Making art politically

I was at Fabrica gallery this afternoon. It was a strange afternoon. Outside, it was a lovely sunny day and the streets of Brighton town centre were packed with people with buskers seemingly on every street corner. Everyone out enjoying the sunshine. It felt extremely hard to go into the gallery and spend time with the banner. T was there and two volunteers and I enjoyed chatting to them. We got talking about White Night on 25 October and I found myself suggesting we have a party on that night in the gallery until 2am. It seemed in incredibly bad taste to suggest such a thing in the presence of THE BANNER. But it also seemed necessary to be light of heart and not to pretend to some kind of solemnity that would have been inauthentic. In fact, I think it was a deliberate provocation of mine to suggest partying. In defiance of death and the warmongers.

But, I suppose, since we ARE the warmongers, it amounts to dancing on the graves of the people in the images.

I couldn't be doing with it all today. The work, the people, the atmosphere. The warnings to people as they entered the work. The dumb screens. The books lying potently around the place.

No one is using the response email:

[email protected]

to send in comments. There have been hardly any posts to this blog. Which is not surprising since I am posting semi-tracts to it which are all pretty much my attempts to articulate my thoughts without leaving much room for others to step in.

But that's all fine because it's all an experiment and I can adapt and adjust to the situation and rethink and work from here. What I did do was to photocopy the comments book to bring home so that I can reread it at my leisure and add other voices into this blog. And I took some photos.

But I was glad to get back out into the late afternoon sunshine, out into the crowd. I went into a shop and started looking for a chunky orange scarf to buy. I suddenly got it into my head that I had to have an orange scarf and went from shop to shop quickly before they shut up for the day, like the demented consumer I sometimes am. Couldn't find one. I noticed the comfort of the quest though and the sense of purpose it gave me.

Orange. Brightness. Brightonness. Energy. Everything positive under the sun. Away from all that awfulness. Away. Away.

note to self: formulate questions relating to human relationships and interactions in context of (un)safe/(un)charted territory.

honesty – what is this?

talk about openness: Critical Practice? http://www.criticalpracticechelsea.org

the whole story?

(continued from previous post)

Now, I happen to find the fact that these areas of thought (and others that are not even classifiable) are not being written about by myself in this blog extremely interesting. Because this leads me towards becoming able to say something about how human experience has been privatised.

In a previous posting (no.22) I wrote something about 'the personal is political'. Now, the idea that there are personal aspects to oneself that cannot be divulged to others because it is does not feel safe to do so, THAT is highly political.

But, you might say, of course it's not safe. Why am I being so naive or idealistic as to think it should be? This blog, as a forum on the interface between personal journal and public noticeboard brings this issue to the fore.

I contend that in contemporary society as we know it, not only are vast areas of the personal unshareable, they are actually inhospitable tracts of land that often we cannot venture into even on our own.

So, in answer to Hirschhorn's injunction to declare where we stand and what we want, I would say that, depending on the individual, part of the attempt at this definition of a subject position may include caveats and qualifications, that, without being able to define or characterise them (e.g. because it is not safe enough to do so) could render the whole project of stating one's location in the world meaningless.

Or am I just taking Hirschhorn's injunction too literally? And actually it is no more than a rhetorical device for invoking the possibility of total self-knowledge and knowledge of the other?

One way in which our experience has been privatised to such an extent that we do not have access to it ourselves is carried out by the mental health system, which takes away from ourselves the rightful ownership and occupation of our own minds, putting them into the hands of experts and professionals who are supposed to understand them better than us. It is a system which makes us believe that our minds are dangerous things that we have to be very careful about investigating if we do not understand how they work as well as, say, a psychiatrist does.

This is interesting: even the very mention of 'mental health' here in this blog is ringing alarm bells in my head and a voice is saying: "Now they all think you're screwy". However, today, rather yesterday, was World Mental Health Day and that lends my interest in the subject some validity. Because if, on World Mental Health Day, you can't talk about how the enjoyment of experience has been stolen from us by a medical system that is backed by a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry which is supposed to control and correct the proper functioning of our brains better than we can ourselves, then when can you talk about it?

It's interesting. I wanted to write something for this blog last night before I went to bed but, sitting at my computer, realised that I was too utterly physically and mentally exhausted from a very full working week to be able to think. I went to bed and slept only four hours before I was woken by my thoughts again. So now I am up in the middle of the night having had just enough recovery time to get me ready for some blog action again.

So, the thoughts go something like this:

However much I protested when starting this blog against the tendency towards gut-spilling in blogs and tried to set myself apart from this by stating that I would be avoiding navel-gazing and instead trying to create a space for many voices to share, I realise that in many ways this blog has become something of a personal journey.

I am thoroughly enjoying this space to think and compose my thoughts 'out loud' with one part of my mind always on the awareness that someone else might read what I write, which in itself creates a desire to transform the strictly personal into a more public text.

However, I know that there is a whole side (or set of sides) of what I am currently thinking that is not getting said here. This is because this forum is a public forum and I am afraid I do not trust the world enough to share these deepest thoughts with you. You are an unknown to me: you might wish me harm but at the same time you could be my best friend. I can't know. This means that for myself (from myself?), in this blog, I am leaving out or withholding significant aspects of my life. They are not getting written. By this I mean, I could be writing them elsewhere, in a 'private' journal for example, but I am not.

They are not getting written.

I don't think I am even prepared to let you know what these aspects of my thoughts relate to.

Or perhaps I could risk this much and tell you some categories in which they might be found: family, money, sex.

Now, I happen to find the fact that these areas of thought (and others that are not even classifiable) are not being written about by myself in this blog extremely interesting. Because this leads me towards becoming able to say something about how human experience has been privatised.

see next blog entry