SPOKEN SPACE

Question Time

As Open Dialogues, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg worked with the 2009 East End Collaborations (EEC) community to develop Question Time; a critical response to the work seen at EEC.

Question Time is a two part response. The first part, the question, is >>>here<<<.

The second part, the answer?, will be here on Monday 6th July.

Do respond with your own thoughts and questions onto the blog.

Open Dialogues is a UK based collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing and debate on contemporary art.

East End Collaborations (EEC) is a partnership between Queen Mary, University of London and the Live Art Development Agency to support graduates and young artists working with Live Art in London.

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Alex Eisenberg; Bimbi; London; Artist and Writer; London; Advanced Theatre Practice, Central School of Speech and Drama; Chemistry, B; Street Walker for a chartered surveyors; ‘Physics of the Impossible’ by Michio Kaku; ‘Fragments’by Jean Beaudrillard; Waiter for a catering company; network visualisation diagrams, maps, conversation, proximity, transcription; none; no current income, working on a new project with Present Attempt; £200; ‘Sounding the Event’, Yves Lomax; cortège; picture frame making.

Rachel Lois Clapham; Poo; Bradford; Curator and Writer; Manchester; Contemporary Art Theory Goldsmiths College; Physical Education: E; Curator of Nahnou-Together Now at Tate Britain; an exhibition of socially engaged art; Will Self ‘How the Dead Live’; Deleuze & Guattari ‘A Thousand Plateaus’; Sanitary Waste Collector (Dog Units) Fullwood Prison; live writing, performance criticism, improvisation, contingency and the porosity of text; Leeds United; Co-Director of Open Dialogues; £250 plus expenses; Jeff Nuttall ‘Bomb Culture’; marginalia; Second Life.






Questions: Name; the name your family or partner calls you (nick-name); the city you live in; what you do; your home town; MA course you did recently; the subject and result of your lowest GCSE grade; a job you had in 2008; a book you are reading for pleasure; a book you have not read because you tried and found it off-putting; your worst job ever; current writerly fascinations; Football team your family or partner supports (if any); what job you are doing now; the most you have been paid for a commission; a book you are really looking forward to reading; favorite word; a mild fascination that could develop into an obsession if you had more time

Writing Residency at the Live Art Development Agency

The Live Art Development Agency has invited Mary Paterson to be Writer in Residence from February to July 2009.  Using the online shop www.thisisUnbound.co.uk as a tool and a provocation, Mary is exploring the relationship between Live Art and online space.

Please contribute to Mary’s research by filling in the short online survey about Unbound on http://tinyurl.com/npnju4. 

It only takes five minutes to complete, and everyone who takes part will receive a free, limited edition Yara El-Sherbini Decision Maker pen.  The survey will be online until Tuesday 30th June. 

Is the internet an opportunity for free expression, a platform for developing and showcasing Live Art, and a chance to speak and share? Or is it a slush pile of unaccountable points of view and soundbites, and a resource constrained by the demands of its own upkeep?

Mary will use the publications and artefacts available on Unbound to navigate the territory surrounding Live Art - its paraphernalia, documentation and archive: how does the Live Art sector speak itself, and its history? She will also look at the ways in which artists respond to online platforms, and make use of online technology in the creation of Live Art: how does the Live Art sector make use of changing technologies?

The residency will culminate in a piece of writing to be published in July 2009, and available on Unbound and in the Live Art Development Agency Study Room.

QUESTION TIME?

As Open Dialogues, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg will be working with the 2009 East End Collaborations (EEC) community this weekend to develop Question Time; a critical response to the work seen at EEC.

For Question Time we will be asking you to ask questions of or about the work you see. What does that mean? Does it hurt? Does your mother know you’re here?

Whatever your questions are, we will use them as stimulus in relation to the work; asking questions of your questions, speculating on possible answers or just maybe leaving them hanging...

The final text will be available from the 21st June in a downloadable PDF file on the Open Dialogues Blog

All questions will remain unattributed unless you tell us otherwise. We look forward to speaking to you at EEC.

Open Dialogues is a UK based collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing and debate on contemporary art.

East End Collaborations (EEC) is a partnership between Queen Mary, University of London and the Live Art Development Agency to support graduates and young artists working with Live Art in London.

………………………………………


Alex Eisenberg; Bimbi; London; Artist and Writer; London; Advanced Theatre Practice, Central School of Speech and Drama; Chemistry, B; Street Walker for a chartered surveyors; ‘Physics of the Impossible’ by Michio Kaku; ‘Fragments’by Jean Beaudrillard; Waiter for a catering company; network visualisation diagrams, maps, conversation, proximity, transcription; none; no current income, working on a new project with Present Attempt; £200; ‘Sounding the Event’, Yves Lomax; cortège; picture frame making.

Rachel Lois Clapham; Poo; Bradford; Curator and Writer; Manchester; Contemporary Art Theory Goldsmiths College; Physical Education: E; Curator of Nahnou-Together Now at Tate Britain; an exhibition of socially engaged art; Will Self ‘How the Dead Live’; Deleuze & Guattari ‘A Thousand Plateaus’; Sanitary Waste Collector (Dog Units) Fullwood Prison; live writing, performance criticism, improvisation, contingency and the porosity of text; Leeds United; Co-Director of Open Dialogues; £250 plus expenses; Jeff Nuttall ‘Bomb Culture’; marginalia; Second Life.

Questions: Name; the name your family or partner calls you (nick-name); the city you live in; what you do; your home town; MA course you did recently; the subject and result of your lowest GCSE grade; a job you had in 2008; a book you are reading for pleasure; a book you have not read because you tried and found it off-putting; your worst job ever; current writerly fascinations; Football team your family or partner supports (if any); what job you are doing now; the most you have been paid for a commission; a book you are really looking forward to reading; favorite word; a mild fascination that could develop into an obsession if you had more time

Labour Practices: Ethics of Service and Ideas of Labour in Performance

An event organised by the Live Art Development Agency in conjunction with At Your Service 

Pinter Studio, Arts Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS

19 June 2009

18.30 – 20.00 

Free

Reservations on rsvp@thisisliveart.co.uk

This event will look at the ways in which artists use ideas of service and labour as creative strategies, and consider the ethics of recruiting the labour of others in works of art. 

Playing with the idea of labour and service the Live Art Development Agency have outsourced the researching and writing of a paper on these issues to the writer Mary Paterson, who will in turn outsource the presentation of the paper to the Agency’s Projects Manager and practicing artist Andrew Mitchelson. Artists and writers working in these areas including Nicholas Ridout, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, and Emma Leach and Natasha Vicars of Position Unpaid will respond to the paper in relation to their own practices and approaches and provoke further discussion.

At Your Service is a group exhibition curated by Cylena Simonds running from 17 April to 27 June 2009 at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London.  At Your Service engages the concept and dynamics of the service and hospitality industries in today’s political and social climate and brings together a wide range of artworks from emerging international artists.  The work in At Your Service ranges from sculptural objects to photography and video as well as featuring specially commissioned performances taking place both within the gallery and in public locations, film screenings and talks. For full details of all At Your Service activities visit www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com

Labour Practices is supported by Queen Mary, University of London.

Contributors:

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer based in London. She was a writer with Live Art UK's 'Writing from Live Art' initiative (2006 - 2008) and Writing Live Fellow for Performa International Biennial of Performance (2007), supported by Arts Council England. She is co-director of Open Dialogues. www.open-dialogues.blogspot.com

Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre is a conceptual and live artist whose work centers around participation, informal networks and the uses of public space as a platform for self-expression, diversity, and the co-existence of conflicting views. Using the ephemeral, the overlooked and the underrated as the starting point, her work creates visible and unexpected connections between things, people and places. The rhetoric of conversation, participation and celebration are often deployed as a strategy for engagement, in which the public is invited to become an active contributor and collaborator to the work. www.lopezdelatorre.org/

Position Unpaid is a collaboration between Emma Leach & Natasha Vicars. The project asks awkward questions about arts internships, and moves towards some constructive answers. Emma Leach is a part time writer, curator and artist assistant, and a full time artist. Natasha Vicars makes live and participatory work in which there is an exchange of individual experience. Both have worked as interns in more than one art institution.

Nicholas Ridout teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (2006), a book which considers theatrical labour and its related affects. Recent publications include an essay on Performance and the Service Economy, and a short book called Theatre & Ethics.

The Art of Democracy

Only two out of five people voted in the last general elections. The current critical standpoint of democracy is of individuals’ ignorance, apathy or disenfranchisement amid the pervasive power of globalised institutions. Of citizens’ inability to speak politically and collectively due to the lack of identifiable, non-commodified public space. The very idea of democracy is mediated to mean intolerance of difference, war crimes and state sanctioned terrorism. This is the climate in which individual agency in democratic acts outside the ballot box and governmental institutions needs to be re-invested and re-articulated. This is the political backdrop to Mobile Conference: an event on the 15 March 2009 organized by South London Gallery (SLG) and Peckham Space exploring play, democracy and contemporary art in the public realm.

The conference was a fringe event of Tate Britain’s Tate Triennial and asked questions such as: can contemporary art provoke democratic participation? How can contemporary art reclaim the public realm through play? It centered upon two contemporary art projects: artist and play-worker Jess Thom’s current outreach with the residents of Seaux Gardens - a project that facilitates children’s play on the Seaux Gardens council estate in Peckham as part of the SLG’s three year lottery funded programme Making Play; and Peckham TV, a 2008 project commissioned by Peckham Space, in which artists Harold Offeh and The People Speak carried out a live game-show style public consultation in Peckham, soliciting locals’ responses in order to collectively design an advert for Peckham.

Discussions on the democratic, public and artistic spaces these two projects enabled were chaired by representatives from Demos - the independent think tank for everyday democracy - and artists The People Speak. The conversations were located at several itinerant sites – Seaux Gardens estate, the entrance foyer of Camberwell Arts School and a local community sports centre. This nomadism aligned itself with Triennial’s Altermodern Manifesto – which advocates a peripatetic, journey form of contemporaneity - and signalled the progressive nature of the conference. It also ensured the event was itself mobile: a physical, spatial match to its subject matter; each location providing a space for political, collective speech on non institutional acts of democracy in a non-governmental public platform.

Outside a set of empty retail lots on the Seaux Gardens Estate, one of which is rented by the SLG specially for Making Play, delegates joined Thom, local children and their parents in a discussion about how their sense of esteem, community and personal security increased through play. They discussed how they had managed to reclaim their estate after their requests for play areas (solicited in a public consultation by Southwark Council) were actively legislated against in the form of large signs warning children not to play on the grass. The empty shops were a stark reminder of the economic unviability of this particular inner city estate compared to the aspirational council town planning of the 1960s, and underpinned the fact that public space, moreover ‘free’ time or play, is at a premium: its architecture aimed at targeted consumption/production. Playing then, defined by Thom as freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated activity, is critical in that its insistence upon unmediated and individual agency represents ‘unproductive’, uncertain and risk-laden usage of space to the institution. Thom’s project articulates these children’s play as political, an act of everyday activism; a subversive sociopolitical performative act that reclaims public space and enables a different- more everyday- form of democracy outside the institution.

Amid the fun of its game-show format, Peckham TV also enacted a critical mode towards the agency of the individual to participate fully in the public realm. Based in Peckham Square, the project explored the possibilities of democratic decision making, with game-show participants publicly and collectively voting on the design of the advert for Peckham, but also on the rules of the game-show itself. In the foyer of Camberwell School of Arts, Offeh talked of how – due to logistics, time and money - the collective to-ing and fro-ing of the public voting could not be translated into the final advert. As a result, he was unsure whether the outcome of Peckham TV would be representative of the public’s participation.

Peckham TV reveals a tension between collective, democratic process and artistic product. It raises questions, not of the participation – i.e. how to progress or make decisions whilst consulting everybody? or Where to draw the line drawn between selective listening and blanket acceptance? - which seem to fall back into the current, problematic dominant order. Rather, it asks questions of the inevitability of the end point of such participation - the desire for closure, definitive result and product. The project articulates a scenario in which the everyday democratic process, or non institutional political speech, is endowed with agency as product in and of itself, and in being duty bound to hear the to-ing and fro-ing of oppositional voices, resolution remains politically – democratically- out of reach. It is a vision of an everyday, non-governmental form of democracy that is always in progress, insufficient and provisional.

Over the course of the day, questions were asked of the instrumentalisation of art in the public realm - how the artistic integrity of these two projects was ensured against the pressure to fit into an infrastructure of social inclusionist policy and box ticking in the publicly funded arts. Conversation focused briefly on the absence of the public funders; the implication being that devoid of the big spenders the discussion somehow lacked integrity. But this line of thinking falls prey to the authority and power of the institution. It denies the efficacy of the non institutional decision makers in the room and the individual choices that have been made by the funders not to accept the invitation to be at the event. Democracy gives (democratic) meaning, or enfranchises an individual’s capacity for, non participation and potentially undemocratic action.

Questions were also asked about the definition, ownership, agency and intellectual property of the art in the public realm; where is the art? who does the project belong to?’ or ‘Is the artist the new agony aunt?’ This kind of probing – vaulted for being open and honest - has been the dominant (post-modern) order in socially engaged art for over thirty years. But again, it is a mode of critique rooted in opposition to a problematic institutional and commercial framework (defining the role and status of the artist, her product, and its quality). As such, it falls back into dualist, modernist dialectic regarding art and artists (that art is apolitical, transcendental and is problematised in its encounters with everyday life). And it defies the aim of post autonomous socially engaged art, which is to trouble hierarchical, patriarchal models of artistic production, as well as notions of sovereignty and copyright.

In contrast, Mobile Conference attempted to articulate a much more blurred, hybrid or altermodern mode in relation to democracy and art in the public realm. It is a mode that ‘works within’ to re-invest agency in everyday democratic acts and public space beyond banal machinations of capitalistic exchange. It is a way of working that recognizes the delineation between private/public space is no longer clear, that the central institutions of our time cannot be so readily identified (what isn’t an institution in the context of Mobile Conference: Demos, Tate Britain, Camberwell Arts School, SLG, Peckham Space?). And that an outside/inside position of critique/complicity with regards to both democracy and art in the public realm can no longer be clearly occupied.

Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues

This article originally appeared on the Culture Wars website.

FREE PRESS : CALL FOR READERS

FREE PRESS is collaborative project between seven artists/writers exploring economies of ideas and alternative modes of dissemination and exchange. The Free Press writers participated in a three day closed workshop in March 2009 at Plan 9 in Bristol, and decided the form and content of Free Press, as well as its distribution and publication. As a result of the workshop, each artist/writer produced a case study detailing how they would like to collaborate with a reader (below). The seven Free Press groups will develop work together over the coming months...

CASE STUDY 1 - ESSAYING ESSAYS : A PROJECT

Readers wanted to explore the possibilities of the essay form. What forms can the essay take and how can such texts be read? What is an essay and who is essaying and where? What kinds of knowledge can be produced? What is lost and gained in moving beyond conventional discursive approaches into using visual and textual material, the space of the page, variations of typography and design?


CASE STUDY 2 - THE ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCE COURSE

You are invited to take part in the The One-to-One Correspondence Course. On the course you will be sent letters, one per day, for 12 days; the letters are in sequence; each letter contains an image or word; the sequence forms a rebus; the rebus takes the form of a question. You are tasked with answering.


CASE STUDY 3 - ACTION/SCRIPT

This case study examines the role that documents play in the production and reception of “meaning”, specifically in the context of contemporary art, performing conspirational scenarios within the structures of professionalism in the creative industries. The study will culminate in a collaboratively-developed archive of documents, distributed and circulated through Free Press, which employ the methodology of “action scripting” as a form of “stage directions” for potential public readings. I am seeking collaborators to reflect on the reversal of the relationship between script and action, between “original” and “copy”, as well as on the nature of documents, asking “what events do documents trace?” and “what events do documents produce?”. “Action Script” is the programming language of vector-graphic softwares like Flash. Like other programming languages it textually defines the parameters for “complex action”. It utilizes one-directional commands where the script defines the action. What if this one-directionality could be reversed – i.e. if the action could also define the script? You go to the grocery store and receive a receipt itemizing your purchases. You apply for a job and send along a CV that presents your accomplishments. You are researching and find a transcription of an interview. In all three cases, documents are acting as traces of specific actions/interactions. All these documents are scripts, offering the performative parameters to restage the action that originally produced the text. Similar to the Borges story, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, a narrative exists within multiple worlds, each moment of its imaginary course through time leading to forks in the road in which new “actions” can be staged, leading to new “scripts”: “Almost instantly I saw it – the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘several futures (not all)’ suggested to me the image of a forking in time, rather than in space. A rereading of the book confirmed my theory. In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible to detangle T’sui Pen, the character chooses - simultaneously – all of them.”


CASE STUDY 4 - TILL POEMS

In a free press, readers do not simply buy and so receive pre-fabricated, finished products, writing or meaning. Rather, the reader physically scripts her own meaning, her own writing in and by the act of reading; understanding and improvising upon pre-authored products. As a Free Press project, Till Poems reads between the lines of reading: it is reading as understanding, interpreting a language and its signs. It is reading as a productive act, an act in which one can infer, substitute or replace meaning in systems. The project challenges you to do a big shop in your local supermarket or store. By placing your shopping onto the conveyor belt in a specific way, you will make sure the receipt spells out words of your own making. Reading the receipt down instead of across, your choreographed shopping will say something more than the items ever intended. In that moment of improvisation and exchange, your act of shopping becomes porous: a space you the consumer can inhabit, manipulate and occupy. It is a space where the consumer is equally productive as the producer, the reader equally productive as the writer.

CASE STUDY 5 - TRANSIT

I offer the reader an exercise in truth and deception. I offer you the opportunity for artful manipulation and skillful honesty. I offer you an excuse. You offer me a reason. The writer will send the reader a set of excuses. The reader will respond with a set of reasons. The two narratives will be fused, manipulated and altered by the both the reader and the writer. Decisions will be made, actions will be taken, conclusions will be drawn, consequences will occur, stories will be changed..


CASE STUDY 6 - PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

Reader/s wanted to collaborate on a project that will explore the subject of collecting - from collections of artists working with an ‘archival impulse’ to personal collections of ephemera. A postal correspondence will take place starting with an inventory of the collections held by the writer - the reader will respond similarly and the correspondence shall build into a collection of collections, taking inspiration from Aby Warburgs’ Mnemosyne Atlas, drawing on and connecting all the interests of the Writer and the Reader. This project will conclude with a publication documenting this exchange and the eventual outcome.


CASE STUDY 7 - ADVENTURE STORY (FREE PRESS GAME)

I’m interested in the notion of agency, how our acts have repercussions or influences; a chain of knock on effects. What is the agency of the reader? How much are they in control of how they read and how much are they under the subliminal influence of the author. Take C S Lewis, whose ideal reader would perhaps be both a child who would take on the fantasy and adventures of Narnia and carry it on in their own games and playtime, and on the other hand a well behaved Christian who would take on the moral meta-narrative. Here we have two forms of authorial intervention. Could we compare these to non-instrumental (e.g. psychogeographical) and instrumental (e.g. propagandist) intervention? In Thomas Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, the unsuspecting anti-heroine Oedipa Maas comes across a series of clues and cryptic messages that lead her to uncover a secret postal service, an underground system, that functions not for overtly political aims but for society’s outcasts, conspiracy theorists and fugitives. These clues lead to her travelling across country on a bus trailing a secret postman. This underground system is a free press, a means of distribution and dispersion that relies on community, secrecy, romance and a high level of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Exploring agency and intervention I will set up a meta-narrative that to be read requires the active engagement of a number of readers. Some who are ‘secret agents’ following my agenda and helping to install the clues, others who are ‘double agents’ adding their own twist to the work that I have to uncover and some who are genuine readers, detectives out to follow the clues and find the route to the exhibition/art work



Trade Union is a project initiated to explore ideas around late capitalism - in particular the economies of contemporary art and the possibilities that could arise from the current geopolitical climate.

Free Press Writers

Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer and curator. Her curatorial practice centres on live and participatory art that explore alternate models of criticality and artistic responsibility. Recent projects include Nahnou-Together Now, an exhibition of socially engaged art at Tate Britain. She is Co-Director of the critical writing initiative Open Dialogues and writes a regular column for Dance Theatre Journal entitled 'Inside Performance'. www.opendialogues.com

Ashkan Sepahvand is a writer, translator and curator based in Berlin. His practice includes curating/performing texts/documents, writing/fictionalizing history/identity, marginal social/religious/cultural formations in the Middle East and art market/institutional analysis. He is currently working with the open art network Reloading Images. He has written for various publications including Bidoun, Muhtelif: Magazine for Contemporary Art Istanbul, and RES:World Art/Art World. He is working on his first novel - 'To Whom Life', set to be published in May 2009 by Book Works as part of their Semina series, edited by Stewart Home.
www.reloadingimages.org

David Berridge is a writer, with a background in Human Ecology. He writes and edits the blogzine 'More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen' focussing on artists films and videos. He is currently curating a conference/screening programme on contemporary relationships to Warhol's film work.
http://www.moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/

Pippa Koszerek creates organisations as artworks/curatorial projects such as the Independent Art School (1999-) and The Unasked-for Public Art Agency (2006 -). These often have activist or critical origins and often seek out alternative models of practice. She is interested in blurring the boundaries between art and non-art environments and borrows materials or ways of working from other vocations. The Unasked-for Public Art Agency delivers an unasked-for consultancy package to a host organisation within which Pippa has nominated herself as ‘artist in residence.
www.independent-art-school.org.uk
www.unasked-for.com/

Matthew MacKisack is an artist and writer. His practice currently consists of video and drawing. He is currently undertaking a PhD at Goldsmiths, looking at models of ideological and experiential contestation.

Sophie Mellor an artist/curator based in Bristol, UK. She is also co-founder and co-director of Plan 9, an artist-led visual arts organisation established in 2005. Her practice focuses on creating discussion through action and provocation, setting up systems and constructs that examine preconceived notions of self and society. Current projects include Girl Gang, which sanctions the exploration of different modes of behaviour via a slight change in individual perception. With Karen Di Franco, she has initiated Trade Union and the associated Free Press, which sets out to explore the current econmonic and environmental reality, seeking to effect change through collaborative working; the free flow of ideas; testing out possibilities; taking action to find workable alternatives to present conditions; and centralising the process within the everyday of the participants.
http://sophiemellor.blogspot.com

Karen Di Franco is an artist and archivist based in Bristol, UK. Co-Director of Plan 9 since 2007 her practice is divided between explorations of an artistic economy with projects such as Trade Union, initiated with Sophie Mellor as a strategy to combine their artistic practice with their roles as directors of Plan 9, and a studio based practice that explores narrative and archival research.
http://kdifranco.blogspot.com