Ben Jones

James & Jones have recently contributed an article for /seconds journal. The article is framed around an email conversation discussing their recent online project ‘31proposals’

The article can be found here.

Socialism would never have entered the world if its proponents had sought only to excite the enthusiasm of the working classes for a better order of things. What made for the power and authority of the movement was that Marx understood how 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.

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

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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