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DAVE
BEECH
Independent Collaborative Hospitality
Avantgardism is no longer the war cry
it used to be. I'm not one of those who have fallen for the sophistic
argument that avantgardism has become conservative while conservatism
has become the new avantgardism, but I have to admit that I don't
know of any artists that I respect today who would call themselves
avantgarde. Calling oneself an avantgardist in pluralist times,
everyone knows, is a recipe for disaster. And yet the demands
of the historical avantgarde for the reconciliation of art and
society, for the negation of aesthetic distinction, for the politicization
of culture, and so on, have neither been met nor superseded,
despite the fact that they are continually neglected, denied,
bullied and ridiculed. This is why the avantgarde continues to
echo through the practices and debates of contemporary artists,
radical cultural movements, artist-run organizations, independent
curatorial projects and critical writing on art.
I want to reflect on a concept which is pivotal for avantgardism
and has not entirely lost its appeal to contemporary artists
this is independence. It is one of the great inspiring
features of avantgardism that it struggled vigorously against
the various institutions, traditions and conventions of the cultural
establishment. Destruction, negation, revolt and rebellion aimed
barbs at a solidified tyranny presided over by the great and
the good, sweeping inherited practices aside in order to make
way for new cultural forms and new social relations for art.
Some of these avantgarde ambitions have dated, especially those
which call for a brave new world based on modern, scientific
principles. Nevertheless, independence is no naïve desideratum
these days. Dealers, curators and collectors may have replaced
Masters, Academicians and panels of judges, but contemporary
artists are not thereby released from the needs of activism,
setting up and maintaining alternative networks, and continually
reconfiguring the political relations of culture. Independence
is not to be taken lightly or taken for granted; it is hard to
conceive, hard to establish and even harder to hold onto. But
it is, above all, hard to beat.
In the summer of 2003 Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, two artists
working out of Manchester in the north of England, curated the
biggest public art project the UK has ever known with a budget
of £530. The exhibition, Artranspennine03 (also known as
ATP03), revived an institutionally top-heavy exhibition ATP98,
which originally cost £3million and was organised primarily
by curators at the Tate in Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute
in Leeds. Working on a shoe-string budget and curatorially hands-off,
Crowe and Rawlinson effectively handed over the official blockbuster
public exhibition to the artists. Independence is not brought
about by rejecting previous practices rather than go out
of their way to distance themselves from ATP98, Crowe and Rawlinson
stress their indebtedness to ATP98 the independence of
ATP03 is won by occupying ATP98 differently. If avantgardism
is to be salvaged from the postmodern caricature of oedipal protest,
then we need to develop a conception of artistic independence
on such models as ATP03.
Consider artist-run spaces. It is clear that a number of artist-run
spaces are set up for no other reason than to catch the attention
of the market and art's large public institutions in the spirit
of entrepreneurial enterprise. Such spaces may be funded and
run as independent concerns, but they are in no way ideologically
or culturally independent. A stronger brand of independence would
entail some substantial divergence from business-as-usual. In
fact, we could even go so far as to say that spaces which fail
to promote this stronger brand of independence are not artist-run
spaces at all; the artists involved are agents for those that
they address. Independence in art and culture, therefore, means
contesting art and culture. If artists are to contest culture,
then one of the key aspects of the culture that they must contest
is the category of the artist. Artist-run spaces contest the
established role of the artist (displacing the artist from the
studio, for one thing) as well as clearing (intellectual and
physical) space for occupying culture differently. This is independence.
When Sparwasser HQ invited 50 artist run spaces to contribute
their 'favourite' video for Old Habits Die Hard, the gallery
I founded with Graham Parker, floating ip, on the outskirts
of Manchester's city centre, recognised something very precious
in this exhibition. We immediately felt that Old Habits Die
Hard had something in common with the founding ideas of floating
ip gallery. The project had an informality about it that
dovetailed with its sense of an international community of independent
art projects. What's more, the suggested criterion for selecting
the video, that it be your 'favourite', was a wonderful subversion
of professional practice in which artists and curators select
works in order to gain cultural capital. Small potatoes, you
might say, but these are the ways in which independent practices
manufacture their independence.
Independence in art is not given, but has to be won by distinguishing
between contesting the cultural field on the one hand
and practices of adapting oneself to the existing culture
and its institutions on the other. Establishing a physical distance
from the existing institutions is not a sure-fire strategy for
attaining independence. Physical distance may turn out to be
a false distance, just as setting up physically independent galleries
does not guarantee that the space will be independent in the
fuller sense. Treating art's existing institutions as contested
spaces gains independence by virtue of doing something else
even if it is in the same space. The first condition of art's
independence is not art's isolation but its re-occupation of
the cultural field, whether that be in setting up alternative
spaces or by doing alternative things in existing spaces.
Nicolas Bourriaud's little book Postproduction does not
match the emphasis on cultural contestation and collaborative
independence that is so conspicuous in the networks and projects
of the new socially oriented artists. True, Bourriaud argues
that "art can be a form of using the world", but when
it comes to the details, Bourriaud converts these social events
back into those of an encounter "between the artist and
the one who comes to view the work". His new artist is a
'semionaut' (the DJ, the programmer, the web surfer), whose 'collaborations'
with the social world are reduced to exchanges of signs. When
he speaks of how the semionaut "activates the history"
of appropriated material, Bourriaud is referring to the generation
of new meanings. And because he places his hope in the liberatory
effects of semiotic play, he takes his position in direct opposition
to the avantgardist who asked "what can we make that is
new?" with the motto, "how can we make do with what
we have?" I think the new socially oriented artists are
closer to the avantgarde than this, with a question that goes
beyond Bourriaud's semiotic play: how we can make what we have
do something else?
Old Habits Die Hard emphasises an aspect of contemporary
independent art that separates it from Bourriaud's semionauts.
The semionaut is an individual who, in Bourriaud's account, is
in opposition to others, in particular to the obsolete producers
on whom the semionaut's appropriational practice depends. Of
course, this opposition can be redescribed in collaborative terms.
The DJ and the socially oriented artist acts in a spirit of hospitality
rather than hostility. While hospitality can contain its own
forms of hostility when inclusion is nothing but a positive
spin on the neutralisation of opposition, for instance
there can be a tenderness to hospitality that is worth encouraging.
As a genre of social interaction, hospitality is more promising,
ethically, as a model for an artist run space than, say, entrepreneurialism
or semiotic play. Collaborative independence, involving hospitalities
within hospitalities, is a form of independence that does not
delude itself that autonomy (self-determination) is equivalent
to isolation (the myth of the self-created self) The 'self' of
'self-determination' is understood, within collaborative independence,
to be co-produced with others. That is, the self of self-determination
is not self-sufficient. And thus, the independence in collaborative
independence is necessarily based on the individual's utter dependence
on others.
We are not semionauts; we are, if anything, socionauts. Socially
oriented artists do not demonstrate any inclination today to
reduce social encounters to semiotic encounters. At the same
time, such social encounters are not typically those between
an artist and a viewer mediated by the object that is made by
the former for the visual pleasure of the latter. If the contemporary
artist contests culture by, among other things, contesting the
role of the artist, then it follows that the contemporary artist
contest culture by contesting the modes of attention of the viewer
(the artist's traditional collaborator). In fact, contemporary
artists seem to be in the process of converting the viewer into
a doer, an active participator in the events and actions set
up by the socionaut. In this sense, the contemporary artist in
the first decade of the 21st century has in common with the avantgardist
in the first part of the 20th century a vital commitment: the
merging of art and life as a critique of the isolation of art
from everything else. If the avantgarde's sense of breaking
new ground gave them a social superiority complex, the current
crop of socially oriented artists are avantgarde only insofar
as they share the political programme of the avantgarde, not
their social position at the head of culture. Avantgardism was
always independent but now it has become independent collaborative
hospitality.
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