Collaboration, Conversation and the Intertwining of Material and Immaterial Worlds: a reflection on the Mothership residency

In April this year I began a four week residency as part of Anna Best’s Mothership Residencies project. I used the opportunity open up the notion of conversation to the possibilities of collaboration both with humans and non-humans. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of affects and becoming, and Karen Barad’s explorations of human and non-human agents, I set out to start a conversation about the nature of conversation and collaboration in the art-site relations of the artist’s residency. At the Mothership person-site relations became part of an affective praxis in opposition to alienating and dehumanising effects of neoliberalism – individualism, competitiveness, exchangism, deskilling, social atomisation and so on. Harriet Hawkins (2014) stresses the importance of shared labour – literally collaboration – in transforming individual and collective consciousness. She uses gardening – a key aspect of my residency – as an example of a ‘grounded’ practice that has the power to disrupt and reconfigure the habitual relations of everyday life:

We could suggest that the physical, discursive, and haptic experiences of shared labour… was part of the creation of a rupture in everyday practices from within which new identities and shared consciousness could emerge (Hawkins, 2014: 170).

The unique labour relations of the residency were an initial source of suspicion as I adopted the cynical post-human perspective of trying to analyse the power relations between host and guest and the exact terms of labour exchange. However, in attempting to calculate and quantify these relations, I found that rather than reflecting the neoliberal idea that altruistic acts are are often thinly veiled opportunism and that everyone is ultimately self-serving, the residency provoked a sense that the reciprocal nature of the collaboration had far more humane dimensions. It seemed that the more I tried to quantify the exchange, particularly in relation to labour value, because I was not paying money to be there, the more the things shattered to reveal human truths and a qualitative value way beyond any kind of contractual arrangement. Thus my attempts to provoke a breakdown of assumed neoliberal labour relations were unjustified as the layers fell away to reveal a very human conversation about not only the need for people to live together but also the importance of bringing things together that are usually held apart. Instead of finding an illusionary micro-utopia sustained by privilege, which masked true power and property relations, I found a situation of honesty – a genuine attempt to make new worlds and recuperate old ones. Small-scale organic farming is an uphill struggle where the old binaries of the humans pitted against nature are initially reinforced, however, in responsible and ethical engagement with complex ecosystems, culture / nature binaries are eroded. Pestilence ceases to become a non-human enemy to be wiped out with petrochemicals when ecosystems are in balance. The context for the residency was not only thought-provoking but also provided a space for dialogue between humans and non-humans alike – “a potential space for collaborative thinking”, as one of my friends put it. One of the key things that emerged from the residency on reflection was the notion of ‘maternal space’ – of how, out of necessity, things of difference are brought together. Instead of seeing disruptions as inconveniences that break our ‘trains of thought’, by being open to ‘external’ factors and intrusions we are able to open out to new and emergent ways of being and seeing that foster generative creative processes. My challenge was to move beyond provocation as a means of ‘exploding’ power and property relations, and to embrace collaborative conversation as a means of gently unpicking the complexities of context without ignoring tensions and differences. In the words of Harriet Hawkins (2014), to develop truly collaborative art-site relations we must ‘remain open to the generative complexities of a given site… to be able to recognise the problematics of context, without sacrificing the ability to work productively within the community…’ (Hawkins, 2014: 166).

Hawkins, H. (2014). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. London: Routledge.

You can read my feedback to host artist Anna Best on her Mothership Residencies blog.

A FOOL'S PARADISE:

Remains of Spring Cleansing Ritual (installation views)

Figure of Eight (installation views)

Flesh of the World: Powerstock / Abu Ghraib (installation view and details)

 

Asymmetrical Codependence (installation views / details)

Discarded bath tub found on Anna's land

Perfomance stills from Spring Cleansing Ritual II: #cleanforthequeen

The Tower (Inverted)

Figure of Eight II: site / interface (video still)

Figure of Eight II: site / interface (HD video)

Barthes / Burgin at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 13th February-16th April

Roland Barthes, Dessin n°393, daté du 21 mai 1972.

The final exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, before moving from Southampton University’s Highfield Campus to its new central location, brings together two distinctly separate yet intimately entwined critical thinkers. Shown for the first time in the UK are a selection of Roland Barthes’ little known drawings brought together with three pieces by Burgin. The influence of Barthes on Burgin’s work both as a writer and artist is well known. Not only are several of Burgin’s essays in direct dialogue with Barthes’ writings but there is also a distinct theoretical influence on Burgin’s practice as an artist. It seems like over-simplification to suggest that Burgin, like Barthes, is first and foremost a writer, as the two aspects of his practice are in obvious dialogue, yet there is also a degree of separation between the two; a kind of translation which takes place in order to allow the work to live beyond theory. Burgin himself acknowledges a certain distance between himself and the algorithmically driven cultural developments of alter-modernity. Whilst he acknowledges his fascination with computer games, for example, he prefers to observe them and to “read about them”, which for him is “the way intellectuals experience life”. This is not a scathing criticism of Burgin, however, for he seems to retain a certain idealism about the generative potential of games engines beyond the “pre-packaged”; beyond fixed rules and terms of engagement. Indeed he is particularly interested in the first-person video game Dear Esther, because there are “no rules”.

Barthes’ works on paper are somewhere between script and painting, which is most obviously influenced by Cy Twombly, whom Barthes wrote about, most notably, in Cy Twombly: Works on Paper and The Wisdom of Art. Barthes’ drawings are rhythmic and ideosynchratic; resembling Japanese calligraphy, hand drawn maps and the repetitive ‘carefree’ motifs of phonebook doodles. They are worlds away from the patriarchal violence and big-business spectacle of abstract expressionism. They also have a joyous exuberance of one delighting in the properties of drawing materials. His marks seem as considered yet unselfconcious as those to be found on pen testing pads in stationary shops. His images, if one can call them that, are anything but representational. His placement of marks suggest a flow of energy and dialogue between them that draws our attention to the paper and undermines traditional figure-ground relations. Yet as his works on headed hotel paper suggest, his fetishism in the action of applying ink to paper and mark marking, in these terms, becomes merely a way of guiding the speed and flow of ink and the pressure of the hand. Therefore if these works are representations, they are traces of body space, movement, muscle memory. Yet perhaps it is better to think of them in the terms of the Situationists, as a détournement of the image-making process. Barthes perverts the desire for representation into a pleasurable act of what de Certeau terms ‘making do’ – a means of losing oneself in a meditative state; a similataneous awakening of material consciouness and a putting subjectivity to sleep.

Burgin’s digital projections combine image and text or ‘intertitles’, inserted between images. These include quotations from Barthes, Milan Kundera and Philip K. Dick. The three of Burgin’s works included in the exhibition – one of which was commissioned especially – use games engines to produce what he term’s ‘moving stills’, which, whilst animated, explore images through subtle shifts that elaborate Renaissance perspectival techniques via impossible viewing points. Burgin suggest that in terms of image-making and in the context of the gallery space, these works are a development of the representational tradition of painting rather than photography or film. Yet there is also a great emphasis on breaking down the constraints of Renaissance illusionism. In presenting the viewer with impossible viewpoints, Burgin provides a post-corporeal vision that mirrors the transcendence of internet technologies. Likewise this disorientating reverie in the unpredictability of the text disunifies and fragments subjectivity and dislocates Text from Work. In other words it liberates the utterence from the speaker, the signifier from the signified, the script from it’s institutionally supported or authorial reading / writing. And what is left, Barthes would describe as signifiance: an open and generative process of textual and inter-textual potentiality. Burgin brings texts together in open and contingent ways, yet prevents their internal or cross pollination. He is the horticulturist that keeps the bees from the flowers or removes their stamen or pistils; neutering meaning and thus the fruition of Work. The Textual pleasure, as Barthes calls it, comes from the oscillation between familiarity and the shock of disorientation at the breakdown in language; the lack of definable fruit. The opening up of desire presents the vertiginous void beneath it. In this direction, Burgin is more of a reader than a maker; a flirter with texts. His practice becomes a pleasurable dance across a multiplicity of texts. He touches the petals of a multitude of flowers, yet collects pollen from none. In a sense, Burgin does not commit to knowing or being. His work is a flirtation with heterotopia: other spaces, other ideas, other possibilities, other beings. It becomes a way of foregrounding his enunciations so that his contingent utterances are not bound to a singular narrator / author. He takes pleasure in actively demonstrating the lack of distinction between reader and writer. He is not making anything; he is lost in textual production; he is lost in Text. This is not simply to say that in his cerebral transcendence he becomes incorporeal, but that in the hybrid composition of authorship, the subjective whole is lost. To quote Barthes’ most famous essay The Death of the Author: ‘Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’. Yet, paradoxically, Burgin’s position on the loss, erasure and atrophy has a distinctly critical ambivalence. Like the public coffee house overlooking the Bosphorous visualised in his work A Place To Read, the clearing of social spaces in common and subsequent replacement with anonymous bastions of globalisation, demonstrates the deeper problems of valourising the neutrality of a post-ideological atopias. That globalisation remains a historical process in which one form of power is atrophied by another; and we are all authors of that process.

Flat Surface Painting, Michael Simpson at Spike Island, Bristol - 16 January to 27 March

Bench Painting 67 [Bruno Resurrect] (reworked 2008) 
Oil on Canvas 
245 x 518 cm


Michael Simpson studied painting at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. Yet while his peers were embracing the brave new world of Pop Art, Simpson turned to the past in order to recalibrate and reconfigure the transformations of faith, illusion and transcendence in secular society. Rather than simply holding a mirror up to social and cultural structures, Simpson’s paintings dig deeper, in ways that align them with Foucault’s methodological approach. Simpson is an archaeologist of embedded power systems of discipline, regulation and illusion. Indeed, both his fascination with the writings and life of Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance scholar burned at the stake for heresy, and what Simpson terms as “the infamy of religious history”, become ways of disentangling the relationship between representation and institutional exclusion, in an age in which aesthetics are dominant. As well referencing the composition and perspectival techniques of Renaissance painting, the Leper Squint series specifically refer to the viewing holes built into the walls of churches that once allowed the inadmissible to ‘participate’ in sermons without entering the congregation. Here, the Renaissance motif of the architectural frame becomes an allegory for our times. In an age of where ‘choice’ and ‘participation’ are the buzz words through which to engage individuals as legal subjects, the screen and the interface masks the power and property relations of political agency. The frame is key in determining our over-identification with institutions of power. Whether it is the neoliberal pedagogies of Big Brother, Dragons Den and the X-Factor or the binary interface Tinder, the frame invites audience into artwork, whilst at the same time ultimately excluding us from its means of production. Here, illusionary forms become part of a technocratic system for rationalising and reorganising labour value and exchange, as exploitation of ‘bare life’, and for the exclusion and eventual elimination of non-participatory subjects. In other words, the interface becomes the dehumanising means necessary for the cultural and institutional rationalisation of Social Darwinism. 

Squint 18 (2015)

Oil on Canvas

229 x 121 cm

Paradoxically, whilst Simpson is deeply critical of ideological dogma and the brutality of organised religion, his paintings also adopt an ambivalence towards the obfuscating glamour and of pop culture and the illusions of our seemingly liberated times. These works are far from agnostic and have a deeply meditative resolve, which balances hermetic withdrawal with critical reflection on the social, cultural and physical architectures of exclusion. Simpson plays with the complex and paradoxical relationship between belief and illusion, playing off the acetic language of American minimalism against the illusionary tropes of renaissance painting. His paintings do not conform to the ‘liberated’ anti-illusionism of minimalism nor the bank-friendly ambivalence of Abstract Expressionism, which Nelson Rockefeller's once famously described as “free enterprise painting”. Instead, Simpson uses the dialogue between illusion and pure form, as a way of questioning the neutrality our architectures of exclusion; the ambivalence that reduces migrants, the homeless, the elderly, the displaced and the marginalised to ‘bare life’. Equally this makes us reflect on the occupation of public space by corporations, in which sovereignty over non-legal subjects is instated with makeshift architecture, the introduction Public Space Protection Orders and the infamous brutality of anti-homeless spikes and on the spot fining.

Far from Simpson’s paintings adopting the critical and complicit stance of Pop Art, they are, in fact deep ethical reflections on the politics of illusion. Thus, in the flesh, they are far from flat and shiny. The surfaces are often heavily textured as if a comb has being dragged methodically through the paint, perhaps in a gesture towards the minimalist paintings of Zebedee Jones. Up close, the illusionary techniques are thwarted as the brush skims the ridges of these surfaces. Yet, as in the case of the meticulously painted shroud-like cloths that appear in some of his Bench Painting series, seemingly weighing down the coffin-like blocks, the adherence to classical painting is challenged by a lightness of touch, which renders this drapery as the ghostly, untouchable projection of cinema. In this direction, Simpson has increasingly described these works as vanitas paintings. In doing this he presents us with a deeply personal paradox, the relationship between figuration and transcendence (his Catholic bodily conscience) and the ontological value in rehearsing death and mortifying the flesh. Indeed, this reflects the paradoxical nature of Giordano Bruno’s fate. In not renouncing his ideas and in his adherence to his belief in the power of transcendence over the body until the bitter end, Bruno ultimately presented himself to the authorities as ‘bare life’. Conversely, he became Christ-like – a body deemed unworthy of life yet in possession of a spiritual and intellectual core, untouchable by his persecutors.

The austere, coffin-like structures in his Bench Paintings appear to float, perhaps alluding to both the resurrection of Christ and the paradoxical relationship between hermetic ascension and the transcendence of enlightenment thinking. Indeed, Simpson has confessed a disliking of gravity, which becomes a Cartesian battle between the desire for intellectual and bodily transcendence and our earthbound nature. Here, the enlightenment shift masks the corporeal relations between power and freedom, previously reinforced by medieval authoritarianism and now reproduced in the biopolitical sphere of liberal forms of governance. Whether its the need for individuals to reproduce and sustain livelihoods within an ever narrowing performative field or the control and regulation of migration, the relationship between the desire for freedom and the exercise of power ultimately comes back to the human body and its right to thrive or wither away. Simpson’s paintings make us all too aware of the cognitive dissonance between the corporeal awareness and representational illusion. Not only does he draw our attention to the weight and encumbrance of the body but also to the conflict between the flat space of virtual projection and the ‘flesh of the world’. The textural and gestural qualities maintained by the act of painting, recalls Merleau-Ponty, in reminding us of the ‘ubiquity of body’ in an age of screen surfaces. Likewise, the minimist trompe-l'œils, invite the bodily imagination to project itself into virtual space more readily than the transcendent cybernetic passivity of the screen interface. Beyond the Cartesian elaboration of the internet, our Godlike propriety over virtual worlds and the impenetrability of the touch screen, the surface of painting reminds us of our own bodies. Here, as artist and writer Bernice Donzelmann suggests, ‘surface is flesh, of sorts’.

Simpson paintings seem to reflect the ways in which the religious illusions that once maintained the deep structures of power and property, as exercised by church and crown, are transformed from the direct disciplining and punishment of bodies – imprisonment, torture and execution – and the allowance or denial of life, to remote governance and the regulation of bodily freedoms and life choices, in which individuals are allowed to choose from multiple paths to either inclusion and life, on the one hand and exclusion and death on the other. Likewise, the Christian parable of ‘the broad and narrow way’ is transformed into a kind of Social Darwinist ‘Wacky Races’, where the object is to install fake scenery to trick your competitors into thinking they are heading towards their own ‘finish lines’, when they have in fact been fast-tracked towards the abyss.

For me, the sheer brutality of contemporary forms of exclusion is represented in the perspectival devices of Simpson’s un-inhabitably shallow architectural spaces. These are not only the spaces of purgatory and divine judgement but the façades, architraves and doorways in which the homeless, the mentally ill, the young, political outsiders and other disenfranchised loiterers wait to be ‘moved on’. Hey remind us that we live in society in which, despite illusions to the contrary, it is all too apparent that we cannot transcend the body. The coffin like forms in Simpson’s Bench Painting series, are a sober reminder of the biopolitical reality of our agnostic times; that subjective freedoms and life choices are ultimately bound to the human body; its inclusions and exclusions, its capacity to thrive or die.

Qwaypurlake

Hauser and Wirth Somerset

15^th November – 31^st January

David Wojtowycz, The Lake (2012)

There is nothing more unsettling in our tumultuous times, than images of nature appearing to act naturally. In the age of the Anthropocene, a trip to the Somerset countryside no longer has the same picturesque, nostalgia-inducing appeal that once enticed caravaners and watercolourists out of the suburbs. Landscape is no longer witness to the dream of reason. Sublime and technological sublime are now entangled in a romantic embrace of slow-death; locked in the mutual chokehold of the forever undead. The hills really do have eyes, but this time not those of alienated savages but of an alien landscape – the nature once feared before it was tamed and refashioned in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Or perhaps these are the eyes of surveillance, following us from the city. A gaze that follows us from within and without our bodies, oscillating between perceived unity and abject thingness, as we peer from behind ourselves. Hidden in the foliage the gaze that watches identifies both with the unknown threat of horror cliché and Benjamin's camera operator but never with the zombie actor whose sightseeing corpse is framed. It is the familiar yet unidentifiable gaze that surveils us in our endless work lives as we chase the next project or tweet another opinion, and as we check-in with our fictions of how best to promote ourselves online or how the world perceives us. It is the blind reptilian gaze of neoliberalism, which doubles as our own, dreaming our dreams and enabling the reconfiguration of power and control around our CV careers; tightening around everyday life with every breath – every blog post – like a vast boa constrictor. It watches us mockingly as we hopelessly try to reconcile the rift between self and world with the sheer will and conviction of our Gore-Texed rural perambulations. It is the GPS that pinpoints our exact location as we scan the view for signs of life. It is the faint intangible atmosphere that haunts us as we attempt to stop the buzzing swarm of me-ness and penetrate the smug mimesis of the landscape before us that withholds its materiality from representation.

Approaching Hauser and Wirth Somerset by car is a reminder that middle class mythologies still hang like an opulent damask veil over our disquieting new landscape. My friends and I debate whether or not wellies will be needed for the short walk from the visitor car park to the lavishly refurbished farm buildings. We glimpse the bistro in which we have a table booked for lunch. We peruse the selection of art theory books including, unironically, Clare Bishop's critique of participatory art, 'Artificial Hells'. On entering Qwaypurlake, a group exhibition curated by Simon Morrissey, what strikes you is the apparent tameness, even conservatism, of the works included. The seeming mundaneness of some of the photographic images, for example, and the reassuring familiarity of the landscape images, lull us into a false sense of security. Look again. These are not the landscapes you're looking for! The works here are representations of an older landscape – the pagan landscape of soil and life-cycles, geology and 'deep time', pantheism and animistic energies – that is hidden just below the septic aberration of space and time we call capitalism. The strange resonances that come from many of the works are like clarion calls from our planet, not in the egotistical sense of it asking us to save it but a deeper tone. The voice of landscape as a primordial echo – a shrug of knowing acceptance or an earthly stirring to shake off the sedimented crust of scar tissue we call human culture.

The landscape of Qwaypurlake, a title taken from the road leading out of Bruton in the direction of Frome called Quaperlake Street, is a sentient one. The exhibition most obviously draws inspiration from of Stanislaw Lem's novel 'Solaris' (1961), which is centred on a conscious oceanic planet. As global sea levels rise, this vision offers a glimpse of a very possible dystopian future. Indeed, the first work we encounter is a film by David Wojtowycz that depicts a familiar yet alien seascape centrally divided by a pier. At first, the scene seems oddly mundane, until the viewer becomes aware that the waters on either side of the pier behave in strange and unnatural ways. To the right the sea is choppy and convulsing, as if broken by jumping fish, and to the left the water surface is still as a pond, pulled flat as if by some unknown force. A sonic resonance burrs from the well-like forms of Kit Poulson / Alex Baker's 'transmitters'. Jem Southam and Aaron Scuhman's sparse, bleak landscapes focus on dew ponds, and smouldering wood and ashes, respectively, to produce eerie post-human narratives of absence / presence. The tree spirits are tangibly present in the dense boscage of James Ravilious' black and white photographs and Ben Rivers' mud-daubed pagan ancestors watch us from the undergrowth. An undercurrent of primitivism runs through the exhibition through Michael Dean's large standing forms, Elizabeth Frink's mutant creatures and Han's Coper's Cycladic forms. Likewise, Daphne Wright's workaday beasts, echo both the harsh realities of our rural past – enclosures, hunting rights, poaching – and the neoclassical spender of the landed gentry. Indeed, 'Stallion' (2009) is a particular startling sculpture, whose grandiose classicism, fuses power and status with the brutal realism and mundane functionality of an equine autopsy. Heather and Ivan Morison's sculptures play in the archetypal landscapes of British surrealist tradition, mixing Nash's rural 'equivalents' with monstrous sublimatory forms. Ian McKeever's thingly paintings have a presence reminiscent of Rothko's Segram Murals, and are slightly menacing. The interplay of light and dark dances on the canvases like daylight from a rock crevice catching the torrential flow of an underground river. The thickness and darkness of the paint is deceptive as there is a gentle melancholy to the gesture and movement of the paint. There is a filmic quality to these paintings. As my eyes panned across their huge surfaces and inky root-like forms, I was reminded of the murky painted backdrops for the subterranean scenes in the 1978 animated adaptation of Watership Down. Of course, the inclusion of Frink and Coper, together with Peter Lanyon and Richard Deacon, remind us that British modernism has always looked beyond the human and engaged with the affective nature of landscape: attentively slowing down human temporal experience to the 'deep time' of geology and nature, and listening to animistic objects and sentient landscapes that speak to us from a time before we were here to listen and will continue to resonate long after we are gone. 

 

Aaron Schuman, Untitled (Bonfire), from the series Summer Set (2012)

Shezad Dawood: Towards the Possible Film

 Still from Towards the Possible Film (2014)

By his own admission, Shezad Dawood has a habit of naming shows after his films. On reflection, the reason for this becomes self-apparent in his wider practice. Dawood feels that studio work is an intrinsic part of the reflective process of film-making. His diverse studio practice, which also includes, painting, sculpture, digital animation and neon works, happens alongside his films. Long production schedules provide an important gestation period for his work – a time the artist describes as “whilst the film is cooking”. Even after works are finished, there is still the process of responding to different exhibition contexts. The dialogue between 'finished' pieces is as much a part of the conceptual process as his research. For Dawood, “the work takes place between the work”. Whilst the film is the sun around which the planets turn, the other works speak with equal clarity about their shared multi-dimensional worlds. Paintings made on canvases of vintage fabrics produced by nomadic Pakistani women in the 1970s (prior to the military coup of '79), are evolving hybrids. These textiles can be viewed in a similar way to art cinema – as experimental media. They once operated as open and destabilising forms of cultural production that sat outside of the dogmatic religious and ideological structures that finally put an end to them. They are culture as, what Bhabha (1994) terms, 'empirical knowledge'. The neon works are both modern and mystical – a balancing act between formal and spiritual meditation. A digital animation of the head of novelist and scientific philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, uses photos taken at different angles and ages to produce a multi-dimensional “quantum portrait”. The exhibition also includes another film, A Mystery Play (2010), to make comparisons between three types of magic – stage, screen and the occult. Here, Dawood continues to explore his interest in Buster Keaton and silent film. He does this via Keaton's links to Houdini, together with the twin histories of Vaudeville and the Occult in the city of Winnipeg – a city whose masonic architecture becomes a metaphor for the loss of progress and the embeddedness of power structures.

The film at the epicentre of Dawood's (re)collected body of work, Towards the Possible Film (2014), opens with a series of powerful images – the pyramid and winking eye of canary wharf, a jaguar, a Mayan pyramid – totems of power, mastery and sacrifice. As the jaguar passes across the screen, it seems to connect two seemingly very different kinds of power, the mystical and the mystifying; magic both ancient and modern. From Spanish colonised Central America we travel to the Moroccan coast with its similar legacy of occupation. We then see a close-up of a blue-skinned astronaut uttering a Marcusian commentary in Berber dialect. The subtitles read: “The  old sense  of  alienation  is  no longer possible. When  individuals identify  with a lifestyle  imposed  on  them, and  through  it  experience gratification and satisfaction,  their alienation  is  subsumed  by  their own alienated existence”.

Beyond setting the scene, description is useless in communicating the sheer complexity of the film's references: pre-Islamic animist cultures in Morocco, the animistic landscape as witness, the triad of ancient religions in Mexico, India and north African connected via Phoenician trade routes and centred on myths originating from visitations by alien astronauts. Dawood problematises postcolonial narratives in the face of the complexities of globalisation – the accelerated violence of neoliberal global capitalism, paradoxically both atomising and uniting us. Persecutor becomes persecuted and coloniser becomes colonised. Obtuse allegorical references act as both pinpricks of ethical reflection and dystopian omens. A piece of lemon rind in seaweed connotes the carrion-eating low-impact lifestyles of those who choose decent from capitalism. How do we reconcile the smallest actions with their incomprehensible global consequences? Pre-Islamic natives stomp their feet, perhaps asking the landscape for answers. They face the sea, waiting for it to speak, like the sentient oceanic planet in Solaris. What emerges are two blue-skinned visitors from another world who see this world as overlaying multi-dimensional fragments. An act of extreme violence perpetrated by a 'native' to one of the alien colonists / tourists / gods, becomes a question – like that of Meursault spoken through his killing of an Arab in Camus' novel. Where is the subject in subjectivity? God is everywhere and nowhere, the greater forces hold us in their gravitational pull.

Ultimately however, it is pointless to endlessly dissect Dawood's post-human parafield because to theorise is to close-down, and for him, art is like “shattering the bedrock of culture” to reveal new layers, new openings. Dawood's practice is an empirical process of opening out – of making “successive openings” in the binary landscape, through which, in Barthes' terms, we can 'outplay the paradigm'; to reveal 'obtuse meaning', or even 'post-meaning' (Barthes, 2002). After all, as the artist suggests, “we are all just objects thinking we're subjects”.

Being in Love is Dangerous

"Being in Love is Dangerous" (2015) is a project in which I took the habitual field of DIY as a starting point, in order to interrogate the relationship between material and immaterial labour, work and leisure, in neoliberal society. In isolating material labour from the creative act of art, I was able to explore the potential of making and embodied geographic relations to disrupt flows within the habitual discources and representations of capitalism, and to attempt to produce - through practice, performance and performativity - alternative modes of being and becoming.

The room interior was designed the youngest member of the host family and all materials were bought from corporate owned DIY stores. I walked from the host family's house in Southbourne to Castle Point retail park, Bournemouth, on three consecutive days to collect materials including three 15kg bags of Homebase 'beach pebbles'. One of the journeys was documented in the following video, which plays with the idea of slowed-down 'zombie' walking, attentive engagement with non-human objects, and fissures and disruptions in the spatial and temporal flows of late-capitalist geographies. The video includes music by Pink Turns Puke. 

 

The title for the project is taken from David Salle, who argues that “being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you’ve never had it so good”. This statement can be taken literally as a warning towards the mythologies of romantic relationships and their embeddedness within the power and property structures of late-capitalism. However, the statement also allows us to consider the ways in which subjectivity is shaped by capitalism as we engage in everyday creativities such as DIY as part of the endless work of self-making and the 'affective labour' of disseminating our efforts within networks of humans and non-humans. Thus, the home becomes a shop front for the self and its wider habitus. Individualism places identity solely in the hands of the markets, it focuses our attention on the material and symbolic property required to shape who we are rather than what we can become. Yet, the power and property relations of subjectivity are rarely just our own. For Foucault (1998), 'technologies of the self' work as a dispositif, or apparatus, through which power is exercised upon individual bodies within the biopolitical structures of late-capitalism. 

Fire surround clad in 'beach pebbles' bought from Homebase, near Castle Point retail park, and brought back on foot, despite house being a few minutes walk from the sea.

Wood cladding 'trompe-l'œil': I wanted the gifting of labour to be a gifting of skilled labour to oppose the deskilling of the neoliberal workplace and the economic rationalisation of skill and craft as entrepreneurial capital in the creative economy.  

 

Recomposition of the total amount of masking tape used to create divisions between planks on mural.

The initial aim of this project was to take a phenomenological approach to the performance of 'work', in order to critique the relationship between material and immaterial labour in everyday production. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri (2011) suggest, ‘[w]hen immaterial production becomes hegemonic, all the elements of the capitalist process have to be viewed in a new light’ (Hardt and Negri, 2011: 25). In the everyday structures of neoliberalism, labour and work are the same thing! Immaterial labour becomes a productive force, that proliferates – when aligned with the big data revolution – increasingly quantifiable surplus value through the unpaid work of everyday life. On these terms it becomes increasingly difficult to mobilise a critique of work. The immaterial labour of everyday production blurs the boundaries between work and non-work to such an extend that work is prevalent both in and out of the workplace. A further aim of this project, therefore, was to make visible the immaterial work of everyday life and to use performance as a way of “doing” work, phenomenologically, in order to isolate its affects. Methodologically, I have attempted to articulate a series of affective relations by using practice and performativity as a means of opening up to – and feeling – the process of becoming in order to critique the conditions of work and leisure in neoliberal society. 

My 'work' became problematic, as neither skilled labour nor the creative act could be rationalised in economic terms or exchanged as capital or labour value.

The 'soft touch' rug.

The performance took place, in (and on) several stages. The first stage involved walking to a large “out-of-town” retail park, over several days, to purchase decorating materials and bringing them back to the host's house. This process reconnected the act of labour with material and spatial ways of thinking – for example the difficulties of carrying 'beach pebbles', bought from a large DIY store, to their destination – the house, which is, unironically, a few minutes walk from the beach. On the second day I began the work of cladding a fireplace in the pebbles, and on subsequent days completed this task along with the rest of the decorating – including the creation of a 'trompe-l'œil' of wood panelling on one wall. This process highlighted the nature of skilled work in an age where the de-skilling of the workplace is a neoliberal trick to perpetuate low wages, precarity and interchangeability employees. Likewise, the possession of hard skills and creative talent, leaves individuals vulnerable to the insecurity of the marketplace. It is not enough to possess a skill or creative propensity, tradespeople and creative workers must also be “front-facing” affective labourers – ceaselessly smiling, eternally grateful and polite self-publicists, tirelessly working their magic on others to stay ahead in the marketplace. 

Absolute Radio: a stupefying mix of masculine melancholy, nostalgia and normative advertising. A false haven from the turbulent seas of 'crisis capitalism'.

The receits: all time-stamped as evidence of my presence 'within' systems of immaterial labour and capitalist exchange.

 

As the performative engagement with the work wound-down, and the space was re-staged as an installation, the performance took to a new stage, upon which I became a 'tour guide', explaining the project to visitors and justifying this 'work tourism' to myself and others. This was perhaps the hardest part of the project – to break away from performative mediation of the habitual and embodied, and to justify the gap between intention and reception, artwork and context, rather than simply occupying that gap. The work itself allowed for the opening up of meaning and I did not want to close down the material and imaginative dialogue. Instead of defending the work as 'art', I used the opportunity as an exercise in 'commoning' – to talk with audiences about the work and to enable them to connect ideas emanating from the 'work', with their personal experiences – bringing things back to the material and ontological. One visitor, for example, said that the discussion enabled him to value DIY as a way of connecting with his home, when he had previously begrudged the fact that his labour was a consequence of not being able to afford to pay for professionals to do it for him. He was able to reflect on the development of skills and creativities based in materiality and outside of immaterial demands of work. Here work becomes play, as it is without consequence. Moreover, in engaging with materials and spaces, the labour of DIY becomes a poetic act, allowing memory and embodiment to collude, and giving birth to poetic images in the unlearning of habitual objects. Indeed, Bachelard (1992) characterises the phenomenological exploration of the poetic image as being fruitful by virtue of fact that it has ‘no consequences’. He argues that the poetic image is ‘the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression a youthful language’ (Bachelard, 1992: xix). The visitor also articulated the way in which his labour was imbued with a sense of care for his family and for place, and was a way of becoming at home in the world (Ingold, 1995). In this direction, phenomenology offers a way to move beyond transcendental critique, to the immanent and its affects on body and imagination. Here, practice-based research is used as what Crouch (2010) calls a 'gentle politics' – a way to explore becoming from within the conditions of late-capitalism, in the recognition that there is no outside.

References

Bachelard, G. (1992) [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Crouch, D. (2010). Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity. Farnham: Ashgate.

Foucault, M. (1998). 'The Birth of Biopolitics'. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Michel Foucault, 1954-1984). New York: New Press.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2011). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ingold, T. (1995). 'Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World'. Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, ed. Marilyn Strathern. London: Routledge. 

 

Staged Art Encounters and Artists on Pedestals

Art galleries – in particular ones that stage encounters between those who consider themselves to be artists and those who do not – often pose as a cultural laboratories in which the boundaries between 'common-sense' worlds are drawn and challenged. However, gallery art encounters are still culturally and geographically segregated from day-to-day life and as such are a problematic field for political action. For Bourriaud however, the simple act of facilitating such encounters is enough. The gallery becomes a liminal zone in the ‘arena of representational commerce’, which has the capacity to transform both art and the everyday by generating ‘free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 16). But this in itself is not enough. It’s the equivalent of saying that going on holiday once in a year is enough to transform life back home. Whilst, the 'free' experiences we have on tour might influence our perspectives on everyday life, what can two weeks away in the sun really do to transform the structures of everyday life? The answer, for Bourriaud at least, lies in the notion that the ideal of a wholesale transformation of society is illusionary, and that we must therefore deal with a micro-political process of 'tiny revolutions'. However, this too would seem to limit the potential for action in everyday life if we are expected to attend relational art exhibitions and artist’s workshops in order to know how to escape the alienating demands of consumer capitalism! The very idea that the artist knows better than the rest of us is absurd. Can art encounters alone really help us to lift the sheer weight of capitalism's oppression within the structures of everyday life? Indeed, the mythologies that venerate the post-YBA, artist as a kind of guru or touchstone of 'good' living, seem to be a crass perpetuation of the cult of the artist and indeed, the cult of the self. Something Marina Abramović's 512 Hours (2014) is testimony to. The preconception that artists are the only people with the privilege to stop time, or at least view it from afar in a practice akin to mindfulness meditation, suggests that the fundamental rift between work and leisure, has not gone away, and that romantic notion of leisure (and art) as 'time to stand and stare' as expressed by the poet W.H. Davies in 1911, still haunts our worldviews and convinces us that art practice is an activity of the leisure classes. Yet, despite the fact that the 'freedom' leisure is everywhere, the structures of today’s leisure still suggest that liberation is found elsewhere and if we want 'freedom' in everyday life, then we have to be either rich or unemployed, or to earn it through resourcefulness or entrepreneurialism. Thus, the artist is imagined as either aristocratic dilettante or subversive layabout, which perhaps accounts for why artists are rarely paid for their time, and that their work can only be evaluated in terms of productivity and output. Yet conversely, if we are to judge the power of artists to transform the world on basis of their actions rather than products, then aren’t we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Actions, in the case of Situationism, amount to, at best de Certeau’s pin-prick tactics and at worst, distractions akin to fascist propaganda or the very image of spectacle. Likewise, actions do not challenge the productivist logic of neoliberalism – that the pursuit of freedom is the catalyst of immaterial labour and biopolitical production (Hardt and Negri, 2011). Rather than considering the art object to be the enemy of social transformation, perhaps it is better to suggest that the root of the problem is the notion that being an artist is a specialised activity, distinct from everyday life, in the same way as being a tourist. Indeed, both have equally negative connotations, depending on one’s perspective!