Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Socialism would never have entered the world if its proponents had sought onlyto excite the enthusiasm of the working classes for a better order of things. Whatmade for the power and authority of the movement was that Marx understoodhow to interest the workers in a social order which would both benefit them and appear to them as just. It is exactly the same with art. At no point in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art; they can be won over only to one nearer to them. And the difficulty consists precisely in finding a form for art such that, with the best conscience in the world, one could hold that it is a higher art. This will never happen with most of what is propagated by the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie.

Notes from A Politicized Art

A Politicized Art – one day symposium

Loughborough University School of Art & Design

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Towards the formation of a critical counter public sphere: A one-day symposium to explore the relationship between art practice and the public sphere.

In the debased public sphere of the mass media, public opinion is administered, monitored, managed and manufactured by the private interests of big business, including the private interests of the owners of global media companies and the commercial interests of advertisers and sponsors.

Critical art is emancipatory, dialogical and dissenting. It is recalcitrant and unmanageable. A critical art is a politicized art and therefore concerned with the current condition of liberal democracy; this symposium asks how can critical art practices bring their autonomy to bear upon a debased public sphere and enable the formation of a critical counter public sphere?

Speakers: Malcolm Barnard, Freee Art Collective, Andrew Hunt, Marysia Lewandowska, Jim McGuigan, Malcolm Miles and Simon Sheikh.

Jim McGuigan – The Cultural Public Sphere: Critical Measure of Public Culture?

Jurgen Habermas, ‘Between Facts and Forms’ (1996), p381

‘Media plays to the politics of the day’

Malcolm Miles – Art as a Public Sphere (Now and Then)

www.criticalspaces.org.uk

www.malcolmmiles.org.uk

Samuel Becket, ‘Endgame’

Public space/realm/sphere

Aesthetic       —-    Social

Art        —-    Dissent

‘Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home’, (IAPDH), Liverpool

Royal Standard – Future Visions, Liverpool

UTOPIA

Use of art in the public space/realm masks the other problems with regeneration, i.e., the depression of the minority through the controlling of them via the design of the public space/realm/sphere

Capitalism is nothing and unworkable without the very people it aims to exclude.

Art is nothing and unworkable without the very people it aims to exclude.

J Robertson, & F Jameson, ‘Post Modernism, Politics & Art’

Freee Art Collective ( Beech, Hewitt and Jordan) – A Politicized Art

-    Slogan and Reimbodiement

Take a position and divide opinion

-    Dissemination

Call Forth Collaborators

-    Contexts

Challenge Hegemony

Malcolm Barnard – Fashion: Public and Private

Words for Private – Idios – Greek

- Idiom – Latin (?)

Words for Publlc – Hubris

- Publicus

Different language interpretation of works

Jacques Derrida – idiomatic writing

Ludwig Wittengstein – ideas on language – private/public

Jean-Jacques Rousseau –     Bommell     –     Adolf Loos

C18                                                 C19                       C20

Marysia Lewandowska – Social Cinema

London, Architectural Biennial, 2006

Projections, screens, cinemas placed around London – onto private housing, a housing estate, opposite Tate Modern.

‘This is Tomorrow’, Whitechapel, 1956

Use of archive material

Simon Sheikh – Manufacturing Dissent

B-books – collection of essays, Autumn 08

3rd generation of institutional critique use it to ‘defend’ museums/ organizations

2nd generation to try and overthrow

1st generation to criticize

Critical              —-           Political

|

?

Criticism as a critic and as a celebration.

Fluxus was used to put forward a political point of view yet was not all of the artists theoretical practice. Their work was politicized yet not political

Noam Chomsky, ‘Political Economy of the Mass Media’

Erosion of autonomy

Bourgeois public sphere

Corporate public sphere

Andrew Hunt – Regional Curating as a Counter-Public Sphere

Amateur and the Idiot

Regional as an opposite to the centre – a marginal place

Affirmative critique and antagonism.

Affirmation         vs        Politics

Mark MacGowan

Plastique Fantastique

John Russell

Wow Wow

Focal Gallery, Southend

‘Critical of Political Critical

Freee Art Collective

The Freee Art Collective (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Melanie Jordan) use protest, language and text within the public sphere, and are interested in the politicization and critical interrogation of art through the possibilities of the public space. They aim to question the role of art in today’s society and the art market itself. Using the language of Marxism, Art & Language, the anti-art and anti-aesthetic of Dadaism, and the writings of Adorno and Habermas they attempt to activate the public through the use of the public sphere and of public art. They aim to practice what they call a counter-hegemonic art to reinvigorate the idea of Art as negative, absent and lacking. Freee use both the public arena and gallery space in attempt to bring the two closer together, turning the gallery into a public space. Using language in a questioning, non-art, and the philistine manner of historical Conceptual Art, they wish to give a voice to the truth and in doing so take sides rather than, in the contemporary art world use of words in an ironic or non-committal way. The artists have previously worked together on several critical public art projects for exhibitions such as Gavin Wade’s ‘Strategic Question: What are Aesthetics?’, Venice Biennale, 2005; B+B’s ‘Real Estate’, ICA, London, 2005; IPS, Birmingham, 2007; and Nought to Sixty, ICA, 2008.

Link to a program

This is a link to as program made by artist, Pete Hindle. This could run on a number of different platforms and in a number of ways, including mobile phones. Different versions of this could also be possible.

http://code.google.com/p/dont-let-the-media/

Låt in te Media ha Monopol på Yttrandefriheten

Swedish translation

Låt in te Media ha Monopol på Yttrandefriheten