ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 1. No. 2. Summer 2007
ISSN 1752-6388

Art & The Political Seminar: Part 2
Democracy and Its Discontents

David Bellingham


David Bellingham: Ok, I think the first thing to say is that I’m gonna show you a few things I’ve been working on recently.  Essentially presenting to a project called Turnout that I’ve been working on for, that I’ve completed at the end of last year.  Most of last year to write this course, and I’ll show you a couple of things to put that into context.  I’m not gonna address these ones critically I’ll just describe what they are, describe how they came about where they were placed and hope to move as quick as possible so a sort of discussion as to how these things might operate in some sort of critical, active framework. What you’re looking at on the screen now is a little postal work that I made in 1998 which comes as part of an occasional group I think of them as occasional works, occasional in the sense that a Christmas card is an occasional form, something that happens in relation to a specific date in the year. Of course, it can be stimulated to respond to events political and social and that sometimes feels important to me as an artist to do that, the condition there of course, is that I would generally consider myself not to be a party political artist. Using Andea Fraser’s definition, which perhaps is in some ways modified from Chantal Mouffe’s, is that all art is political but most of it is reactionary in the sense that most art, of course, happens within the institution, occasionally things happen outside of the institution, they happen in the social realm and they function actively, they function in some sort of critical diagnostic way and these occasional works are generally prompted by things that happen in the world, happen as a result of power structures that seem beyond reach and therefore comment is necessary. I don’t actually see them, in real terms that’s different or outside of other things I might make that might feel or seem to be initially less kind of politically positioned.


But to attend to this (slide) Cruise: a wandering voyage in search of an enemy in a way it’s a definition, it’s a play on a definition which is a kind of Homeric odyssey, this idea of odyssey’s kind of roaming the world looking for adventure, looking for territory and looking to extend one’s horizons it seems to me that this idea of journeying and searching has been misunderstood and misplaced by certain neo-conservative power bases as a way of extending territory and extending political capital. So it’s a play on this, this word that was chosen, perhaps arbitrarily, to name a missile and play on this idea of the leisure cruise, the journeying out into the world, the sense of adventure, in this case for me very much a misplaced adventure so and it’s specified very directly, a definition To Mark Four Nights of Air Strikes in the Gulf. This was done almost ten years ago in 1998. This little publication here, I’ve got another couple of copies around, was produced in July/August 2006 last year and it was done in direct response, and it’s just called Town, perhaps less overtly kind of politically positioned. But it was made in direct response to the air strikes that happened in Palestine from Israel and it’s a little poem really, two page poem: ‘It’s colour and shape, smell and mood had changed, but its name still stood’. Then the words evoking some sort of spirit of a historical place that spirit was stronger than the bricks and mortar that substantiated it and the following page ‘its colour and shape, smell and mood changed, but its name stills stands’. So moving this kind of historical heroic mode into the contemporary perhaps.


This is a series of posters that were made in Edinburgh, actually just at the time when there was a debate, just prior to the time of the first elections for the Scottish Parliament, there was this exhibition at the City Arts Centre in Edinburgh called Without Day it was organised by City Arts Centre and Alec FInlay, three posters that were placed around the city of Edinburgh that it’s some oblique way attempt to circumvent the rhetoric of party  politics and cut to the quick of what a real social politic might be. And in this sense I’m interested in this French Revolutionary Saint-Just phrase that was often used, or used a couple of times by Ian Hamilton Finlay which states: ‘The native land is not the land it is the community of spirit.’ And this idea that it’s not the bricks and mortar, it’s not the earth that you walk on, it’s the idea of belonging, it’s a sense of belonging that comes about from the people that Chantal Mouffe referred to this morning as ‘the masses’, as the populous, but it’s really quite interesting as something that’s very important to the development of the Turnout piece that I will be talking about in a moment. So these four posters read: ‘Our scheme is only a sketch’ which is a quote taken directly out of Plato’s The Republic, a contentious book, ‘Meat, Branches, Fruit, Principles, Actions, Consequences’; ‘Inquiry First, Allegiance Second’; and finally ‘In party politics the earth is still flat’. As I say these were pasted up around Edinburgh in their linear sequence and there was a concertina publication that went out also.

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So to attend to Turnout the first work that happened was just this, was a little 32 page A5 pamphlet it was distributed by post, free of charge, and a few kind of artist bookshops, the Serpentine in London and printed Matter in New York, took them and gave them away free, but essentially it was a way of again circumventing the big piece of work that had this public life that disappeared almost instantaneously. I’ll read the little text on the back of the book: ‘The 4,668 crosses in this book represent approximately 1/500th of the votes cast in Scotland on the general election of May 5.’ And it was an addition to 500 so the book itself is full


(slide: first page. here’s a kind of ballot box to put you in the spirit of the voting mood) and the rest of the book is full of crosses, every page is just full of crosses, the size of the book is determined by the amount of space that these 4,668 crosses took up.  The addition of 500 if you can imagine it, altogether would have represented one cross for every person that voted. So it was complete thing in itself but you cold only ever have a fragment, you could only ever have 1/500th. The idea of the cross is something in itself that interests me as that’s a kind of figurative gesture, the idea that one cross equals one person and in a later publication here, there is this idea that a cross is two arms and two legs, so every time you’re writing this little figurative gesture the cross itself becomes representative of an individual.

So this thing happened, it went out in the world, it had quite a lot of response. It was published by little gallery in Edinburgh which was a stone’s throw away from the Scottish Parliament, by a guy called Paul Robinson who runs the Heart Gallery, a tiny little private gallery erm, and this is the kind of scale of works that I usually make, I generally make things that can happen in a day, can be distributed fairly quickly and easily and I forget them and get on with the next thing, and he kind of dared me in a way to extend this, what about if you actually made the complete piece and as it turned out in the first general election, after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, as Rebecca mentioned earlier, just under 2 million people voted which represented just under half of the total of the people with the right to vote. This idea was kind of mooted that I might spend some time in a gallery and make the whole project, make it as an archive. And initially I kind of declined that the idea of being holed away for a month didn’t appeal to me too much but he went away and raised some money and we did it and it came about and it turned into a situation that I couldn’t really back out of; and actually I came round to this idea that being involved in labour, being involved in a day to day task was something that wasn’t completely irrelevant in the production of work.

(Slide) This is little a painting from a series called the Painting by Numbers series that were made between 1992 and 94 and it’s maybe not so clear what we’re looking at here but we’re looking at six 30cm. 12 inch school rulers and each of the individual implements has been painted in a shade of black, white or grey. And these used to take a week to two weeks to do and one of the motivations for making these works was that I was recently out of Art School, I’ve got a studio, what do I do with my time? how do I fill that time? It seemed quite important to me that I made some work that in a way was non-heroic, and I didn’t wanna make big metal things, but I wanted to make something that in some ways the process of their making revealed a sense of time and a sense of investment and had some sort of equivalent to what it might be to go and do a job, to go and work in a factory or to work in an office.

So there’s an element of time, there is a time base to this kind of production that I think has a direct cross over to the Turnout project. So what happened, I spent a month in Edinburgh, failed to complete the task in my time in this little gallery. We agreed to extend my residency at the gallery for a further month and it was really just physical constraints, I realised that I wasn’t gonna get the job done in time. I should say that the way that I produced this, as you see on the panels on the back of the white partition wall, there are a number of A3 panels. The work was produced on a light box with a grid underneath and I would fit a thousand crosses per A3 sheet. It’s very much kind of systematic approach to you can imagine; the aim was to produce 2,000 A3 sheets with a thousand crosses on each sheet or approximately 2,000 it was just under 2,000 sheets. So the gallery was closed to the public for a month in this kind of conceit of a second show, a second period of time, that we called Abstention - there’s a little card that was sent out to announce that I would be there, in the first part of the exhibition being open to the public, people could come and watch me at work, if you like, the second part of the time I spent there was closed to the public, by invitation only - and then again I thought that was the kind of end of it, that the work itself had turned into this kind of performative act and the very fact that I made all these crosses and this archive had been produced was something that would disappear. And then I had a response, this is just a way of saying that all these things are in a way out of my control the way the work ended up is slightly out of my control which is quite unusual, at least in the kind of work that I make, a woman from an organisation called Fife Contemporary Art - which is relatively new organisation which morphed out of the old Crawford Art Centre which closed a year or so ago in St Andrews - approached me, she came to visit the exhibition and she saw me at work and told me anecdotally about this building in St Andrews which is called Parliament Hall and Parliament Hall was a place where in the 17th century the Scottish parliament was resident for a number of months whilst plague was rampant throughout most of Scotland, Edinburgh was out of bounds, all the people went back to their country piles, parliament happened in St Andrews where apparently it was plague free.

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CONTENTS

Editorial

Chantal Mouffe

Jan Verwoert