Tuesday 30 June 2009

The Age of Neo-Enightenment supported.

I have come across a useful article online 21st Century Neo-Enlightenment by
Julie Barko Germany
which supports part of my criteria for the qualification of this period being one of Enlightenment. Julie Barko Germany sets out the criteria for a social/political digital enlightenment by stipulating that in order for 21st Century Democracy to progress:

1. A system of education that enables the population to possess more than just a functional literacy. We need an education that teaches technological literacy and fosters innovation system.

2. Increased, affordable access to the Internet, including civic Wi-Fi, cybercafés and Internet stations in economically disadvantages areas, and broadband networks in rural communities.

3. A spirit of public leadership that understands and values technology, and a belief that some buzzwords of the Digital age—such as “increased openness,” “collaboration,” and “transparency”—are imperatives for public office, not clichés.

4. Additional guarantees of free speech and privacy, despite the temptations that ubiquitous computing will pose to more closely monitor citizens and restrict speech.

5. Finally, a lack of fear about and exploration of the potential of technology to make voting more accessible and more direct.


I think the manner in which Julie Barko Germany has coupled these ideas with examples by Marquis Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet is nicely put. I am aware though that the proponents of the Enlightenment were for the most part Les Grands or Bourgeois and although the likes of Jurgen Habermas cites the existence of a public sphere the access to it as a means for debate was very much restricted. One could argue that a certain level of learning should be attained before entering into a debate but the fact remains that that public sphere was not a democratised space. I can give this blog as an example of why an element of elitism might have been required - in this space I present ideas that lack clarity and are temporal and nascent but conversely how am i to improve the quality of my thought without debate?

Damn, I'm running late - I hate feeling G.C.S.E. level when I need to be Degree level to sort this muddle out. I need more evidence.

Monday 29 June 2009

SAMO © AS INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE


I've been tossing a couple of ideas around in my head today and I think it's in no small part due to Jerry Saltz' review of the Venice Biennale show. Much of what I've been reading about the Biennale has been a little negative. I think everyone is getting quite nervous about what the next "ism" is going to be. We are in flux once more, tired of post-modernism and looking inwardly to find layers of meaning. I was looking at an interesting website which catalogues some of the SAMO© images and it struck me that Jean-Michel Basquiat, Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson (of the Band Konk) were offering up ascerbic institutional critique of sorts. The anonymity of their acts was really cool and this work in particular got me into Basquiat. (In my opinion he sold out as soon as he stopped contributing to this kind of activity but that's another days blog.)
So back to the point, whilst Saltz bemoans the profusion of instituitional critque and relational aesthetics in the Biennale and wonders what is around the corner I am quietly soaking up ideas from hither and thither. I'm looking to the USA and seeing the Left reclaim the notion of personal responsibility as it's own - no longer the libertarian claxon call of the right - Obama's rhetoric is lip smackingly utopian and enlightened. I sense an undercurrent building through the art world where practice is being placed at the center of the audience's concerns (whether Saltz likes it or not) and the much hyped democratisation of the means of disseminating information and the right to assembly that is facilitated via online social networks all culminates in what we might dare to call the nascence of a Neo-Enlightenment.

So, Is it possible that we are moving into a cultural, political and philosophical period of Enlightenment with a new understanding of the Left, where information and assembly is organised via social networks based on what we have in common ideologically and intellectually and the production of cultural material/art is based on transcendence.

I mentioned this to a friend and she asked two questions:

"Do you think public life should be based on agreement?
Do you think art should be conceived in terms of transcendence?"

I think that dissent and difference are important but as a means to find concord. I believe that transendence in terms of reaching for a horizon in this world rather than plain on another world is a useful means by which to achieve an inclusive group for the production of art that seeks to move on from the aesthetics of commodity and hegemomy.

So where is my evidence of this Zeitgeist? I believe it's been happening for a while, it's not that new, and I think the rest of the world is beginning to catch up only now. Critics may be tired of relational aesthetics, socially engaged art work may seem like jumped up pedagogy or social work and street art may be so much of a commonplace that much of the impact of it's intended detourement is lost but I believe we are only at the tip of the iceberg. As new ideas and practices emanate from the East and the dissemination of work is taken out of the hands of galleries and biennales and taken up by supposed "fringe" hosts ie online social networks, I think while the sale of artworks will continue the fetishising of the art object will diminish. I think the audience will continue to ask "how much is it worth?" but now a monetary value will not be the value that is sought.

The ideas that seem old to us are barely disseminated amongst the global populace. The Neo-Enlightenment period is upon us and those more articulate than me will define it in terms that are less cloudy.

Saturday 27 June 2009

Making WORDS/worlds



This introduction to the idea of Birnbaum's curated show for the biennale illustrates an idea I am very interested in. Through semiotics and in translation the meaning of something when communicated via different languages can be quite different. This point is moot I hear you say. Well, durrr, perhaps. I am trying to imagine what my interpreation of graffiti culture has to do with a halcyon 70's NYC era. How can I appreciate it as it's intended to be. What I have, from an early age, been excited by no longer exists. I grew up watching the film Wild Style:



Which in itself is a parody of the graffiti scene. So you can imagine my facination with the aspects of versimilitude we find in cultural output. I think Marshall McLuhen put it very well when he said "Food for the mind is like food for the body, the inputs are rarly the same as the ouputs." If we consider that we consume culture and digest it then would it not be also right to regard the preperation of it as nuanced. I imagine much as my Cassoulet is to some tastes inauthentic that the creation of the art works I produce would also proove dubious to some tastes. It's this difference that I am currently interested in. In the Cult of Youth the voracious pursuit of material causes many gaps in comprehension. I recall being at a dance hall club in Munich with a group of liberal Germans who were going wild to the beats and chants of some fiercely homophobic Capleton tunes. I thought to myself, there is something wrong here. This is where the product superceeds the products content. This is a parody of a Dancehall Club, this is not ironic, this is not being post modern, this is being wittnes to blind consumerism. Rum adverts and films have conviced us this is the music to listen whilst having a good time.

These ideas are as of yet fragments - much more is yet to come. I have an artwork in the pipeline dealing with this issue, a couple actually. I should go back and read my reference books on semiotics and give Marshall Mcluhen a proper going over again.

I must manifest my research in artworks rather than blogs... I may yet become a Leben traum kunstler. A life dream artist????

The Importance of the Art

By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rembrandt or Ver Meer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished. This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

Marcel Proust, in "The Past Recaptured"

Friday 26 June 2009

Annie are you ok?



I love the optimism, the hope, the generosity which was ingrained in my youthful perception of the King of Pop. He fought the bad guys, saved the world and made it a better place. Rest in Peace MJ I never learned to moonwalk.

Thursday 25 June 2009

We build our own Utopias



A good friend of mine Alastair Wight sent me the link to the above video. I like that the film could be a parody and even is a parody inasmuch that once we start searching for meaning and context in the art world we find it. There are always connections to be made however spurious they may seem. The idea of subconscious art is hilarious, it is the absolute of the critic, I wonder if Joseph Beuys would agree? I mean, if we're all artists right?

I was at a music festival at the weekend and we were promised "art installations" - everyone is at it now... installing art, doing the place up, making it all a bit MAD!!! As is often the case the reality of the project perhaps fell somewhat short of the intention. Kelburn Castle (as you can see by following the link above) is home to one of the most exciting graffiti commissions I've ever seen - the scale of ambition by Os Gemeos and the Marquis of Glasgow was exemplary. It's a model for Estates everywhere. However, what the festival itself provided was a little less pervasive or iconic in terms of artwork... unless... we look at the festival as an opportunity to instigate some kind of Relational Aesthetic. Admittedly, in the field of Socially Engaged Artwork practitioners often seek to give voice to people who have neither the apparatus nor often the indoctrinated vocabulary to express or give evidence of their situation, in other words, to make poinient what is taking place but in the arena of the "music festival" this element of giving aid may not be so integral. I believe it is the apparatus, the tools and the skills of artists working with "relational aesthetics" or concerned with social engagement, participation and inclusiveness that would prove to be invaluable to a music festival wanting to include Art in the scope of it's cultural output.
Festival goers subconsciously or explicitly create mini utopia societies. Once through the door the economic environment is based on barter, interstice or potlach, much of the trappings of modern day life become secondary to essentials like food and drink. Social barriers are blurred and collective endeavors are undertaken. If there was someway to survey this activity and present it, a manner in which to personify or manifest, even distill this perhaps a meaningful rather than indulgent or subjective body could be formed. I'm not an anthropologist nor have I studied sociology but what I do know is that as an artist it is nigh on impossible to make a meaningful art work out of a party. One can focus on the spectacle and approach the metier of Assume Vivid Astro Focus:



or broach the Fluxus like production of the band Found but when using the festival as one's canvas one has to accept that much of ones audience may be reaching for some kind of release rather than a cerebral intervention. Is it possible to give people that and still achieve some modicum of critical artistic merit? Burning Man might be the answer it's certainly the model many festival creators look to.

In a couple of weeks I'm off to the Venice Biennale to check out Danial Birnbaums curation of this years festival. He has operated under the slogan, subject, tag-line of "Making Worlds" suggesting that this is what Art is for - we create new possibilities and ideas of how to live, how we can live. I will be blogging on this further and I also hope to develop bring some cohesion to my idea of a Relational/Socially Engaged Utopiafest.

Wednesday 17 June 2009






I wanted to revisit this old work as the space where it was located has now been torn down and redeveloped. I recently was contacted by a member of the Aberdeen FC supporters club the RED ULTRAS (Check out their photostream here)congratulating me on the piece. Looking back the work functioned really well, it was honest and egalitarian.


"Stand Free where ever you may be..."

I made this mural in a derelict fore court next to one of Aberdeen's busiest roads, it also happens to be in one of the most deprived areas of the town but I'm not sure I find that too significant. I just wanted to make a piece which would resonate on a number of levels and highlight a positive aspect of the city. Aberdeen FC "Stands free" of the Church, is non sectarian I feel it also speaks about tolerance.



Admittedly this image of partisan machismo is at odds with the intention I hoped my icon would confer but what is beautiful about it is the intencity of civic pride. It is a shame that this pride is only really visible when in conflict with another body. I would like to create more synergy in the public, more discussion, more questioning, more searching. If I can find more positives to amplify in communities all's the better. I don't want to appear superficial, I understand that sometimes it's more important to provide critique - I think Hewitt and Jordan do this well. This piece done in collaboration with Dave Beech in particular might by a useful if cynical retort to my endeavors:

Tuesday 16 June 2009

A Biologist, a Painter and a Sculptor walk into a barn...

















I made this sculpture a few weeks ago with some friends. I intend to Scale the structure up by 300% and install in on a piece of common ground. I Imagine it may be a single colour though.



Fragment from "A User’s Guide to Détournement"


....It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression. For example, in a metagraph relating to the Spanish Civil War the phrase with the most distinctly revolutionary sense is a fragment from a lipstick ad: “Pretty lips are red.” In another metagraph (The Death of J.H.) 125 classified ads of bars for sale express a suicide more strikingly than the newspaper articles that recount it.(3)

The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements. This is well known. Let us simply note that if this dependence on memory implies that one must determine one’s public before devising a détournement, this is only a particular case of a general law that governs not only détournement but also any other form of action on the world. The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead; it only temporarily survives in parodic form as long as our other enemies survive.

Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. This is the case with a rather large number of Lautréamont’s altered maxims. The more the rational character of the reply is apparent, the more indistinguishable it becomes from the ordinary spirit of repartee, which similarly uses the opponent’s words against him. This is naturally not limited to spoken language. It was in this connection that we objected to the project of some of our comrades who proposed to detourn an anti-Soviet poster of the fascist organization “Peace and Liberty” — which proclaimed, amid images of overlapping flags of the Western powers, “Union makes strength” — by adding onto it a smaller sheet with the phrase “and coalitions make war.”

Détournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least effective. Thus, the Black Mass reacts against the construction of an ambience based on a given metaphysics by constructing an ambience within the same framework that merely reverses — and thus simultaneously conserves — the values of that metaphysics. Such reversals may nevertheless have a certain progressive aspect. For example, Clemenceau [nicknamed “The Tiger”] could be referred to as “The Tiger Named Clemenceau.”

Of the four laws that have just been set forth, the first is essential and applies universally. The other three are practically applicable only to deceptive detourned elements.


“Mode d’emploi du détournement” originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Faust's Study (I) from line 1210

But now, that deep contentment in my breast,
Alas, wells up no more, inspite of all my best
Endeavours. Oh how soon the stream runs dry,
And in what parching thirst again would lie!
How often this has happened to me!
Any yet, there is a remedy:
We learn to seek a higher inspiration,
A supernatural revelation -
And where does this shine in it's fullest glory,
If not in that old Gospel story?
Here is the Greek text; I am moved to read
It's sacred words, I feel the need
Now to translate them true and clear
Into the German tongue I hold so dear.
(He opens a volume and prepares to write)
'In the beginning was the Word': why, now
I'm stuck already! I must change that; how?
Is then 'the word' so great and a high a thing?
There is some other rendering.
Which with the spirit's guidence I must find.
We read: 'In the beginning was the Mind.'
Before you write the first phrase think again;
Good sense eludes the overhasty pen.
Does 'mind' set worlds on their creative course?
It means: 'In the beginning was the Force'.
So it should be-but as I write this too,
Some instinct warns me that it will not do.
The spirit speaks! i see how it must read,
And boldy write: 'In the beginning was the Deed!'

Saturday 13 June 2009

Banksy's Homecoming



My responce to this small and brief piece:

Banksy at Bristol City Museum

I've got a couple of issues to flag up with this exhibition. Firstly, it was my understanding that this show was funded entirely by Banky but in the opening lines of the Guardian piece he was quoted as saying 'This is the first show I've ever done where taxpayers' money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off.' If this is truely the case then Banky's continued tragectory toward the centre and the establishment is a betrayal of the subject he made the crux of his work. I believe once accepted by the establishment he seeks to critique he compromises the quality of his dissent. The mere act of stencilling over a bill board or on the outside of a public gallery is far more incisive at pointing out the gap between rights of access to the means of production of culture and political or cultural hegemony than making a grandieuse gesture like re-curating the gallery in Bristol. He is acknowledging defeat, with out the expressed permission of the market he would be unable to achieve these feets, it really should leave anyone with half a brain thinking, "well... duh!"

I'm saddened to see so many gimmicky flares in this show, the falacy that he is anonymous is yet another function of the market - it maintains his brand. He may be this guy Robin Banks or maybe according to the auto-publishable font of dubious knowledge wikipedia, perhaps he isn't. The fact remains that his brand and artworks are now so heavily invested in that many top collectors and gallerists can not afford to have him unmasked. I don't think Banksy particularly revels in this or enjoys his new found celebrity - it demeans the potentcy of his work, he has always self-merchandised via his books but the cool thing about that was he was actually out there making work, if you saw it with your own eyes it was a massive reward. If you saw it in the book you lost out, you had been had, more fool you for buying into the "Fopp-ish" world of cool.

I think what is needed now is a more considered critical appreciation of the work Banksy produces. Let's not judge him on the magnitude of the gesture but on the quality and integrety of the work. If Banksy has paid for this entire show to be put on he is on the right track, certainly parting company with his Gallery Agent Steve Lazarides would suggest a desire to return to the honest interventionism that he made his name with. In this current environment more than ever we need artists who are willing to show us new ways of understanding the world, who provide effective platforms for discussion and facilitate a means to move forward as a society. Let's stop buying overinflated prints and glossy books and get back out on the streets and search for evidence of enlightenment.