Cut-Through Collective, International Workers Memorial Day Zine – Work’s Context
Originally published at: http://www.communityofgoods.blogspot.com
I’ve been involved in making leaflets for political demonstrations, but most recently the art collective I’m in produced a small zine for one. I’m going to try and explain why we did this.
Our zine was titled International Workers Memorial Day 2023, and was distributed at May Day demonstrations in Glasgow and London. We found the subject matter lent itself to an approach that suited our art group’s communicative style, and we also wanted to seriously work through what would be an appropriate response to the theme of memorialisation. A community’s approach to mourning and celebrating life/death signals something important about the attractiveness of its character. How we do this matters.
For better or worse, there is a cultural tendency to keep certain forms of politics apart from mourning. To make political work about memorialisation, we have to accept some different rules, have to meet grief on its own terms before we can do anything with it that doesn’t appear to rob it. To act politically in relation to memorialisation requires a different sensitivity to the material under consideration.
The type of intervention we deemed appropriate is what our group understands as non-didactic, what I think of as demonstrating an oblique or diffuse political style. While our group has some definite points of agreement, there are some subjects where vaguely expressed attitudes that capture something of our place in an unfolding dialogue work better. Maybe this can be thought of as a dilemma between holding a ‘political line’ vs cultivating a structure of feeling/‘vibes-based politics’.
In the case of this specific intervention, we were communicating with an audience composed of people who care enough about the labour movement to attend a May Day demonstration in the UK. It is hopefully understood from our work that we wanted to help people into a more internationalist view of class, and to reckon with the reality of a labour force with divergent needs and priorities.
In our art, here, we don’t want to take a wholly argumentative or declarative textual approach because, as mentioned, we identify the subject matter as poorly suited to this manner. But additionally, we avoid this style because we believe in making the most from our total ability to communicate. There are people in our movement – or more often on its peripheries – with the skill and desire to communicate in unusual ways, and it’s our movement’s loss if we fail to figure how to include their energy in the struggle for a classless society.
At the same time: I do believe in the need for a confluence of political and stylistic positioning – as in politics so in art – but this should be conjunctural. There’s an Asad Haider article about the Chinese Cultural Revolution that I think gets at this. Haider relates how a plurality of co-existing political experiments during this period of decline in Chinese working class power became strategically necessary (though not wholly sufficient in itself) to overcome counter-revolution. In the UK now, where the capitalist-aligned classes similarly appear to face no singular, leading mass movement coherent or capable enough to surpass them, where there is no mass organisational force and programme around which we must all evidently trend in the same direction, plurality is again the word.
Probably the most recent situation in the UK that seemed to suggest a large-scale coherence of communist positioning was during the Labour Party’s Corbyn years. Please allow me to divert here into a very quick appraisal of this as a case in point for how politics and art were cohered round a mass movement.
At its worst, the cultural output of Corbynism’s leading, nascent cultural institutions (The World Transformed, Tribune, Novara Media, Grime4Corbyn), was characterised by a sycophantic, idolising, forced enthusiasm. This may be the style that a closeness to bureaucratic power tends to bring forth. On the fringes, however, were lively experiments taking place amongst Twitter users – most notably, the array of ‘Trevor Bastard Extended Universe’ accounts, which developed a new style of parafiction uniquely suited to the participatory medium and shifts in the balance of political power. The former attempted to inculcate a collective projection into some future idyll of material abundance and comfortable self-governance, the latter focussed on criticising the movement’s antagonists. (I probably missed the best of the worst though, so would welcome hearing more about positive Corbyn-aligned artworks that didn’t end up falling heavily back onto the movement leadership’s icons and slogans.) How Corbynism might have institutionalised this latter cultural tendency had the political fortunes leading up to 2019 been different, is a question we can only dream of answering. I think to be fair this was a radically new situation for many of us, so it was understandable that some of us would try on things that didn’t really fit as part of finding out what would.
That said, it must be clear that developing a style from the fantasy of wielding big institutional power is a bad fit for those of us working through socially progressive organisations and campaigns in 2023. So what is this little zine? How is enough power amassed to realise its political and stylistic aims? Are we interested in power? Should we receive institutional support, from where?
In its way, a zine such as this can work as a connecting object between different points in a field of actors organising for progressive social causes. One of the most actually prominent, though least recognised, reasons for art’s existence is to serve as an alliance-forming entity that softens differences between factions. Part II in Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art makes a case for recognising how in the Eighteenth century, art revolved around the “creation of a common arena of high culture and fine art in which the nobility, gentry, and educated middle class could share”. The coalescence of social power blocs into a ruling force can be facilitated by art. Shiner goes on to quote the view of Lord Kames, that “by uniting different ranks in the same elegant pleasures, they [The Fine Arts] promote benevolence; by cherishing love of order, they enforce submission to governance.” I want to tentatively say from this that the outlined social function of art can be applied from any point in the arena of class struggle, and on scales far smaller too.
So what do we – the makers of this zine – want to coalesce our allies around specifically? As mentioned earlier, part of our intervention comes from a felt need to experiment with styles that are non-didactic, or developing on from this, approaches to communication that are non-analytical.
We learn from reading artists’ statements and interviews, how art tends to hide the analytical thinking that goes into its making.
In the case of Conceptual Art, this transposition of analysis into non-analysis is turned into a formal technique of display. The explanatory text is presented as a discrete but fundamentally co-constitutive part of the work. Take for example, Forbidden Colours, by Felix Gonzalez Torres (1988). The accompanying written text demonstrates an adept grasp of analytical language and thought that does not show up in the image he has presented. I’m using this example to quickly present a mechanism that can show up in some art – analysis goes to non-analysis.
But I would like to suggest that we do not in all cases have to see analysis as some kind of proof that validates an artwork, since there are times when artists work from intuition. A work might legitimately move from non-analysis to non-analysis. Because some artists are more well-suited to working from intuition, they may not generally think or know how to communicate analytically. Analysis, with its basic assumptions about language, is an ill-fit for the style of thought belonging to the historically situated artist-type. (Though we should be careful not to fetishise or exoticise this!)
My provocation here is that artists don’t find it easy – that to be good with words is an incredible gift. To hold a predisposition for cogent argumentation is like being born in a body that is white or male or holds any other quality that tends to confer social advantage. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why Hamja Ashan’s book Shy Radicals has been so popular in art circles? Because in speaking to a phenomenon of introversion, it highlights a widespread lack of faith in one’s own ability to speak in concert with the dominant analytical style.
I believe that how we approach these differences should be a live question for our organisations. Is this difference something to which we should adapt our wider practices, or do we focus on training people into the style? I want to leave that open.
To round off, I think Cut-Through Collective made this zine as part of a project to include different types of communication in the culture of political demonstration. We wanted to experiment with styles that would be appropriate to the subject matter of grief, to our political aims, and our real position in a balance of forces. Finally, we wanted to find and gently shape some points of convergence amidst the extra parliamentary political left.
Whitechapel Book Club, Report No.1
Rebecca Birrell – This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century
Report author: Allan Struthers
In February this year, after much wishful talk, staff at Whitechapel Gallery launched our very own book club. Across three after-work sessions, eight of us from the visitor services team read and discussed the club’s inaugural book. Before offering a review of ‘This Dark Country’ by Rebecca Birrell, I’ll say a quick word about how we got to this stage.
The initiative was catalysed by our friends from Koenig Books, who sometimes furnish our staff spaces with one-month-backdated surplus stock of their art-critical publications. January’s copy of Art Review happened to contain a punchy two-page write-up of Birell’s book, counterposed (favourably) against Katy Hessel’s bestselling, ‘The Story of Art Without Men’. The article was temptingly illustrated with a painting, in the Baroque style, of a woman effortlessly toppling a brawny guy down a well. Many of us read the article.
We gleaned that Birrell’s methodologically novel history of women in art could pair well with our upcoming, ‘Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction’ exhibition. The ready availability of this article, written by Eliza Goodpasture, combined with the long-stated intention to have a colleague’s book club, allowed us to form a consensus on selecting a first text organically enough. Inertia broken, we were excited to now more actively participate in a lively contemporary discourse around feminist art history.
This report is a product of conversations from the book club, between participants: Christy Chan, Joel Cosson, Camilla Cuminatti, Claire Jensen, Hana Krkoska, Allan Struthers and Seulki Yoo
In her introduction, Birrell briefly situates the book within queer scholarship, which took us by surprise for the first few chapters. The handling of diaries, letters, sketches and paintings are treated in ways that are “loose and intuitive”, “queer”, “speculative”. Over the course of ten further chapters, each focusing on an individual artist, a group outline of divergent womanhood emerges. The figures receiving treatment all studied, painted, and exhibited largely between London and Paris in the early twentieth century.
Non-heterosexual relationships and desires are guessed at, mainly from biographic coincidence and implication rather than overt reference in the source material. The book’s more-than-occasional passages of imagined detail, delivered in a yearning lyrical style, seemed to us a bit audacious for a history of art. But there was undoubtedly something appealing in Birrell’s youthfully transgressive enthusiasm and apparent glee in grouping artists under a queer umbrella. It brought to recollection lines from The Smith’s, ‘Meet Me at the Cemetery Gates’: “Keats and Yeats are on your side, but Wilde’s on mine”, in its wish to collect and claim dead artists for a cultural project of one’s own.
The book’s gossipy method seemed a suitable match for its stated themes, ‘Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century’. It recreates a network of whispered advice to young painters seeking an exit from family expectations – move here, pretend to be this, go safely with him. Though as Silvia Federici points out in a history of gossip, in her ‘Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women’, the word has less comradely connotations that rose to prominence in the 17th and 18th centuries. She says, Gossip, “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk, that is, talk potentially sowing discord, the opposite of the solidarity that female friendship implies and generates.”
We found in the book’s frequent citation of Virginia Woolf, (she crops up as a source in nine of the ten character chapters), much by way of opinion that regrettably conforms to this latter type of talk. Her authoritative descriptions of the artists are characterised by a restless oneupmanship that seems to undermine the collective identity that Birrell seeks to recover. We are left to imagine how unruly these women could have been had it been possible to cultivate a more collaborative and inclusive sociality.
As a group, we agreed with Birrell’s main argument that art can offer its creator an excuse not to conform. We saw how an art practice can become a valid reason for moving far away from claustrophobic and conservative family situations, a way to avoid unwanted marriage arrangements, a substitute model of creativity to childbirth. Birrell is highly condemnatory of marriage, the evidence she collects of hopeful, brilliant artistic lives being run into miserable corners, is damning.
The artists covered here are all associated with the Bloomsbury Set, a small cultural elite described by literary critic Raymond Williams as a ‘class fraction’. That is, a minority tendency within the ruling class who hold divergent, potentially subversive values. This Dark Country shows how these artists were involved in re-fashioning sexual morality and the family in a secularizing modern society. They acted far in advance of shifts in the dominant culture towards a more permissive society.
But in other ways they held regressive attitudes similar to the rest of their class; in their lack of curiosity towards a lower class; and in their “casual racism”, which Birrell declines to explore but explains as a consequence of having been “raised in ambiently Christian households instilling in them a form of complacency”.
In assessing these non-living artists it feels imperative that we try to hold their welcome and unwelcome characteristics together, rather than rejecting everything outright. As a group we saw in the story of Gwen John’s relationship with the much older, wealthier, and professionally esteemed Augustus Rodin, similar power dynamics as came to light in the #MeToo movement. By sharing stories of relationships like these, the patterns of patriarchy become more recognisable, an awareness of how not to conform becomes wider. This is one of the powers of relating intimacy.
In her talk for last season’s WG public programme, Griselda Pollock referred to ‘Action, Gesture, Paint’ as “a corrective exhibition”. The term implies more than a mere updating of the record. “Confined to footnotes of canonical accounts, remembered only as lovers or muses, women’s [art]work was not only denied serious attention in their time, but continues to struggle for status today”, writes Birrell. We can see how the book and the exhibition are part of this same broader ongoing struggle for recognition, and ultimately, reparative change.
For this season the book club will read Camilla Cuminatti’s selection, Maura Reilly’s ‘Curatorial Activism: Towards and Ethics of Curating’, which was chosen by vote.
SUTAPA BISWAS, LUMEN/ADAM LEWIS JACOB, IDRISH(ইদ্রিস)
The other day when I watched Sutapa Biswas’ film Lumen at Autograph APB, my immediate thought was that it should be programmed alongside Idrish(ইদ্রিস) by Adam Lewis Jacob. Corie then told me that this film is currently being exhibited on loop just 45 minutes away at Lux in Waterlow Park.
Both of the films speak to migration from post-Partition India to Britain. Biswas’ work moves through a monologue, performed with arresting expressivity by the actor Natasha Patel. The artist and the actor tell a story of intergenerational displacement, the process of ‘primitive accumulation‘. That’s how a kind of prehistoric (to capitalist capture) idyll is destroyed by the expansion of empire. Lumen offers a personalised reflection of reluctant journeys across the sea, from subordinated majority in the empire’s periphery to oppressed minority at its centre, a logical labour-redistribution effect of this process.
An interrupted movement in the reverse direction is the subject of Lewis Jacob’s film, Idrish(ইদ্রিস). It centres on a 1983 national campaign against racist immigration laws, and specifically to halt the deportation of political organiser, Muhammad Idrish. In this work, the overcoming of political inertia and silence around the (since ingloriously dubbed) hostile environment is intensified through agitated passages of animation and Christian Nouk’s convulsing soundtrack.
The two works fit together like consecutive acts in the same story. Biswas brings breath-taking rage for the British settler ruling class and their unmistakably mediocre social qualities. Through the use of recently donated archive footage depicting the British Raj enjoying their riches, drips of sun drenched sentiment are burnt up, the left-behind traces are hardened resentment. These are rocks that Biswas sifts through, for underneath the rage her story is one primarily of loss, to display as evidence the salt of her family’s tears.
The writer China Miéville describes the leftist injunction, ‘don’t mourn, organise!’ as a bullying disavowal, asks how we can organise if not through mourning, enjoins us to hear and to speak ‘the subtle buried tongue’. This might be the same wagging appendage that caused British officials overseeing the Highland Clearances to bury outspoken women they murdered face down, so that their songs might not reach the surface. The teller of Biswas’ story recognises and channels a latent power in the symbols of subversive lamentation.
The Lewis Jacob film demonstrates an agency that is more instructive, though no more nor less intrinsically important for that. Muhammed Idrish describes becoming a part of his newfound nationality, the lifeline of a community forged through political organising, which he describes without varnish as a ‘way of life’. A direct connection is made between the unglamorous work of building a political movement and belonging, and this is retrospectively glamorised, we might say historically vindicated, in Lewis Jacob’s artful depiction of Idrish’s individual figure.
Between the appealingly personalised narratives of Lumen and Idrish(ইদ্রিস) is, of course, a collective story. The latter offers one way of picking up where the former leaves off. Biswas charts a constellation of open questions about loss, anger, and retribution. Lewis Jacob answers through the slogan ‘Here to stay, here to fight!’
Betterment Spoils the World (pt.1)
Part one of a moving-image work in three parts, featured in Schemata’s show IDENT, as part of the Corsica Studios digital programme. It was made in collaboration with Corie McGowan, and the explanation we gave it runs as such:
This work aims to build a narrative between Rivington Terrace Gardens in Lancashire and Port Sunlight in Merseyside, both once owned by the liberal industrialist William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925), through a combination of filmed site-specific and home-studio performances that explore histories in the production, distribution, and consumption of soap.
We draw from the analyses of Stuart Hall [The Spectacle of the Other], Roland Barthes [Mythologies], Mary Douglas [Purity and Danger], and Friedrich Engels [The Condition of the Working Class in England] to situate William Leverhulme’s idiosyncratic industrial practices within ideologies of management and cleanliness.
We play on the Pre-Raphaelite marketing devices the Lever Brothers corporation (now Unilever), the seductive material qualities of soap, and the gesture of washing, to address Leverhulme’s ‘co-partnership’ industrial model that sold not just soap, but the image of a ‘better’ society.
The two selected sites serve as interlinked situational points within art and industry in the early 20th-century, which we intend to reappraise through a historical narrative that runs us up to the issue of ‘artwashing’ in the 21st century.
We anticipate further exhibition of this work upon completion of parts 2, and 3.
Rent Pandemic 2020
A short artists’ film made in March 2020, looking at the prospect of an extended lockdown and the potential for community oriented safety measures to protect people living in rental accommodation from incurring debt.
At the time it seemed as though a social crisis on this scale would galvanise the renters movement. The government attempted to mitigate social fall-out through the furlough scheme while also lowering some bureaucratic obstacles to accessing Universal Credit. But there was still a worry that without a scheme to put a hold on rent payments, many would fall through the cracks and become trapped in debt. Renters’ unions picked up a lot of new activist volunteers during this time; London Renters Union launched an ambitious ‘Can’t Pay Won’t Pay‘ campaign.
The film is both a personal response to the immediate mood of lockdown, and an attempt to feel out what potential lay in a coordinated response to the widespread vulnerability of living in rental accommodation at that conjuncture.
Brief Transcript From a Panel Talk I Was In…
In February the short part of my Cast-Off Club film was shown as part of an ‘Open Screening’ at Whitechapel Gallery, hosted by film curator, Gareth Evans. 15 minutes were set aside after the screening for the 6 featured artists to talk a bit about their work. I had a button up shirt that I adorned when speaking to the audience in character, and removed when I was not.
The panel featured myself, Andreia Afonso, Andrew Locke, Corie McGowan, Kai Fiain, and Robery Lye. I’m only including contributions from myself, but rest assured, the other artists spoke well about their work. Assiduous fact-checkers/’Struthers-truthers’ can contact me for a copy of the mp3 recording if they wish to verify the following…
Gareth Evans: ’45 seconds to introduce your work.’
Allan: First of all, primarily I’d like any questions to be addressed either to Stanley – the character, or myself – the artist who was allowing the space to showcase some of what they were offering and what their aspirations and dreams were. So, to Stanley, or to myself, Allan, thanks.
…
Gareth Evans: ‘The question is about performance and if there is a performative practice that extends beyond the screen. In a larger way, maybe a dominant way.’
Stanley: Yeah, well I mean we are all performing and failing to perform to the extent that we would like to. Life is characterised primarily by failure. You look around you in this room, and you’ll see that,
[Takes off shirt to signify transition into Allan]
that is the case. Uhm.
I mean, yeah there is a kind of actually a bit of a slippage between fiction and non-fiction that goes on in any world-building exercise, and that’s because you don’t want to let your character become independent because then you can’t control their narrative anymore, and the worst thing that could happen is that you make this independent character with an independent existence, and then it would just get ignored. And that’s the kind of fear because the thing is, if you don’t stop performing, then no one can say you’ve failed your performance. Because it’s not finished yet and they can’t exercise their final verdict until then.
…
Audience member: ‘How did you want your films to make us feel?’
…
Stanley: I wanted people to feel like a sort of sponge, saturated with desire, and I also hoped to instil an insatiable thirst for glory that can only be realised through engagement with me.
Gareth: ‘To mix of course the two images that Allan just offered us, with the filmmakers today, I think it’s hard to dispute, our sponge is saturated with the glory of their own presentation.’
Review: 3 Art Exhibitions in London I Would Recommend You See Before They Close in Mid-January
One of the main things I do is look at art. There are some pretty big shows in London at the moment that are set to close in mid-January. I want to hype them because they’re quite political in subject matter, and because they’re still open [edit – they are not still open], so you can actually get a chance to see them, rather than having to just take my word for it on whether or not they were any good [edit – you can now only take my word on whether or not they were].
O’ Magic Power of Bleakness at the Tate Britain, with artwork from Mark Leckey [Closes 5th Jan]
Retrospective for Mark Leckey, who’s Scouse-accented work has this time involved recreating the motorway underpass that him and his mates used to mess about underneath when they were teenagers. So it’s a large theatrical installation with multiple video projections, like an open plan cinema hall that’s been designed and built specifically for showing just one film. Taken together, the videos have an overall runtime of just under an hour, and offer a hazy impression of youth culture in Britain since around the 1970’s – and I think they form a modestly personal, non-linear recollection of the artist’s involvement with more-or-less subversive popular cultural styles.
The cumulated affect is a decaying hallucinogenic volatility, etc., but most interesting is that, through his professionalisation as one of the world’s most successful contemporary artists, Leckey has become estranged from his class, yet still maintains a strong attachment to some of its symbolic codes. Now, his take on the working class is on its sportswear branded contingent, those who’ve designed themselves in line with a sort of subcultural visual ideology, and it is in this focus that Mark Leckey places a deeply uneasy question about class authenticity right at the centre of his work. Has the working class ever had its own culture?
If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol I at the Centre for Contemporary Arts: Goldsmiths, with artwork from Tony Cokes [Closes 19th Jan]
Retrospective for Tony Cokes, showcasing a selection of his video works from the early 90’s to now. For the most part, it’s a pretty basic set-up of texts taken from political speeches and essays relayed on primary colour backgrounds, set to tasteful selections of alternative pop music. Kodwo Eshun’s Mark Fisher memorial lecture from 2018 gets a full 40 minute treatment and is played in a nightclub-like environment, allowing the Fisher/Goldsmiths legacy to continue apace, which is very nice if you’re into that sort of thing.
Cokes’ intention is to make theoretical texts more accessible, so the artworks are unapologetically didactic. The emancipatory political potential of producing and listening to music is offered as a recurrent point. The artworks attempt to show how cultural influences shift across national and racial boundaries in the historical development of dance music styles. They celebrate the creation of temporary conditions where joyful collective experiences seem to break down ideologies that enforce types of segregation. It is very Goldsmiths.
In the basement is one of Cokes’ early video works, FADE TO BLACK, which doesn’t adhere to the colour-text-sound template. It’s an erratic 30 minute composite of found footage, quoted text, and politicized music about cinematic representations of blackness, and you should take the time to watch because it is very angry and very stylish. (An analogue to this can be found in Elia Suleiman and Jayce Salloum’s film from the same year, Introduction to the End of an Argument – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI3AeaRUUhk)
Misbehaving Bodies at the Wellcome Collection, with artwork from Jo Spence and Oreet Ashrey [Closes 26th Jan]
An exhibition of text and photography from Jo Spence with videos from Oreet Ashrey in an impressively cotch watching environment (beanbags and blankets are provided). Across 40 years, Jo Spence has developed a diaristic approach to photography to reflect on how her working class background has shaped her experiences of mental and physical illness. In scrapbook style, Spence wryly criticises gendered representations of the body and links this to her own feelings of pain and dejection. To deal with some of the fallout from this, Spence developed a technique she calls photo therapy. This involved reenacting and photographing moments of struggle that she and members of her family have lived through. Photo, text, and video documentation from this experiment are featured in the exhibition.
Performance: Imperialist Knowledge Environment – ALARM
Instructions
Materials:
Scissors
A pack of playing cards
Some boxes of matches
>10 smoke alarms, velcro-attached to cloak
A fog machine
A ladder
A copy of Marx’s Capital Volume 1
Actions:
Place playing cards on ground
Add matches
Chop up some cards
Set off fog machine
Add more matches
Rearrange cards + add more matches (imitate development of monopoly capitalism)
Set off fog machine
Stand up and walk towards the fog
-ALARM-
Walk to ladder
Climb ladder
Pick copy of Capital Volume 1 up from top rung
Hold up Capital + thrust it into the ceiling
Climb down ladder
Switch off smoke alarms
Hmm, yes, well, hm. 