be recognized as art at all.
‘The “democracy!” exhibition took on the job of representing some aspects of this activity and of finding ways of presenting it in a gallery situation. This is a difficult and even paradoxical endeavour, which demands from the visitor a level of deep engagement – reading, listening, forensic investigation. As an exhibition subject it is a risky enterprise, and one which might not easily be undertaken by an established institution. It seems appropriate that young curators, working within the research environment of a curatorial course, should give themselves the task of making manifest practices of this kind.’
Evidence that such socially engaged art practice is swiftly gaining in significance, raising a host of issues related to venue, craft, distribution and commodity, can be seen at a glance from some of the artists involved in ‘democracy!’. Sarah Tripp’s documentary project, for example, interviewed a network of people about their faith and belief; Group Material – best known for their ‘AIDS Timeline’ – were an artists’ collective based in New York’s Lower East Side, ‘committed to art’s potential to effect social political change’. Also for ‘democracy!’ Jeremy Deller worked with elderly people, ‘opening the doors of the Royal College’s Senior Common Room to the members of a local drop-in centre’.
Taken point for point, a freshly politicized approach to making art can be seen to exchange the sexual, nihilistic, aesthetically exquisite and pop culturally individualist agenda of last decade’s ‘Sensation’ generation, and replace it with a virtually existentialist reassessment of art’s capacity and function. Where the lucrative visceral shock tactics of Emin, Hirst or the Chapman brothers could be seen as the convulsions of outraged romanticism, so the various practitioners and collectives of the latest sensibility appear to be based in a kind of philosophical ethnography, questioning social and cultural power structures from the outside, and developing an art that is largely impossible to own, display or accord a financial value.
For the novelist, pamphleteer and founder of the Neoist Alliance, Stewart Home – who famously went on ‘Culture Strike’ between 1990 and 1993, refusing to make any new work at all – this relationship between culture, commodity and distribution is central to both his writing and its publication. He regards both Tracey Emin, with whom he once exhibited, and Damien Hirst as artists who have ‘recouped’ on his ideas (his ‘Culture Strike’ bed, and his ‘Necrocard’, respectively) by turning them into commodified objects.
‘I guess that in some ways I’ve worked with self-publishing and small presses in order to enable different discussions to go on outside of the commodified business exchange. The Tate have been collecting my pamphlets and leaflets since the 1980s, so you can criticize these institutions, but their archivists and librarians are really on the ball. Basically, if you get an A3 sheet of paper, and fill it with whatever polemic you want, then those ideas are going to get around and get a response.’
A further collective devoted to such practice is Inventory, formed in 1995 as a group committed to exploring the possibilities of anthropological research as text-based art. Through their Inventory journal – with the slogan, ‘Losing, Finding and Collecting’ – and a succession of activities based on street interventions, Inventory could be seen to represent a determinedly outsider stance, while seeking new, cheap ways to disseminate their thinking.
‘We all abandoned individual practice at the start of the 1990s,’ says an Inventory spokesperson, ‘primarily because we found the whole new British art scene, which had originated around Hirst’s “Freeze” exhibition, to be utterly alienating. We saw ourselves as more connected to surrealism, Dada, Walter Benjamin or Bataille, and we wanted to talk about ideas through a journal which could be slightly academic, mad, and shocking.
‘But that wasn’t enough; we wanted to explore the various economies of social life through social situations, and so our work is political inasmuch as it’s occurring at a time when even the word “socialism” appears to be taboo. We regard nihilism in a pro-active, Nietzschean sense, as something to be worked through, and empowered by. By investigating the nature of field work, we turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves. This could be translated into politics – through the surrealist notion of a permanent state of revolution.
‘I don’t think that anyone in the London contemporary art scene trusts us enough to represent us; they like us to be a bit of a cult. But we’ve survived for five years without them, and so we can easily do another five. We’re quite happy representing ourselves.’
One of Inventory’s better-known ‘interventions’ was a fly-posting project in Hanway Street, in London’s West End, called ‘Smash This Puny Existence’. Braving foul weather, local hostility and the approaches of bored prostitutes, the group fly-posted this dark cut-through between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road with a series of newsprint posters proclaiming such announcements as ‘The Puerilification of Culture’ and surrealist texts on the experience of walking through a city. The group also discovered that a loophole in public by-laws made it possible for a person to stand on Oxford Street holding a large placard (of the sort usually seen advertising closing-down sales) which blared ‘Smash This Puny Existence’.
This project was also disseminated by Matthew Higgs (the curator of this year’s British Art Show) through the long-established art books publishers, Book Works, as part of their Open House series of guest-curated projects. Book Works was founded in the mid-1980s as ‘an attempt to reposition the book in the context of visual arts’, and in recent years their role as enablers of documentative, interventionist and pamphleteering artworks has become increasingly significant. Above all, many of their publications create affordable artworks, which can have whatever collectable status the buyer decides.
‘Over the years, this has produced an eclectic range of works,’ says one of Book Works’ founders and directors, Jane Rolo, ‘from early collaborations with activist groups like the Guerilla Girls, or Adrian Piper’s book Colored People – a visual commentary on preconceived ideas about race. More recently, Czech artist Pavel Buchler’s project involved projecting a red light from Chetham’s Library in Manchester – where Marx and Engels studied – on to the Saint George’s flag of Manchester cathedral. With the Open House project, we’ve been able to work with talented young curators like Matthew Higgs and Stefan Kalmar, and to commission books by artists like Janice Kerbel and Nils Norman: to invest in ideas, rather than the cult of artist as celebrity’
Stefan Kalmar has introduced his commissions for the Book Works Open House project – under the umbrella title ‘access/excess’ – with a quotation from the Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.’
As though to illustrate this supposed disruption of systems and orders, Kalmar has commissioned four artists to create what are in essence handbooks for social or anti-social activity. Janice Kerbel’s ‘15 Lombard Street’ gives precise instructions on how to rob the branch of Coutts & Co. bank at that address, for example, while Nils Norman’s ‘The Contemporary Picturesque’ considers protest culture tactics in relation to ‘the development of a repressive form of urban architecture and design – such as surface studs, trash cages and anti-poster surfaces’.
Ultimately, events such as the recent ‘Reclaim the Streets’ demonstrations in London can be seen as a potentially volatile summation of the burgeoning relationship between marginalized artistic activity and direct political action. For Stewart Home, however, as a veteran of many interventionist, hoaxing and direct action campaigns, the political significance of anarchic demonstrations should not become too intimate with art. ‘The danger is that you begin to brand such street actions as “art”, and thereby dampen their political directives. It’s always easy for them to try and control us by treating us as a cult.’
Freezing
