Public Partnership

I picked up a couple of useful pointers during Friday’s Street Art talk. First of all: if you’re ever seized with sudden yen to slap a subversive poster on a billboard, tape over a road sign, rip up a few paving slabs or set fire to a CCTV camera, hang fire until Sunday morning. According to Brad Downey, one of the two artists speaking, this is the prime time for committing acts of street art when you can get away with pretty much anything. Secondly, if the police happen to take issue with whatever you’re doing – even if it is a Sunday – then don’t, whatever you do, run. Instead, ‘tell the truth; tell them what you’re doing’, and they’re more likely to laugh than arrest. This from Mustafa Hulusi, the other artist present, seconded by Downey, who attested to his experience in this area with his opening gambit: ‘Hi, I’m Brad Downey, and I’ve been arrested seven times for making sculpture.’ (Although this statement goes some way to indicate that however charmingly you explain yourself the police will still arrest you. But then, perhaps Downey’s art just wasn’t their thing).



Apart from dispensing practical advice, the talk, guided by the curators of the Street Art exhibition currently emblazoned across the ex-power station’s flank, revolved around the experiences that Downey and Hulusi have had when engaged in ‘subverting the public sphere.’ Hulusi, who now has a flourishing fine-art practice, regaled us with an entertaining account of how, graduating from Goldsmiths in the early 1990’s and facing the bleak realities of the job market, he took a job with a flyposting outfit. Having been fascinated by the ‘world of images’ and posters during his degree, Hulusi now found himself appropriately embroiled in an industry which contributed directly, in its nebulously illegal fashion, to the daily construction and deconstruction of London’s visual make-up. Good as the money was, the job had its downsides: namely, coming into violent conflict with an angry competitor who wanted Hulusi off his patch, and a serious encounter with the Belgium Police, who did not merely arrest Hulusi but interrogated him on suspicion of terrorism.



Like Hulusi, Downey has come into his fare share of conflicts when venturing into the public sphere with subversion in heart and mind. He showed a series of videos that followed him on his quest through the streets of various metropolises to ‘make the biggest piece of vandalism but make it as happy as possible.’ I found Downey’s express aim to use whatever the street provides to make a monument – ‘coming with nothing, leaving something’ – the most appealing aspect of his work. He feels there ‘is already enough information’ on the streets; the challenge lies in ‘shifting it around’, refiguring what is there so that people look afresh. One piece, created in East Berlin on a crisp Sunday morning, sees Downey taking a crowbar and prising up a step-pattern of grey flagstones, as dour communist architecture bristles all around him. He lines the slabs up at right angles to the spaces they have left in the pavement to create a Carl Andre-esque arrangement – then, as he walks away, tips the nearest one over so they cannon into each other like dominoes.



But here’s the rub: visually arresting and conceptually interesting though the sculpture was, I couldn’t help worrying about someone falling over it on the way to the shops. I put that out there in the full knowledge that it makes me sound like a hopeless reactionary: however, health and safety issues aside, street art, and the artists who make it, need to answer the challenge of who has the right to put what where. Not especially a legal right in any strict sense of the word, but rather the ‘rights’ of the other people who use the public space. If you’re operating so explicitly in the public sphere, is it important to temper your own wishes with a consideration of how the other people using the space might feel about the works that suddenly appear in it? Or are such considerations not only irrelevant but impossible to determine? As Downey and Hulusi’s experiences demonstrate, the arena of street art is a contested one. The art itself feeds off this, and rather than avoiding such questions, often seems to court them openly.



A response to this was what the title of Friday’s talk ‘Public Space: who’s it for’ seemed to promise. Potentially, the conversation between Downey and Hulusi – a practicing street artist and an artist who has frequently insinuated words and images into the public domain – could have generated a fruitful interrogation of then issues attendant on art in public spaces. Yet although the talk touched on them, it floated along on top of the artists’ experience without making any wider connections, or joining up the points made between them. Hulusi did begin to do this when he talked of the need to ‘determine what is a public space’ and decide ‘what do you want to do with your public spaces’, opening up the possibility of street art as an antidote to the shabbiness of much visual data displayed on our streets. He pointed out a little-known fact that over 80% of the billboards around London are actually illegal, clinging to the edge of buildings without proper planning permission. Which gets you thinking: if the adverts are as illegal as the art, well, we might at least have something interesting to look at…



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Wrong-wrong-wrong

Gustav Metzger, Wolf Vostell and Al Hanson
Photo credit: Tom Picton
Lent by the artist's family
Image taken from Tate Britain's website

Have you ever seen about 200 people simultaneously bending forward in their seats, literally straining to try and hear every word uttered by someone sitting on a stage meters away? It's quite a sight and you would have witnessed this had you attended the Talking Art event with Gustav Metzger at Tate Modern on the 29 March. Indeed, the founder of auto-destructive art had a few chosen words to impart on his rapt audience.
Gustav Metzger is bemused by the current state of the world. To be exact, he has been bewildered by the vicious cycle of conspicuous consumption and waste that we perpetuate for over 60 years. Amazingly, none of that time has eroded his sharp mind, or his conviction that our way of life is wrong-wrong-wrong. In fact, it appears that time is on the artist's side, considering that his work is just as relevant now as it was 30 years ago. Not only is he generating new projects, but he also gets to stage ideas he had decades ago such as Project Stockholm, originally conceived in 1972 for the UN Environmental Conference in Stockholm produced for the 2008 Sharjah Biennale.

His ease with the contradictions that will arise over the course of such a long career is exceptional: he can without a phone, a television and a computer but he is not averse to having someone else Google for him. He believes in the potential of the internet to create powerful networks outside of the realm of capitalism but he doesn't have to let the technology via which internet is accessible dominate his life. He is convinced that humankind is bent upon self-destruction and yet he has faith in the younger generations' intelligence and potential. He is concerned with artists making a living yet he is appalled by the price a piece of canvas can fetch in the current overinflated art market. In other words, he doesn't pretend to hold the answers to the questions raised by his work but he knows the questions need to asked over and over again until enough people think about them.

Feeling like I've been kicked in the head, ideologically of course, I forgo an expensive espresso at the museum's cafe and walk home, still a bit hunched over from all that straining forward but thankful for Gustav Metzger's definition of the Avant-garde: A desire and need to go beyond the existing. I'm all for it.
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For or Against What Exactly?

I attended Against the Avant-garde? a study organised by Tate Modern and the Open University on the 8 March with a bit of resistance and a lot of curiosity. By doing a post-graduate degree in the fringes of art, I'd already encountered so many uses of the term 'avant-garde' that I had started to doubt its etymological origins. In French, my first language, 'avant' means before and 'garde' means guard, so avant-garde literally means before the guard. Over time, its connotative meaning has come to designate what is thought to be 'cutting edge' or 'ground breaking'. So I attended this event with the glimmer of hope that I would finally walk away with a definition of the Avant-garde that did not resort to metaphor. The title of the event led me to believe that I might even formulate a position with regards to it: maybe I'll become an adamant defender or an inflexible detractor of the avant-garde. How exciting! No, really.

The day started with art historical accounts. Paul Wood argued that the Avant-garde was essentially the critique of the conventions of art. Jason Gaiger then asserted that Duchamp led to a break with the art of the past with his ready-mades by creating works that revolved around ideas rather than aesthetic concerns and that these works now exist in a sort of limbo between their formal qualities and their status in art history. T J Demos followed by subsuming Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia under the category of the Dada movement and proceeded to demonstrate that the notion of exile was at the heart of their production. Jennifer Mundy, the curator of said exhibition, then presented her view of three artists who didn't belong to any movement or school of thought but influenced and nurtured each other's practice. At this stage, I had yet to be gratified with a unified definition of the Avant-garde and found myself more than ever in no position to endorse or reject it. Was the Avant-garde perhaps a complex set of contradiction? Critique, oppositions, resistance to categorisation and unification. Was it rather a source of frustration? How do you curate the works emerging from a movement that defies classification? How does one neatly document for historical purposes something that aims to evade definition?

Over lunch, I couldn't quite slow down the dizzying activity of my little mind's attempts to answer these questions but the afternoon was a welcome shift of paradigm. Dave Beech, Richard DeDomenici and Carey Young didn't provide more of a definition of the avant-garde, but they demonstrated how the co-opting and appropriation of mass media, popular culture and corporate culture could be used to question a dominant definition of art as well as social values and preconceived ideas. Critique, oppositions, resistance to categorisation and unification are but expressions of a tension that can be productive in affecting changes in our perception of art and perhaps even in our perception of the world a large. In that sense, they are forerunners in their field. Does that make their work avant-garde? I still don't have an answer to that question but I sure hope they never appear before the guard. I guess that means I'm for the Avant-garde... or is it against?
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That Crusty Corner of the Sandbox

Doris Salcedo Shibboleth 2007 Photo: Tate
Image from the Tate Modern Website

It's amazing the things you can find at the end of something else: home at the end of a journey, a fish at the end of your line, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Yesterday, I found artist Richard DeDomenici at the end of the Tate Modern's crack. Equipped with a coffee and a hot chocolate, we headed for one of the windy balconies. I'd come more or less prepared to discuss the place of avant-garde in his work but instead I got to see the smallest gallery ever to be worn on a wrist and was introduced to the progress of his new year's resolution to make bad decisions. So far, smoking, flying and watching a lot of Eurovision seem to indicate success.

But a quick look at his work reveals that although he's not always been an adept of the well assumed disaster, he's often voluntarily privileged the unexpected and the absurd. I would say that forming a boys band with asylum seekers, signing the 80s success 99 Red Balloons while inhaling helium and embracing failure are a fairly good indication of his propensity to create unsettling experiences. Although some of them are no less than giggle-worthy, it's not that simple to faze people enough so they're able to consider their world from a different vantage point.

As the conversation veered to Richard's works in progress and my coffee gradually got cooler , I couldn't help but think that if there is any chance that art can accomplish what politics can't – significant changes in the attitudes of people regarding the various unpleasantness otherwise known as “social issues” – it's via works that jostle people out of their comfortable preconceived ideas. Some of these works are notably uncomfortable to engage with, but some of them present themselves in the guise of a game which is much more efficient. As you all know, whoever doesn't want to play is left to sulk in the crusty corner of the sandbox. And since nobody wants to be left alone in the sandbox, being playful about important issues is serious work.

Finally, we've run out of coffee and hot chocolate when we get around to the avant-garde. In all honesty, Richard is not sure whether his work is neo-avant-garde, post-avant-garde or plain avant-garde but he knows he's an artist. I tend to believe him and promptly commission The Forum's first avant-garde self-portrait. Result soon to be posted...





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Encounters with the Iconic

Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/Paris and DACS, London 2007

When visiting Tate Modern's Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia exhibition up until the 26th of May 2008 , it occurred to me that there is something mind-boggling about encountering an iconic work of art in the flesh. It is indeed flesh that we are referring to because the combination of paint, marble or any other material the artist might have used has become so familiar that it echoes the jolt of recognition usually associated to a friend's face. You feel that you know them if only for having read about them and for having seen reproductions.

But as I discovered when I came face to face with Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and the Fountain signed R. Mutt, encounters with the seminal works are akin to bumping into a famous actor. There is first a sense of recognition that lingers as you stare at the individual. You recognize him yet you can't quite recall the details of this familiarity. Did you meet him at an opening or was it at your cousin's wedding? What's more, there is a slight sense of inadequacy in this recognition. You know this person, yet they should be taller, slimmer, younger. While all of these thoughts are racing through your mind, he will most likely have the time to walk right by you, not even glancing in your direction. The recognition is unrequited and you're left with the impression that you were snubbed in some obscure way.

The infamous Duchamp works credited for an irrevocable change in the production and understanding of art are quite recognizable, even in a room laden with other works by Man Ray and Picabia. They're familiar because such a cult has been built around them over the years that you've most likely encountered some version of them, and that might also be why the experience of actually seeing them leaves a bit to be desired. Is that urinal really what changed the course of history? Well, not exactly because the Fountain that you can see at Tate is actually a reproduction made in 1964 rather than the 1917 original and because it's not so much the object itself that has changed our understanding of art but rather the surrounding debates it generated.

So here you find yourself, in the presence of what looks like the famous actor without the costume, lighting, make-up and applause that contribute to elevate him above and beyond a mere human status, but it's in fact his stand-in. Where did the illusion go and why is the encounter so disappointing? Is that what Duchamp meant when he stated:
'The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.'
Marcel Duchamp, from Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957

Is art powerful only if we invest it with the knowledge of its history and with symbolic transformative powers? If, like myself, you have no answer to these questions, perhaps the Against the Avant-garde? Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia study day on the 8th of March will be a good platform to discuss your beliefs or disbeliefs in the power of art. I will certainly try to challenge my visions of the not quite sublime encounters with the icons of the avant-garde.

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