"Flower chucker' image by Banksy
Conference sponsored by the Anarchist Studies Network
There has always been a strong connection historically between aesthetics and radical politics, and this is no less true for the global justice movement’s current preoccupation with cultural approaches to political action. This conference seeks to bring radical artists, activists, theorists and academics together to discuss past and present convergences between the theories and practices of artists and writers and the theories and practices of movements for radical social change.
There is already a massive amount of literature on Marxist approaches to aesthetics, art and literature, and whilst recognising the usefulness of such approaches, this conference will attempt to engage with these issues from other radical critical positions - whether they be anarchist, autonomist, ecological or otherwise. Such perspectives have often been overlooked historically, but it is arguable that they now more centrally influence the activities of radical artists and activists.
Registration and Conference Fees
To register, please email Gavin@cyber-rights.net.
Fees
£ 10 waged
£ 5 low/unwaged
Registration is limited to 120 people.
Conference Programme
Saturday 3rd February 2007, University of Manchester
| Roscoe 2.2 | Roscoe 2.5 | The Whitworth Gallery | Other Events | |
| 09:00-10:00 | REGISTRATION
Roscoe Building Foyer |
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| 10:00-11:00 | Jorge Goia
SOMA workshop |
Laurence Davis
Free Art |
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| 11:00-12:00 | Anna Feigenbaum, Steve Hanson, Martin
Jackson, Sophie Le-Phat Ho and Mark Rainey
Roundtable: The Street as a Site of Radical Potential |
Helen Stalker,
The Walter Crane Archive |
The Vacuum Cleaner
Mystery Art Project Meet at the Registration Table |
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| 12:00-13:30 | LUNCH | |||
| 13:30-14:30 | Jorge Goia
SOMA: An anarchist therapy |
Gareth Gordon
Anarchist Literary Theory |
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| 14:30-15:30 | Michael Gardiner
Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio: A Primer |
Jesse Cohn
Interpretation and the Proudhonian Series |
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| 15:30-15:45 | BREAK | |||
| 15:45-16:45 | Philip Armstrong
"Constructed Situations": Agamben’s Reading of the Situationists |
Daniel Ashton
Simple, Meaningful Graphics |
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| 16:45-17:45 | Anja Kanngieser
The productivity of disruption: the subversive potential of anarchic play in the actions of Berlin and Hamburg Umsonst |
John Jordan
Title TBA |
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| 20:00 | The Vacuum Cleaner
13 Morsels to Suck On... At The Basement Social Centre |
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Presentations in Roscoe 2.2
__________10:00-11:00 Jorge Goia, SOMA workshop
SOMA is a series of physical workshops, which are based on principle of self-organisation. SOMA is always conducted in groups with an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual within the support of the group. SOMA is concerned with the politics, not of institutions, but of everyday life. With so many blatant and latent repressive forces in society the search for your own health, pleasure and happiness can be a highly political act.
At the beginning of the 1970’s, SOMA was created in Brazil by Roberto Freire as a means of resistance to help people fighting against the military dictatorship. Drawing on Anti-psychiatry’s focus on communication, the research of Wilhelm Reich and the Brazilian fighting tradition of Capoeira Angola, SOMA uses drama games, sound and movement exercises and Capoeira to help salvage spontaneity, playfulness, communication, creativity and awareness of anarchist organization where no one is boss. The body is the material to resist and create within the world. The pleasure of being yourself challenges the body forgotten, develops new skills and turns the capitalist reality upside down.
__________13:30-14:30 Jorge Goia, SOMA: An Anarchist Therapy
A theoretical introduction to SOMA through presentation and group discussion.
__________14:30-15:30 Michael Gardiner, Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio: A Primer
Despite an early death and long periods of inaction due to heroin addiction – to the frustration of his literary editors – Alexander Trocchi had an extraordinary cultural career. In particular his two editorial projects, Merlin (1952-54) and The Sigma Portfolio (1963-67) were at the cutting edge of the radical aesthetics of their times. The very early Merlin, edited from a Paris throbbing with diasporas from North Africa and the Antilles, published proto-situationists, absurdist dramatists like Ionesco, experimental writers who had no other major outlet, and helped revive the career of Samuel Beckett. In one long editorial comment (particularly aimed at T.S. Eliot and right-wing New Criticism), Trocchi looks at the Cold War standoff, and the West’s aggression in it, in a way which would resemble the later idea of supplementarity haunting seemingly fixed dualities. Trocchi’s later Sigma Portfolio is a loose collection of around 25 papers taking in, amongst others, the situationism to which he had now made himself central (and which would echo through 1970s Scottish art practice, as in Get Arts), the psychogeograhy of Kenneth White, which has had a great influence at the Sorbonne and which proved to be an early type of ecocriticism, various genre-busting forms of semi-factual prosepoetry, Timothy Leary and his collaborators concerned to shift the paradigms of psychology in practical experiment, and R.D. Laing, both in his more familiar role in stressing the importance of anti-psychiatry, or socialising the power of the clinic, and also as an advocate of the anti-university – and it is particularly in The Sigma Portfolio that Laing and Trocchi sketch out their ideas of the perfect, socially engaged yet intellectual, peer-audited learning space. This paper will be a short guide to the 25 or so papers of Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio and will point of some of the radical aesthetic threads it influenced.
Michael Gardiner is Research Fellow at the AHRB Centre for Research in Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. His publications include The Cultural Roots of Devolution (EUP, 2004), Modern Scottish Culture (EUP, 2005), Escalator (Polygon, 2006), and From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Critical Theory Since 1960 (EUP, 2006).
__________15:45-16:45 Philip Armstrong, "Constructed Situations": Agamben’s Reading of the Situationists
The paper addresses Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the Situationists’ concept of “constructed situations,” defined as “a moment in life, concretely and deliberately constructed through the collective organization of a unified milieu and through a play of events.” Irreducible to any form of aestheticism, to the becoming-art of life or the becoming-life of art, the constructed situation constitutes a politics that is finally “adequate to its tasks,” one in which the Situationists begin to counteract capitalism—which “concretely and deliberately organizes environments and events in order to depotentiate life”—with an equally concrete, confrontational project. Through references to both Nietzsche and Benjamin, Agamben rethinks the Situationist’s proposal by arguing that the spatial or topological implications of the constructed situation must be rethought, opening toward a politics in which the singularity of the political event cannot be detached from the spatial conditions of its “taking-place.”
Philip Armstrong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He has published essays on Hardt and Negri, Derrida, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as widely in contemporary visual arts. His book Reticulations: Networks and the Space of the Political is forthcoming.
__________16:45-17:45 Anja Kanngieser, The productivity of disruption: the subversive potential of anarchic play in the actions of Berlin and Hamburg Umsonst
Coming out of the German Fels (For a Left Current) movement, two recent groups; Berlin Umsonst (Berlin for free) and Hamburg Umsonst (Hamburg for free), have utilised play and laughter in ways reminiscent of the historical examples of Dada, Surrealism and Situationism to encourage discourse and exchange with the public. Additionally, in the spirit of calls for the de-specialisation of activism, the groups are established rhizomatically, non-exclusively, and trans-ideologically. This is evident in their methodology, which is predicated upon common moments and events of anti-capitalist sentiment in everyday life. These moments are used as the basis for actions that reconceptualize traditional modes of capitalistic interaction.
This paper will examine some of these actions undertaken by these two groups between 2003-2006, in order to illuminate some of the ways that laughter, play and desire can be used to address social, cultural and political issues without losing the rigorous, self-reflexive characteristics of more conventional forms of resistance. Through the disruption of ritualised forms of political dissidence, I will suggest that such experimental types of activism may offer interesting supplements to more conventional and tested methods of protest, and allow us different ways to think about the functions and manoeuvrings of activism in the current socio-political realm.
Anja Kanngieser is a current PhD candidate at University of Melbourne, Australia. She is presently concluding a year-long independent fieldwork research trip in Berlin where she has been investigating contemporary German activist groups that utilise aesthetic techniques to articulate their dissent.
Presentations in Roscoe 2.5
__________10:00-11:00 Laurence Davis, Free Art
What would free art look like and what sort of society might produce it? In this paper I propose to discuss three different answers to these questions given by three anarchist or anarchist-inspired artists who attempted to formulate self-consciously libertarian utopian visions of a world in which the arts might flourish: William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
My argument is that all three strove to imagine post-capitalist, non-coercive societies in which art would replace economics as the fundamental organising principle of social life, yet they did so from very different perspectives about the nature and social functions of art. Morris the socialist craftsman suggested that art should be radically democratised, and that it ought to serve the social function of making common labour a source of pleasure and joy. Wilde the dramatic artist and art critic believed on the contrary that art should be insulated from democracy, and permitted to grow autonomously in a highly individualistic society characterised by a far greater degree of equality and respect for individual difference than our own. Le Guin the anarchist and Daoist literary artist arrived at her own accord at a position somewhere between the two, believing that art is inextricably bound up with society and ought to be democratised to a far greater degree than it is today, yet also remaining acutely aware of the dangers of reducing art to its social function and hence neglecting the individual springs of both artistic and social vitality. I will sketch and analyse the utopian conceptions of art and society animating the work of Morris and Wilde. Second, I will consider how these or related ideas have been taken up by contemporary thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, Hakim Bey, Terry Eagleton, and David Weir. I will conclude by elucidating the ways in which Le Guin’s work can help us to move beyond the sometimes unconstructively dogmatic positions generated by these struggles.
Laurence Davis has taught political and social theory at Oxford University, Ruskin College, and University Colleges Galway and Dublin, and is the editor (with Peter Stillman) of The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. He currently lives in Dublin, Ireland.
__________11:00-12:00 Anna Feigenbaum, Steve Hanson, Martin Jackson, Sophie Le-Phat Ho and Mark Rainey, Roundtable: The Street as a Site of Radical Potential
Situationist practices have been recuperated and re-envisioned in contemporary alter/anti-globalization movements from graffiti and flashmobbing through to Act Up! and the WTO protests. Our proposed roundtable will explore the site of the street as a place of political potentiality as it is marked and mapped by artistic practices. Drawing on specific, local projects we will look at some of the forms that radical geographies and cartographies of the street take today. Participants will ask questions about the links between mapping practices and other forms of art that ‘mark’ the street such as, stencils, stickers, posters, installations and performances.
We will draw from our individual and collaborative work as researchers, artists, writers, curators, cartographers, photographers and aficionados to examine and expand on questions including, How does the ephemerality of street art shape they way we imagine its political potential? What kinds of residual, affective traces are left by the removal or covering of street art? What happens to the ‘politics’ of street art when it becomes permanent, state-sponsored or state-sanctioned (i.e. Banksy’s mural in Bristol; Roadsworth’s parking lot in Montreal)? How can documenting the sites and spaces of work and consumption be figured into a praxis of the street? How does the street fail as a site of resistance and what productive knowledge can be garnered from these moments of failure?
Anna Feigenbaum is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, QC Canada. In addition to organizing anarchist cabarets around Montreal, she has worked on three radical cartography book projects with blckbrd publishing, Cracks, what makes together, and How Many Maps…
Steve Hanson is researching towards a PhD via the sociology department at Goldsmiths College. He teaches Cultural Studies at Herefordshire College of Art & Design and is an associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has written a paper on Flashmobbing for Goldsmiths College and has produced collaborative book works, including Forage: Operations with Harvey Dwight, Simon Ford and Robert Galeta and New and Accurate Maps of the World with Robert Galeta. He has also exhibited street photography.
Martin Jackson lives and works in East London where he is part-time street artist, part-time writer, part-time photographer, part-time corporate whore. Having previously studied creative writing, photography, cultural theory and other things at UEA and Goldsmiths, he is now working on a book project about global street art.
Sophie Le-Phat Ho is a young researcher and cultural organiser. She was interim Programming Coordinator for Studio XX, a cyberfeminist media arts centre in Montreal, and the Editor-in-Chief for .dpi, an electronic periodical on women and technology. She has also worked as Project Officer for terminus1525.ca at the Canada Council for the Arts, and is one of the organisers of Upgrade Montréal on politics, culture and technology, as part of Upgrade International. The co-founder and director of Artivistic [http://artivistic.omweb.org], she works at the intersection of art, science and activism. She is currently pursuing an MA in Anthropology of Health and the Body in the 21C at Goldsmiths College (University of London).
Mark Rainey lives in Manchester and is the head of the tour programme at the Urbis centre. His interest in pyschogeography and interpretation has developed through guiding people around the streets of Manchester and the exhibition centre itself. He is a regular contributor to the Urbis blog and has a background in philosophy, studying both at MMU and the University of Warwick. He also currently teaches the Introduction to Western Thought module at the Nazarene Theological College, Didsbury.
__________13:30-14:30 Gareth Gordon, Anarchist Literary Theory __________
14:30-15:30 Jesse Cohn, Interpretation and the Proudhonian Series
How does art make meaning? What is the nature of the relationship between representations and reality? Why do interpretations of texts diverge and converge? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s concept of “series” can help to answer these questions in ways that can seem both familiar and surprising. A fresh look at the theory of the “serial dialectic” which he declared to be “the queen of thought” can provide a way into a rereading not only of Proudhon’s oeuvre but of the epistemology of the so-called “classical” anarchist tradition which he founds.
Jesse Cohn, an Associate Professor of English at Purdue University North Central, is the author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics. He teaches courses in American fiction and popular culture, and is currently working on English translations of Daniel Colson’s Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme de Proudhon á Deleuze and of Proudhon’s Du Principe de l’art and De la Justice.
__________15:45-16:45 Daniel Ashton, Simple, Meaningful Graphics
The inspiration for this piece comes from Molleindustria, an Italian team of artists, designers and programmers. For Molleindustria, videogames can be used to “describe pressing social needs and express our feelings and ideas”. Moreover, to “express an alternative to dominant forms of gameplay we must rethink game genres, styles and languages”. For Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria “the use of simplified but meaningful graphics is one of the most disregarded chances in game design” and “hyperrealism is not the only way” (2006).
The paper will introduce the games Tamatipico (Molleindustria), McDonald’s Video Game (Molleindustria) and Disaffected (Persuasive Games) and their attempt to raise issues of management processes and worker productivity. These games will be seen as offering a two-fold critique in terms of their content and subject matter and representational aesthetics. To focus on issues of precarious labour and exploitation is a massive departure from the film licenses and best-selling sequels which commercial games developers and publishers concentrate on. The form these political games take is also a far departure. Novel approaches to gameplay and “simplified but meaningful graphics” further work to mark out these games and foster an opposition or alternative to commercial games which emphasizes graphics as ideological tools.
To argue for graphics as ideological tools, the paper will turn to Alexander R. Galloway who draws on André Bazin’s association of neorealism in cinema with both a certain type of form and narrative (2004). Galloway’s wider argument is to suggest a realist game must be realist in doing, with this being an attempt to counter interpretations of realism in gaming as merely realistic representation. With the games this paper will draws on, one may note the foregrounding of anti-realistic representation. Whilst agreeing with Galloway’s approach to gaming realism and doing, I would also emphasize the forms of critique that the representational choices in these games offer. As certain formal techniques such as using non-professional actors and real life scenery operated to critically reflect on everyday life for Bazin, the use of graphics in these games works to critically reflect on the commercial games industry drive for increased spectacle. This paper will suggest that these games, as counter-mobilisations of immaterial game labour, subtlety critique the aesthetic and design choices through which the commercial games industry problematically propels itself.
Daniel Ashton is a PhD student in the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University. His research interests include social and political games and games design, and cultures of games innovation.
__________16:45-17:45 John Jordan, title TBA
Presentations in The Whitworth Gallery
__________11.00 Helen Stalker – The Walter Crane Archive
The Walter Crane Archive at the Whitworth Art Gallery and the John Rylands University Library is an extensive collection of artwork, design, correspondence and ephemera, relating to one of the best-known decorative artists of 19th century Britain. As an active socialist, Walter Crane strived to create a universal language of art, employing imagery with strong, aesthetic resonance and poetic symbolism. A friend and follower of William Morris, Crane’s political and artistic motivation was assimilated from a variety of sources and readings. Since his indenture to W. J. Linton as a teenager and his early exposure to radicalism, Crane’s writings, poetry, lectures and artistic practice continued to reflect an ideology of positive progress and the importance of the artist-craftsman.
Throughout his career, Crane became a significant artist of Socialism, his utopian imagery creating a unique vision for the movement’s familiar propaganda and collective identity. Crane was a prolific designer, his skill spanning an array of disciplines. This ensured that the politically emblematic figures, often conceived within his paintings, transcended the canvas, appearing in posters, cartoons, magazine covers and trade-union banners. Often, they metamorphosized into fairy-tale characters, storybook animals and were even present within designs for wallpapers and furniture.
This presentation will combine a talk and discussion on Crane’s relationships to art and radical politics, and will enable participants to view archive material before its becoming available to the public in September 2007.
Helen Stalker is the Cataloguer of the Walter Crane Archive
Other Events
__________Friday 2nd Feb
Private Viewing – Revolution is Not a Garden Party. The Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University
Conference Participants are invited to the pre-opening viewing of the international exhibition ‘Revolution is Not a Garden Party,’ envisaged as a tribute to the revolutionary spirit of the Hungarian Uprising. The exhibition consists of new and recent works that examine the global economic and political context against which revolutions take place, as well as the intersection between personal and artistic heritages of revolution.
For more information, see http://translocal.org/revolution/.
__________Saturday 3rd Feb
Book stalls: AK Press, Autonomedia and the Basement Social Centre Bookshop will all have book stalls at the conference.
11:00 The Vacuum Cleaner – Mystery Art Project
The Vacuum Cleaner invites you to get involved in an art project dealing with the aesthetics of disgust and disguise. Meet at the registration table.
The vacuum cleaner is an artist and activist collective of one fashioning radical social and ecological change. For more see http://www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/.
20:00 The Vacuum Cleaner – 13 Morsels to Suck On...
At the Basement Social Centre, 24 Lever Street, City Centre (off Piccadilly Gardens). 13 Morsels to Suck On is a performative screening introducing 13 different videos and stories of political pranks, art activism and acts of creative resistance from Europe and the US. Expect all the subtly one can expect from groups with names like the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and The Space Hijackers. The screening will also include a guest appearance from the Monkey United Fighting Force (MUFF).
The Basement is a social centre in Central Manchester with a vegan cafe, library, bookshop, computer hub and exhibition space. For directions and more information, see http://www.basementmanchester.org.uk/ .
Getting There
Manchester University is located on Oxford Road, with bus services running there from Manchester Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly British Rail Stations.
The Roscoe Building is located off Oxford Road on Brunswick Street. Coming down Oxford Street from the city centre, after you pass under the ‘Manchester University’ sign, Brunswick Street is the second street on the left, just opposite the Manchester Museum.
For a detailed map, see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/visitors/travel/maps/.
Travel links:
Freewheelers (lift share) - http://www.freewheelers.co.uk/Aesthetics_and_Radical_Politics_Conference
Trains services – http://www.thetrainline.com/.
Coach services - http://www.nationalexpress.com/.
Accomodation
If you are planning to stay overnight and require help with finding accommodation, please contact the conference organisers for advice at Gavin@cyber-rights.net.
Also, if you live locally to Manchester, and would be willing to accommodate someone in a spare room/on a sofa, please also get in touch!