ART&RESEARCH

AC: So they are the two kind of cardinal points of this spectrum of subjectivity and objectivity.

CMcC: Well the other is to take the ‘socialism is happiness’ to it’s extreme as well, and fill it out so widely that the person has to adopt an imaginative position in relation to it.

MV: I think it’s also not necessarily naff if the person really means it, then they’ll come across as being, you know, it depends on whether it’s done with irony or not and a lot of the art I’m interested in which I think is political is not really institution-based and not like the work which I’ve seen here at all, and it’s kind of embedded in more straightforwardly political groups, and sort of a form of creative pranks and thinking of, like the people around the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest do interventions and actions in a more or less anarchist spectrum. But they have ambition of politically effect, and then it can be called art or not, but that’s not their main goal – so they have a clear position in that. Then for me, the sort of idea of effectiveness and what I like about it or not is more based on the relationships between people and the making of it and relationship to the viewer they assume, which is coming from my personal viewpoint.

Chris Freemantle:

I was trying to get back to grips with Foucault, and particularly his work on madness, and in that, in a sense the argument is that he’s not proposing that madness is an effective counter to the enlightenment. In a sense, in the end, it’s perhaps that error is an effective counter to enlightenment, and it seems to be that the fundamental problem with the utopian idea is that there’s really actually no error taking place in it at all. The utopian is, in effect, perfect – and therefore, there are no mistakes, and what I liked, in a way, about what it seemed to me that Chad’s work was maybe doing, was almost proposing error. You know, the statements are mistaken statements in a way within common sense, so that they’re sort of errors being offered out as a challenge to people, like burning money. Nobody would, I mean well, a few people have done it, but in a sense that actually, the act is to offer up an error and that doesn’t mean you have to be offering up a solution that everybody has to buy into, but you’re offering up an error that helps people to think about the situation differently. It’s like, in a sense, you’re focused, maybe, I don’t know, but it seemed to be there’s a fact that you highlighted all of those cobble stones were perfectly clean, in a sense was very suggestive to me that, that you know, just focussing in on the cleanliness of the cobble stones, maybe it seemed slightly implausible that they’d been dug up and thrown the day before, unless the police had vigorously got out and scrubbed them of all evidence of having been thrown is erased.

OR: You know, to appear on TV, maybe they cleaned it before.

RS: But that’s funny that that’s the most aesthetic image in the whole film. (Laughing.) The most aesthetic image is the way they placed them. (Laughing). Like Ulrich Ruckriem or something, you know.

OR: Yes, like an art piece. Carl André, before the installation. (Laughing.)

CR: I think we’ve got one more, a few more minutes for one more question.

Ross Birrell: I just wanted to make a comment about Justin’s ‘the packing case is part of the work’. Where do you stop? In that, I suppose, self-criticism that somebody like Althusser promoted in relationship to Marxism, that it must go through self-criticism. And it seemed to that was underpinning that very gentle and sensitive work, in a lot of ways – there was a kind of rigourous, self-criticism undertaken throughout the thing, and where do you choose to stop? Because I thought the next slide you were gonna show us was a packing case and solar power was it gonna be a boat-shaped packing case (Laughing) and it was gonna power it’s own journey to the Expo, and I thought this is gonna be amazing – that’s a beautiful image, you know, this little slow boat to Japan. (Laughing.) But also, a very poignant kind of metaphor, I’m just wondering if you’d actually considered making it a boat as well and, you know, ‘cause you didn’t want it to go by ship, and I mean, it’s a joke as well.

JC: The budget didn’t extend that far. (Laughing.)

CMcC: I don’t know, when you start to seal it up like that, there’s something tiresome about it. There’s something when you lose it.

RB: But it’s kind of like lost at sea.

JC: But it’s that thing about, you know, I guess within the kind of green movement, within green politics, that whole thing about having to, in a way, do everything perfectly so you set yourself up as a perfect example of everything, it just, I think I find it, personally, problematic in a way and it’s largely distanced me from a lot of that kind of direct action kind of involvement. The whole idea of, a lot of the time, the way in which groups operate through consensus kind of agreement, I don’t entirely kind of buy into, for example. And I find it kind of, in a way, takes away certain kind of freedoms, particularly within the creative decision making, but interestingly enough, I was just kind of thinking, myself, about this idea of, in a way, how, coming back to what Sue was talking about, this idea of sort of sitting on the fence or kind of moving the goal posts as an artist, ‘cause for a while, I’ve been kind of, in a way, playing with this idea of what ecological art is, what it could be, and in a way, thinking about artists who I think are great examples of ecological artists, who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves ecological artists. In a way, they’re kind of run a million miles away from the ‘eco-artists’ label. I mean, I think, you know, it conjures up ideas of Simon Starling’s work. I think he’s, for me, an ecological artist because it’s all about that kind of rejoining, reconnecting, considering the relationships between different things, materials, places, people, politics – and, in a way, it draws together all those things which I think, within a globalised kind of world, get separated. And I think, in a way, that’s, to a large extent, the root cause of a lot, within ecology, a root cause of a lot of the separateness from cause and effect which, in a way, opens up a lot of problems.

RT: There’s another kind of stream of thought on that, which is also that the powers that, whatever, we’re all benefiting from globalisation, we’re all living here – but people who are actively wanting to push towards some of the economic systems that a lot of us find problematic, or it bothers us, makes us conscious, you know, of things we want to change. One of the ways in which that is affected is through art, which is really interesting, as well. ‘Cause I went to hear Vandana Shiva speak recently, who was the environmentalist based in India, speaking at actually the launch of the radical book fair in Edinburgh, that was mentioned this morning, but she was talking about Monsanto’s use of the images of deities in south India because amongst the earliest, most outspoken, most organised groups of people resisting the whole Monsanto project of enforcing certain seeds, the ones that don’t generate new seed. Farmers have resisted it throughout, and one of the things that went on early on was small documentaries about their own traditions of saving grain and how pesticides were avoided and all the kind of naturally organic solutions that they had found and that had worked, but what Monsanto has done very well is used its ability to research – the great academic tradition – and to interact. All those grass roots things that the left has been doing are always adopted by organisations that are going to profit from them. So they are very, not only do they have a very sound grasp of Hinduism, but they also go about packaging their seeds with the correct deity for the correct region. I just find that really interesting, and then Vandana Shiva comes up with really extraordinary statistics, such as – not long ago, there were 8000 grains that we used to consume, as human beings, and now there are five because of multi-national companies. And it just seemed to be, there were so many things, bells ringing in my head, listening to Oliver’s work being described and the things we’re talking about, but it always seems as though large corporations are so much further ahead in this?

RS: But in a sense, that’s the classic, I mean, that’s, in itself it’s this sort of big mushroom cloud over everything – that’s this sort of idea of, well we used to call it late capitalism but maybe it’s globalisation now. You know, this incredible ability to assimilate any kind of critique or criticism or opposition and to draw that into it and kind of turn it, face it round, you know, against, let’s say any kind of critique and to, you know, an extremely kind of insidious and complex and entertaining ways, and in a sense, maybe, you know, there’s something in the back of my mind that I can’t quite focus, but you know, the idea of like, even like, globalisation used to be a good thing, or that, maybe that’s just semantics, you know, ‘think global, act local’ let’s say. You know, that’s all changed now – maybe that is just a semantic shift. But the idea of you saying, Justin, about worrying about painting the side of something and you’re kind of carbon footprint or whatever, broadly speaking, you know, when did it turn out that, you know, let’s say sixty, seventy, eighty years of, you know, billion dollar profits by petrochemical companies, you know, producing all these fuels, it’s incredible in the UK, in the last sort of year, eighteen months, it’s really shifted round that it’s really kind of reflected back onto us as individuals that it’s our responsibility to change that now. You know, it’s not all these companies that have spent fifty years doing that and making the profits, but it’s now our responsibility to change our light bulbs and to reduce the carbon footprint and for you to worry about sending something to Japan, and I just kind of worry – it’s so complex and so subtle.

CR: And curiously that’s been present from the state. I mean, the state’s been increasingly, in our lifetime, saying to us things like we have to be more responsible for our pensions and things like that. I mean, increasingly the individual levels of responsibility is just enormous now, and it seems to have moved into that other area.

RS: It’s kind of our fault.

CMcC: Having said that, the responsibility’s been removed from other areas.

TE: Authority has been removed from other areas, where I think responsibility increases, or autonomy...

RS: So maybe, in a sense, just go back to that have the simple statement, like the ‘socialism is freedom’ thing, in a sense, you could argue that it’s so glib that it’s just another facet of what’s in that kind of machine already, that it’s absolutely accommodated to say that, and, you know, does political art have to be something that’s kind of underneath that and kind of off the radar as maybe someone there was suggesting. Or something that can tap into a certain part of our brains that have become totally immune to all these images and spectacular life and all the rest of it. I just wonder where that could be, where that, you know, it doesn’t seem that that’s, you know, everything is assimilated – you know, there’s lots of political art goes on and all these big art festivals all over Europe and broader, you know, and, and it’s the sort of lapdog of kind of what’s in vogue at the moment, or maybe in ten years it’ll be something else, it’ll be, you know, and it’s almost just serves, one could argue, it serves as a justification for the rest of it all just continuing in exactly the same way, you know? And bankers in Switzerland buying Chad’s work and you know I’ve been there as well in different works and things, and you know, the classic is the Hans Haacke piece, you know, the Ludwig, big critique of the Chocolatemeister, whatever it’s called, and then Ludwig buys it and puts it in his museum, you know in the 80s, but sorry that’s just a bit of a negative point. (Laughing.) But I just wonder where there’s some organic, another structure, different kind of ways of kind of re-imagining it that, you know, somehow that engagement with people, with an audience, with individuals to this kind of social structure, somehow.

CR: I think we should leave that point hanging there. (Laughing.) And we also owe all of our speakers a great thank you this afternoon, it’s been a really productive afternoon, an informative and Ross Birrell was concerned that we weren’t presented as this kind of gender block, Susan Phillipsz couldn’t be here and neither could Shauna McMullan, they both sent their apologies, so obviously we’d have had contributions from them. We might maybe get their papers on the second issue of the journal. Thanks very much for inviting me, I’ve had a great afternoon. I’m looking forward to moving our collective authority over to the Fruitmarket gallery, buying a drink there and so on.