Art and the corrupting power of the market

Reading about Hito Steyerl I found the desire to reclaim the experience of art exciting but I began to recollect a discussion I had attended about theory communiste, which advocates the creation of instantaneous revolution rather than the production of preparatory propaganda for a revolution of the future. The power of the institution is upheld by direct protest art like the songs of the proles. This is what Orwell revealed when Winston and Julia betray Love in 1984. It's what one might call fucking self-neutering art. Art belongs to a realm beyond and outside of the institution accessed from the gaps in the fabric of its all enveloping mesh. Art understands the language of the soul or perhaps it is that but only by virtue of appearing in the gaps in the living society. The problem is that much time and effort is spent reacting against the patriarchal institution and yet much of this this effort by attempting to adopt a cynical or aggressive stance, rejects the soul in equal measure thus only serves to maintain the equilibrium of the institution's power.

Trying to force people to see the cracked mirror of the toxic nature of the institution via critique or detournement will only ever result in the institutions continued power. We can decide to move towards what we might do if this were not the case. To make a non-bifurcated art that refuses the institutional divisions of mind and body - science and nature - reason and poetry - emotion and thinking. Rather than make art "about" these things one can only make art that embodies this and make it visible in such a way that encourages a multi-modal way of engaging.

Dandelion Visions – William Blake and A. N. Whitehead

This is a multi-media interactive exhibition seeking through art and poetry to create a situation of entangled engagement between artists and the public. To organically disrupt the idea that art delivers a message rather than occurs within a living society. The exhibition seeks to grow beyond the walls of the conventional split of subject and object or mind and body and tries to offer a multi-modal way of being.

Inspired by William Blake the exhibition attempts to marry his fourfold vision with A N Whitehead’s idea of non-bifurcated thinking or “process reality”. Blake’s image of Newton is a vision of the fixed detachment of Enlightened frameworks, which fossilise or abstract the process of culture and life that it may be analysed. This state of stasis (essential to data processing) has the affect of not only alienating the public from art but each other too.

The exhibition is more of an on going occasion into which artists and public alike enter, reporting back on epiphanies and discoveries. It seeks to explore Blake’s idea that we imagine our realities outwards and workshops of poetry and object making add to a blurring of the distinction between the viewer and the creator. Consisting of work from all over the world the exhibition gathers around a central installation, The Nonbifurcatedman, propelling us via hyper-drive back into nature. As well as guiding the visitor into the space the central motif of the dandelion seed is used as an emblem for the spread of a collective creative imagination – so vital to a shared sense of connectedness.

The role of an artist is in some respects not to create a framework but to reveal it and in doing so offer what Duchamp refers to as a “way out through a clearing”. As Einstein joined time and space, A. N. Whitehead took the idea of relativity and asked us to reframe objects as events not static abstractions. This living state is underpinned by the concept of the soul for both Blake and Whitehead. The soul, so superfluous in an age of data and meaningless detachment, is the only thing that makes the equations of entanglement add up.

Debbie Kennard, Cabinet Member for Stronger and Safer Communities attended a recent event based around the idea and commented “I think if it doesn’t touch your soul, there’s no point, and that did. I think it’s fantastic having it [the exhibition] here in the library, it makes it accessible. Art and poetry, it’s for everyone, isn’t it. Here at the library it’s open doors, open dreams, open boxes of dreams and aspirations.”

I am not an illusion by Arzu Kiraner at Bognor Regis Library Sep 2017

the nonbifurcatedman Bognor Regis Library September 2017