The Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art
Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt, Mel Jordan
Last night was the first meeting of the Art & Politics reading group – a project I am running alongside mentoring from Emma Cocker and Dave Beech, funded through a-n’s Re:view bursary. The idea is to develop my understanding around some of the issues I’m interested in through dialogue with similarly intrigued peers.
For the first 2 sessions I’ve chosen a text from each of the mentors – then it will be opened up to the group to decide on future texts.
The first text was definitely a challenge. Modelled on the communist manifesto – in places absolutely identical – the text introduced ideas around a counter-hegemonic art and seemed to propose that only a philistine could achieve this art. The philistine was not the philistine any of us recognised, but here embodied a revolutionary potential through its very exclusion from art and art discourses.
