A challenging first mentoring session with Dave Beech. I was able to ask for clarification on some of the concepts we encountered in the Art & Politics reading group around the notions of counter-hegemony and the Philistine. The philistine is the artists ‘other’ that carries the potential to create a counter-hegemonic art precisely because it is excluded from art and its discourses. For artists the challenge is to renegotiate what it means to be an artist – how can we shift what an artist is, or inhabit being an artist differently? By being a philistine artist – rejecting the mythology of art.
We talked about the use of scale in my work how this device could be played out in different registers. Scale, because of its conventional relationship to the body, could be viewed as politically conservative. Scale could relate to geography, masses of people or the universal.
To look at:
Raymond Williams
Lukacs – ‘slow revolution’
Ranciere
Zizek
Minimalism
Paul Wood
John Roberts
Terry Atkinson
