Making art politically

This residency is making me think about images, specifically photographic images. Of course, I think about images a lot, but not necessarily about photos. Soon, I'm going to try to read with you what Rancière has to say about incommensurability. Before that though, I wanted to show you this image. I found it amongst some family documents. I don't know where it was taken and I've only got a slightly out of focus digital photo of the photo itself. It looks to be an office and the date on the wall tells us it was taken on the 6th of the month (if that is a calendar). Two of the men in the scene are looking towards the camera, the other is busy with his work. I feel they must be accountants but of course their work might be anything. There appear to be murals painted on the wall of trees and a landscape with a horizon. It's a very beautiful room with high arched ceiling and a stone floor. I suppose the man on the left who is looking straight at us might be my Grandfather as a young man but I don't know because I only know my Grandfather from photos of him as a much older man.

The story goes that he, his sister and his mother turned up in Syria with only a suitcase and without his father. They were probably Armenians and fled the Turkish genocide at the beginning of the last century. I don't know for sure, so much is hazy with uncertainty.

I'm bringing these old photos into this blog almost despite myself. I keep wondering what on earth they have to do with anything. But of course there is a link with the residency: photos as witnesses, calling us to account.

Some books of mine relevant to this residency:

Armstrong, N. & Tennenhouse, L. eds., 1989. The Violence of Representation – Literature and the history of violence. London: Routledge.

Art Review, Issue 23, June 2008 – Thomas Hirschhorn Supplement

Barthes, R., 2000. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage.

Berger, J., 2007. Hold Everything Dear. London: Verso.

Bhabha, H.,1994. The Location of Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Chomsky, N., 2007. Hegemony or Survival. London: Penguin.

Costello, D. & Willsdon, D., 2008. The Life and Death of Images. London: Tate.

Coulter-Smith, G. & Owen, M. eds., 2005. Art in the Age of Terrorism. London: Paul Holberton Publishing.

Derrida, J., 1995. The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M., 2001. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Gray, J., 2004. Heresies. London: Granta.

Hyde, L., 2006. The Gift. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Kraus, C. & Lotringer, S. eds., 2001. Hatred of Capitalism. Los Angeles, California: Semiotext(e).

Kristeva, J., 1989. Black Sun – Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rancière, J., 2007. On the Shores of Politics. London: Verso.

Rancière, J., 2007. The Future of the Image. London: Verso.

Rancière, J., 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rose, G., 1997. Mourning Becomes the Law – Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sauermann, B., 2003. 2/15 – The Day the World Said No to War. New York, NY: Hello.

Scarry, E., 1985. The Body in Pain – The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: OUP.

Sebald, W.G., 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Penguin.

Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin.

Woolf, Virginia., 1943. Three Guineas. London: The Hogarth Press.

Zizek, S., 2008. Violence. London: Profile Books.

Some striking differences of opinion:

"I think that "Where do I stand? What do I want?" is the essential question for an artist. I want to answer this question myself first. But I want this also to be a challenge to any other artist, in order to know: "Where does he/she stand? What does he/she want?" Because, when confronted with an artwork, I always ask myself if the artist is answering this question, and it is essential that the response come through the artwork directly. This is what art can establish – a direct dialog, one to one."

Hirschhorn, Art Review Supplement, June 2008

"I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn – as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things."

Gerhard Richter, 1966, quoted in Guardian 20/09/08

"I believe in Art, I believe in Art because it's Art. I have faith in Art and I believe in the power of Art. Faith in Art and passion are essential as an artist, there is no doubt. But Art does not change your life when you stay passive, Art changes your life when you have the courage to be active yourself. Active in thinking. Art has the ability to create its own space, its own reality, its own truth. Doing Art is not utopian, doing Art is not dreaming or escaping reality. Art creates the condition to confront the other, directly, without communication, mediation or explanation. I am not doing my artwork for an ideal world – but I want to do my artwork in this non-transparent, in this violent, in this complex, and in this chaotic world we are living in. I am part of it and I want this to be obvious in my work. There is no ideal world and there is no ideal artwork."

Hirschhorn, Art Review Supplement, June 2008

"I believe in nothing … I consider belief of every kind, from astrology to every elevated religion and all great ideologies, to be superfluous and mortally dangerous [ … ] We no longer need such things. We ought to work out different strategies against misery and injustice, war and catastrophes."

Gerhard Richter, 'Notes' 1964, quoted in Guardian 20/09/08

This is a photograph of a photograph of Thérèse Fatallah, my Grandmother, on her Iraqi pass papers of 1925. As I write that a hole opens up in my heart. Voices and questions sound in my head: I have no right to show her to you. It is not safe to show her to you. What am I trying to say anyway by showing her to you? What kind of cultural claims am I pretending to stake by showing her to you?

The link between her and me is thread thin. She died in 1999. She was my Grandmother. How can I validate the necessary papers in my mind to make it allowable to contemplate that she might have mattered to me? That her having existed matters still?

A photograph of a dead Iraqi.

The previous sentence rings obscene. What does the space between sentimentality and offence measure? Where is the language to find the correct questions to be asking?

Of what am I so afraid?

I have had a response to my rather sad plea last night for someone to tell me if they were actually reading this. Not that I think that people ought to be reading it but just because it helps me to know that there is someone out there. Not only did you say hello but you even let me know who you are. So, thanks for that.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about art practice and about how artists are employed 'as artists'. I suppose it's inevitable that I should think about this a lot, given that I have jobs teaching, advising other artists, facilitating other people's creativity, mentoring, leading gallery education workshops etc. I get paid for being an artist doing activities where I am not actually making art. Because my practice has often had a strong strand of working with others in it, this has sort of merged with those other paid activities in my perception of what I am as an artist. These days, I often think quite simply that in order to call myself an artist I ought to be making art and my idea of what that is seems to have become rather conventional in many respects. I am rather suspicious of this move, thinking that there are unconscious strings coming at me from the direction of the Art Market, pulling gently on my motivations and desires and skewing them. I suppose this is inevitable.

This evening I got out my peace banner (that you can see in the only picture on my blog) from its plastic storage wrapping. I've not looked at it since 2003. I'm making a piece of work for a show in London at Hold and Freight which references this earlier work. I was surprised when I unfolded it at how colourful it is. At the time I made it I was trying to depict something positive and all I could think of was flowers and idyllic rural landscape so that's what I've shown. It looks so naive and hopeless. It embarrasses me. But I don't mind that. In many ways it seems like the polar opposite of Hirschhorn's banner. It's more modest too in its dimensions . . . which isn't surprising. I took it on the march in Feb 2003 and it caught people's attention. One person told me it ought to win the Turner Prize and I remember just thinking "that's not the point, it's supposed to stop the war". Lovely idea that, that one could make a piece of work that would stop a war. Hideously grandiose, naturally, but says something still about the potency of objects, or at least about the potency we attribute to them.