ARTISTS TALKING

# 49 [17 April 2010]

Salon no.21
‘Agency’
Sunday 28 March 2010
Whitechapel Gallery

Speakers: Alec, Ian, Chris from Hut Project, Paul Pieroni, and Sophie Hope

This Miss B’s Salon, held in the Whitechapel Gallery, maintained its usual tension between public and private, open and insular. We were one of the last groups of the year to sit around the glass-topped roundtable that formed the centre of Goshka Macuga’s installation The Nature of the Beast, having responded to the open invitation for any groups to hold public meetings during exhibition. The salon guests had responded to direct invitation, but the meeting was public, so that anyone could listen, observe or join (and someone did! hich I consider a thorough validation of the debate!).

A tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica dominates Macuga’s installation. Commissioned in 1955 by Nelson Rockerfeller the tapestry was loaned to the United Nations New York headquarters in 1985, where it was displayed in the Security Council Chamber as a deterrent to war (though controversially covered with a large blue curtain during press conferences in 2003 where Colin Powell and other U.S. diplomats were arguing the case for the invasion of Iraq). Archive material relating to the exhibition of the original Guernica at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1939 at the invitation of the Stepney Trade Union, but also to other political groups and activity in the Whitechapel area was displayed under the glass on the table. The formal shape of the table is a reference to both the Security Council Chamber, and the centrepiece to the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, where Guernica was originally exhibited. It certainly added a air of seriousness and mock-formaillty.

I was interested in Macuga’s restagings and revisitings, and in the fact that she has made a pre-requisite that her installation must now be referenced in Whitechapel ‘s Guernica archive. She has inserted her interpretation into that history and (I think) somehow intervened with the agency of the material.

So the stage was set. The questions were asked:
- How does a work or reproduction of a work like Guernica gain or lose agency?
- Does what happens in art matter in the wider world?
- How does one reflect or express politics within ones work?
- What are the tactics of 'restating' in contemporary art practice?

Details of the discussion to follow in the next post..

# 48 [19 February 2010]

Salon no.20 (cont)

Some of the haircuts!

# 47 [19 February 2010]

Salon no.20

Miss B’s Hair Salon

Shoreditch Town Hall, 24-28 January 2010

Topics: The Wilderness, Women and Protest, Pedagogy and Art Education, Failure, Nostalgia, Popular Economics, Amateurism

A special one-to-one ‘home haircutting’ version (no specialist training!) of Miss B's Salons... conversation on  topic of Miss B's choice.

# 46 [21 January 2010]

The next, rather unorthodox outing of Miss B's Salons:

Miss B's Hair Salon - cut and conversation
26-28 January
PAUSE AND EJECT 2
A show by Goldsmiths MFA year 2 students
Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT
Open 26-28 January 2010, 12-6 daily

Miss B’s Hair Salon will operate from the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall during Pause & Eject II. It will be a unique one-to-one version of the regular Miss B’s Salon discussion events. For £5, get a trim or haircut from Miss B whilst partaking in a conversation on a subject of Miss Bs choosing. By appointment only:

http://www.pauseandeject.com/ruth_beale.html

# 45 [7 January 2010]

Salon no.19 (cont.)

Is the aestheticised context a position of luxury I wonder?  Sometimes the most immediate and effective thing is a photocopied note and the school gate or a viral email. Dissemination by any means necessary. But somewhere lies a warning to up your game in an era of professional lobbyists and media-savvy politicians.

Pamphlets are undeniably aestheticised objects in all senses. But not to be taken lightly. Laura Oldfield Ford's zines are a direct response to the emptying-out of an aesthetic - of the punky homemade look being used to advertise Shoredtich bars. She has taken a particular moment around 1981/82 when the zine aesthetics typified angry, disenchanted but mobilised people and has re-politised it with a realist dystopia that presents a harsh critique of regeneration and gentrification in East London. Her screening of Boys From the Black Stuff was a reminder of that moment too. It was shit - in a way that might even be the same now but the grimness is now more effectively glossed over. Laura's zine format remains what it is and can be distributed cheaply and in an ad hoc manner. A tool for reminding us about a time when it felt like a change felt dangerous and revoluntionary but possible.

But what of radical publishing without sophisticated references? I have lately been thinking about the kind of contemporary anarchist publishing that shows more than a touch of nostalgia..  pamphlets presented unironically in a format unchanged since 1978. It's certainly not the media-savvy and networked mobilisation of the anti-globaslisation movement for example. I'ts more like preaching to the converted - which is a charge levelled at the artworld despite the dilemma I've heard people talk of lately that art is one of the few places left for talking about radical politics. Which brings me to finally the archive. There are some and the salon who queried why the pamphlet collection doesn't take a political stance (or at least be organised in the sense of a real library) but others who wanted to see the archive as something that opens up a political history - a social anthropology that through both its strengths and the missing or underrepresented parts says something about the value or proliferation of certain versions of history. I found myself banging on (again) about Wikipedia being great for having sown the seed of mistrust in information - the way it highlights the subjectivity of any published 'facts' - exposing in this context that these pamphlets have a meta-data.. who why and for whom they were published... both a historical record and a mirror on today's society and ideologies.

# 44 [7 January 2010]

Salon no.19

An Agitation Lunch
Saturday 12 December
SPACE

- Screening of Boys from the Black Stuff, programmed by Laura Oldfield Ford
- Followed Miss B’s Salon - Pamphlets: Agitation, Polemic and Design, with Modern Activity and Laura Oldfield Ford.
Helped along by a hearty soup and home-made mince pies.

The discussion took place amongst my exhibition 'What I Believe (a polemical collection)' , making use of the specially-made seat/shelves and surrounded by over 100 twentieth century pamphlets as visual aids.

Modern Activity introduced their work with booklets, copies of Le Gun and a series of pamphlets they design for Demos (a centre-left think tank) with titles like The NHS in an Age of Progressive Austerity, Service Nation and The Liberal Moment. I felt no small glee about having real-life political pamphleteers (ok.. their designers at least). Their design of the pamphlets is simple (arguably the hardest kind) with quotes on the cover and attractive little charts inside, and clearly reference the pamphlet tradition in their size and format. They have a neutrality (apparently purple being the most popular colour as it suggests neutrality.. green, red, blue and yellow all being taken! Hovering between red and blue in a 'neutral' state says a lot a me about contemporary politics though). Although not extravagant in their production values, they are also clearly  not cheap, which threw up a whole argument about the purpose of this kind of publishing, in relation to the historical purpose of the pamphlet (get it out there..). Demos and other political agencies and lobbyists obviously do still make PDFs and send info as emails, but the pamphlets publications are about standing out.. about going that bit further to make someone notice and read something. It's a 'nice' thing that has value. We were curtailed for a while in the salon by a somewhat bogus print Vs internet argument whichc concluded with agreement that the pamphlet is a choice - merely a weapon in the arsenal of possible mean of dissemination (er that would be the arsenal of non-violence).

# 43 [13 November 2009]

In place of the Miss B's Salons in November and December, I am running a weekly reading group at SPACE gallery. Details below. All welcome - to come along, just email news@spacestudios.org.uk with BOOK GROUP as the subject line to request texts.

SIXPENNY BOOK CLUB

Weekly discussions addressing in turn each of the five Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets.

Published in 1939 by Hogarth Press, this series of pamphlets gave voice to well-known authors and journalists and aimed to ‘provide thinking people with the means to consider fundamental problems in art, literature, taste and morals’.

Tuesday 17 November, 7pm
THE NEW REALISM: A DISCUSSION
By Stephen Spender
Spender’s essay expresses a disgust with radical politics – following time in Spain reporting and observing for the Communist Party of Great Britain – and calls for the artist’s ‘duty’ to be re-defined.

Tuesday 24 November, 7pm
ANTIQUARIAN PREJUDICE
By John Betjeman
A revolt against the purely antiquarian approach to buildings and the selective preservation of buildings we might now associate with the heritage industry.

Tuesday 1 December, 7pm
REVIEWING
By Virginia Woolf, with a note by Leonard Woolf
A satirical essay that labels the reviewer as ‘a louse... a distracted tag on the tail of the political kite’ and offers a new model where published reviews would be abolished.

Tuesday 8 December, 7pm
THE ARTIST AND HIS PUBLIC
By Graham Bell
Bell attributes a loss of artistic craft to the decadence of capitalist society, and appeals for a revival of technical skill in which the ‘honest craftsman’ is contrasted with the ‘deliberate fraudulence’ and ‘self-deception’ of the modernists.

All meetings at SPACE, 129-131 Mare St, Hackney, London E8 3RH

Part of the exhibition Ruth Beale: WHAT I BELIEVE (a polemical collection)

www.spacestudios.org.uk

# 42 [13 November 2009]

The work that Dave has been doing to promote the idea of local TV channels - decentralised news and programmes interspliced with, for example, music TV which he successfully piloted in Dundee – is coming to a head as the digital switchover offers up new opportunities. Whereas 3G bandwidth was sold off commercially, Dave is campaigning for some of the bandwidth freed up by analogue switch-off could be used for local TV, and funding restructured to match. The fortuitous thing is that the number of transmitters across the country allow for this. In his own words, at the moment the problem is that half-national half-local news is able to do neither well because of its lack of poor local scale. So this is a 'prefer no to' - non-participation in one system in order to create another.

We couldn’t ignore the internet of course, and dicussed briefly how tthe BBCs iplayer or user-generated content offer has prompted anti-competition criticisms, but TV still seemed to remain a separate issue. TV ain’t going away and, in fact, the subject seemed to chime with wider rhetoric about local-ness, civic engagement and responsibility, the local without the colloquial, and the ever-present need for an impartial media.

When I got home that night I was frustrated with reporting on both the big stories that day - the news on the strikes were all about 'what will happen to my letter?' and Nick Griffin, although made a fool of, wasn't wasn't given the chance to really show himself up with his policies. TV still a one-way media then.

# 41 [13 November 2009]

Salon no. 18

Miss B's Salon Behind the Salon
22 October 2009

On media and autonomy - in-coversation with Dave Rushton

At The Museum of Non-Participation - Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's Artangel Interaction project, behind Yaseen hairdressers, Bethnal Green, London

Dave Rushton joined us from Edinburgh for this special ‘salon behind the salon’ at Karen and Brad’s Museum on Non-Participation. The context gave us space to consider Dave’s area of interest and knowledge as a campaigner for local TV in light of the idea of opting in, opting out, private and public, local accountability and representation. It was a prescient night for the salon – it coincided with Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC Question Time and the nationwide postal strike.

By request from me, Dave took us on a potted history of his career over the last 30 years – from Art & Language to heading up the Institute of Local Television via local film collectives, trade union TV, a PhD on protagnonism and local TV and radio. I thought it was interesting that politicisation in the art world (Art & Language being in part a product of those reacting to art education.. the first generation of comprehensive-trained kids in art school – the first not to come from a position of privilege) led Dave to make politically minded films, to organise socially, and to engage with the dissemination of information.. from which he then gained an awareness of and reaction media control which led him into analysis and campaigning of TV. He described this shift between fighting for the interests of communities and geographical communities.

# 40 [18 October 2009]

Salon 17 (cont.)

Lucy Skaer saw negotiation of copyright (or the moral questions therein) as simply another conceptual and formal strategy to make a work. Her approach to reproducing images – remaking images through drawing, as with Hokusai’s wave or countless press photographs, her reproductions of Brancusi’s Bird in Space or through film, as her film Our Magnolia with Rosalind Nashashibi of Paul Nash’s painting – seemed actually very respectful and sensitive towards its sources. Images are either totally distorted, or reverentially replicated, somehow further elevating the stature of the original by acknowledging it as an icon.  Lucy talked about this being a means to enter into a dialogue with another artist, in fact the most direct means of doing so.

St Pierre and Michelon’s take on bootlegging – their bootlegged version of Sexymachinery magazine – seemed to revel in the ingenuity of people to either get round of flaunt copyright law… Fakes being cultural product of copyright itself. Adding value (as with Burberry) or making direct critique through parody (‘parody’ in ‘fair use’ is apparently being a real clause in US law). Treading the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy being by-the-by. There seemed to be an important point to it all about not taking popular culture as it is given to you, but rather intervening in it.

In general there was certainly a spirit of fairness and integrity, and nobody seemed to like a cheat. But a question remains about the suitability of copyright law for art and art-making -  should art be exempt? Andrew told us that the legislation is very much under discussion – and lobbyists are needed, so any passionate advocates show your hands now.