What is to be done?
Dr Tonia Carless
What is to be done?
Power lies in the social production of art.
We must question whether art is a service or art is cultural production and we must keenly follow this categorisation of cultural production when we are making art.
Art is seeking to make a legitimate position for itself, within the changing economies. It is important to frame this strategy so as to develop practices which are critical of its’ own internal operations. If this is not done then we are not even able to look beyond our very immediate and self-referential sphere.
Artist lead groups
by artists
for artists.
Is this the best possibility for cultural exchange or cultural production?
It is important to highlight and emphasize the structures of arts management and funding, which are so closely bound up within the structures of power and value of late capitalism and which lead to a technocratic ideology that locates the professional artist at its’ centre, as a service provider.
With this in mind we can reinstate art as communicative medium, as socially derived.
In the late 1960s The Situationist International (SI) and Guy Debord instigated notions of the spectacle, identifying restrictions or denials of rights, along with the mechanisms that preserve the capitalist order of things. They exposed the power structure that had maintained and preserved the capitalist order of things.
This structure had been maintained by the twofold authoritative claim to objectivity, the programming of space and the justification of this authority through visual or aesthetic improvement. Existential subjectivity and the promotion of political activity by the SI was demonstrated by the mass uprising in Paris in 1968. The SI considered the ongoing preservation of the capitalist order of things by analysis and actions against
alienation
the privatisation of the social
and the all pervading: spectacle and consumption.
These are the spaces in which to work creatively to find a utopian possibility in the inversion of these power structures. ‘Utopian’ here might be that which is directed towards the transformation of the social and political, as well as that which might be termed appropriated rather than dominated.
To find these transfigured spaces we must turn to the full social histories of modes of production and social formations.
Action must come above and before text and image. Lived experience must be fore grounded. Text and image are all abstractions of space, we must ground action in the life worlds of lived space, the space of the everyday, the social occupation of space and in the words of Certeau an ‘arts de faire’.
Service providers and resource management strategies are all part of the framework of the increasing production of commodities.
Intervention and cultural production can be critical, analytical tools.
Things must be made
objects,
surfaces,
spaces,
events,
happenings. This is where creative work must be done.
What is happening in the economy and how will it impact upon artists? This is the current exchange that goes back and forth. The debate closes around the question of whether these will be interesting times, on whether creativity flourishes under the spectre or reality of economic blight. The real discourse is, however, the possibility of a new, utopian project.
‘The situation’ is always described as being one of minor crises which have accelerated out of control, that the real economy will prosper again and it is not that the economy might be merely being propped and maintained with a continuing cycle of reinvention and reinvestment, re appropriation and recuperation.
If culture is seen as the driving force in the development of the economy then we must question the basis upon which this culture is produced. How are we to make investment in the future? Is public funding of the arts to be understood as outside of what is being questioned here? Is the assumption that such investment is non- toxic?
The current economic crisis must surely now leave an opening to move further outside of this, dominant frame of cultural and other production.
The project must be about the social relation among people and the return to ‘being’ from the position of ‘having’. It is also about the reformation of groups, not the individual as a power base from which to commence work, from which to build and make things.
Sadie Plant, in The Most Radical Gesture describes other groups, following the SI, which emerged during the late 1960s, such as the Dutch Provos and Kabouters who were keen to ‘seize at least the little part in things that you ought to have and that the authorities try to take away from you. Kommune 1 set up a ‘Save the Police Committee’ in 1967 to give the police “spare time for reading, leisure activities with their wives and girlfriends and time for giving vent to their aggressions by making love, and also time for chats with elderly passers-by to whom they can explain democracy”
The Orange Alternative went on to celebrate international Children’s day in 1987 by dressing up as red hatted gnomes, dancing in the streets and distributing sweets. They also thronged the streets with Santa Clauses, leading to the arrest of both real and unreal Santas, similar also to King Mob’s stunt in Selfridges when: “soon afterwards the shoppers were witness to the edifying spectacle of policemen arresting Father Christmas and snatching back toys from small children”.
All of these and the more recent acts of, for instance, Zombie marches through the newly opened Cabot Circus shopping centre in Bristol, work outside of the main frame of understanding both capital and the authorities that sustain it. The actions similarly refute political categorization. The protagonists are working as extended groups, in temporary social formations, which come together, for happenings, or subversive acts.
Sadie Plant describes the significant rupture from the ideology of the SI as being that the other groups were seen to be merely extending the life of the existing system, with no proposal for revolution.
“A member of The Orange Alternative was asked
‘do you set up happenings in order to expose the totalitarianism of the system under which we live?’,
he replied, ‘I do them because I do them, but one does things because of, or for something’.
Another victory for the Situationist perspective?
Well maybe not. For he continued:
‘Well, yes, when I was preparing for the gnome happening, I assumed that we would have a good time with sweets and streamers”
To refuse to be identifiable as a group, whilst at the same time drawing power should be the very essence of the alias group. To assume another name and thus to remain mantle free might be continuing in the trajectory of these early groups which analysed and appropriated the existing social order.
Artists should move out of PR, management, administration and marketing and return to the task of
making and producing culture.
Tonia Carless 1st June 2009
References
Certeau, M. de, The Practice of Everyday Life ; trans Rendell, S. University of California Press Berkeley, 1984
Debord, G. Society of The Spectacle; Rebel Press Aim Publications, 1987
Plant. S, The Most Radical Gesture. The Situationist International in a Post Modern Age; Routledge, 1992