperation
of resistance, which was the position Debord tended towards in the end,
but that capital is always on the back foot - that its own developments
are driven by and a response to social movements. That it's an open
dialectic (or if you prefer, not a dialectic at all). There's a kind of
neurosis to it, although rather than excluding the other to maintain its
ego, the state is including everything to stave off other possibilities
- you can see this in the language. The whole discourse of
'participation' and networks in business (and since the 1990s, also in
art), is as Boltanski and Chiapello observed in their book the New
Spirit of Capitalism, a recuperation of the language and terms of 1960s
social movements - movements which first properly gave birth on a mass
scale to the kinds of self-consciously autonomous and creative politics,
or art-activism, which we talk about in the guide. Likewise, the big
society is focused on mutuality, and there's a strange recuperation of
libertarian and radical thought by the thinkers behind it like Phillip
Blonde. In this case, you're left with a stunted vision of the anarchist
idea of mutual aid, without any institutional aid, and structurally
limited mutuality. But rather than simply critique this, I'm interested
to look at how we might otherwise structurally and materially embody
other kinds of social relation. Obviously this starts on a much smaller
scale, and is often more directly materially embodied. University
departments' attempts to support radical philosophy within existing
institutions and setting up new autonomous radical art institutions are
two possible, but not mutually exclusive, directions here. As, of
course, at the most local, accessible level, are the art-activist
practices and objects we discuss in the guide.
Our new book-film is out "Les Sentiers de L'utopie"
Free online (in french) : http://www.editions-zones.fr/
Our blog: http://lessentiersdelutopie.wordpress.com/
our twitter: @nowtopia
Some info for A Users Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible.
3 different links to download the publication:
http://www.minorcompositions.info/usersguide.html
http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/a-users-guide-to-demanding-the-impossible
http://www.brokencitylab.org/notes/required-reading-a-users-guide-to-demanding-the-impossible
The Font used was Calvert is by Margaret Calvert, designer of our road
signs.
Words: Gavin Grindon & John Jordan Design: FLF Illustration: Richard
Houguez Original Cover: The Drawing Shed Produced by the Laboratory of
Insurrectionary Imagination, London, December 2010. www.labofii.net
Anti-copyright, share and disseminate freely.
More about Minor Compositions - a series of interventions & provocations
drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the
revolutions of everyday life.
http://www.minorcompositions.info/
Other Info:
Crude awakening: BP and the Tate. The Tate is under fire for taking BP
sponsorship money. Does corporate cash damage the arts — or is it a
necessary compromise? We asked leading cultural figures their view.
Interviews by Emine Saner and Homa Khaleeli. guardian.co.uk, Wednesday
30 June 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/30/bp-tate-protests
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