Whose political agenda says artists have to be at the end of the sentence?

I have been thinking about the context of this post for a while now but decided to leave its destination up to recent travels and encounters. New contexts as it were. So, here I sit on my Virgin Train journey returning from Somerset back to Scotland; on Facebook I chat to an old friend and avid art writer. She sends me a link to the following text:

“Has it ever occurred to you that most contemporary art galleries are asking us to rewind? “Look back”, they seem to say, “take a look at all the art that shook the world during the twentieth century! Look at its political agendas, its dense conceptualisation, its experimentalism, its radicalism, its craziness, and its out-of-this-worldliness! Can any of you struggling artists create anything better, potent, or more profound? We think not!””

On Saturday the 23rd of October I was asked to accompany my friends on a sight seeing tour of Bristol with, “many a photographic opportunity” – little did I know this was to be a protest march through the city reacting to the spending review. I chose not to go. Why? Let me explain:

A recent push from AIR: Artists Interaction and Representation introduces, on a national scale, a growing list of ‘AIR Activists’ exposing artists who are also activists within their artist communities. The list is growing but where do these people function – where do they hold their meetings and where do they rally? Just as I decided not to march with the rest of Bristol, other artists may decide their own purpose would be just as diluted by such an amass of reaction – so in what context do they campaign?

In my mind, as new rotations around the cultural sphere begin, we are about to hit an important wave of creativity gestured by shifting times. Funding will come by way of decisions made and new definitions accrued – individual artists must still have a voice though and we’re not all accustomed to activist marches. So how can local “open source” institutions respond and advocate these forms of regional and national artistic engagement?

Do we have to rewind now to realise that we’re possibly facing government cuts as harsh as ones experienced post-war? And does this mean we need to get all down and dirty with historical context once again in forecasting the definition of an artist in our contemporary era?

“…let us ‘rewind’ to Duchamp, to whom, granted, we do owe something. In 1957, he spoke of the artist as a medium…. a part of the sentence rather than the full-stop. He said that the meaning of a work of art would accrue in the course of its existence. This implies that an artwork is not determined by the initial creative gesture as much as in the realm of the spectator, and ultimately in the work’s historical reception. Surely the task of all these retrospectives at contemporary art museums is to help us look forward by looking back; to provoke new ways of perceiving political situations and so highlighting what’s going on in our own dreadful present? Obliquely it might be possible for us to study our own ‘realm’ by focussing on realms of the past…”

Important figures can be quoted as often as anyone attends a library, and theory may rule (as well as be ignored considerably) until the ‘theorists’ then reach office. So now theory really is reality let us study our own realm and realise how we can act to save the arts, not react or indeed re-enact.

Excerpts from Sophie Frost’s blog, ‘The Plight of the British Arts Post-grad’

Find AIR: Artist Interaction and Representation on Facebook and join in with the tide of activity: www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=373432691345&v=wall

Arts Council press release October 26th

October saw the beginning of conferences, exhibitions, Frieze Art Fair, Manifesta et al.  One conference worth noting was #media2012 – a day long event which was part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester on October 4th. Working from the premise that the Olypmics in London 2012 will be the first summer games in which citizen media will play a key role, a series of speakers outlined what exactly this might mean.

The conference was organised by Prof. Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland and it drew on his proposal for 2012  – #media2012 : Blueprint for #london2012 – which ‘aspires to create an Underground Media Zone, which will link the United Kingdom in physical and virtual space’.

Speakers covered a wide range of issues and as just about everything was recorded you can catch up on it at ipadio.com here.

The day ended with a work in progress screening of With Glowing Hearts – a film about the impact of social media at the Vancouver Winter Olympics this year:

Jamie Kenyon, a new member of our programme team, is currently preparing an exhibition in Hamburg Kunstverein entitled Zwischenraum: Space Between.

Working in tandem with Annette Hans of the Hamburg Kunstverein, the exhibition explores the ways in which an artistic residency can generate work, uncertainty, unforeseen collaborations with other artists and finally an exhibition:

“With an exhibition and a public programme we use the specificities of the residency model to focus on the artistic process itself. We are not out to dramatically reveal the artists in this exhibition project, but rather make public the artistic process which is informed by time, discussion, research and physicality. This is in no way a new approach to exhibition-making, but it is a method which we believe can withstand repetition. In a historical string of exhibitions we can see how artists approach their own work in the process of making as well as how they relate to the exhibition space as a public space. By making this repetition, we can also ask questions of how the art institution and the public’s way of relating to contemporary art change. What was controversial in 1969, for example, might not be today. What can be done today might not have been possible back then.”

The exhibition whcih opens on the 15th October and runs through to the end of November, includes Oliver Bulas, Nick Evans, Julia Horstmann, Alon Levin, Ingrid Lřnningdal, and Ciara Phillips.

For more details of the show and what looks like a great talks programme accompanying the exhibition go here.