A
RadicalAesthetics/RadicalArt (RaRa) event
People’s History Museum, Manchester,
FRIDAY June 14th 2013
Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer
will
explore the history and relevance of the pamphlet for contemporary art
practice through presentations by speakers and performers. The one-day
event will coincide with a small display of selected pamphlets from the
PHM collection (curated by the RaRa
organisers) together with a selection from our ‘call for pamphlets’.
Radical Pamphlets
It
is written because there is something that one wants to saynow, and one
believes there is no other way of getting a hearing. Pamphlets may turn
on points of ethics or theology but they always have a clear
politicalimplication. A pamphlet may be written either for or against
somebody or something, but in essence it is always a protest.
George Orwell (1948) in
British Pamphleteers Volume 1, from the sixteenth century to the French Revolution
For
Orwell, the pamphlet is a polemical provocation. Through the 20thc and
beyond, artists have worked and acted provocatively and polemically
with text, images and performance, publishingwritings and producing
pamphlets and manifestoes, including the Futurists (1909), Surrealists
(1924),
Fluxus
(George Maciunas, 1963),
First Things First (Ken Garland 1964),
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (Manifesto for Maintenance Art
1969) and Stewart Home’s
Neoist Manifestos (1987). More recently, in 2009,
Monica Ross and fifteen others co-recited the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
on the Anniversary of The Peterloo Massacre at John Rylands Library Manchester and
the
Freee Art Collective have performed their manifestoes in a range of public settings.
The edited book (2011) by Danchev 100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists
(Penguin Modern Classics) demonstrates it as subject of current interest.
The
last decade has seen art’s increasing engagement with political and
social issues, whereby in some instances artists’ activities have
become indistinguishable from social activism (e.g. Wochenklauser) or other disciplinary functions (e.g. artist as ‘anthropologist’ as in Jeremy Deller’s
Folk Archive).The art community’s current preoccupation with
revolutionary movements and global politics is being addressed from
different perspectives. The format and traditions of the ‘radical
pamphlet’ may provide an alternative platform for artistic intervention
and provocation.
The
People’s History Museum (PHM) is a national research facility, archive
and accredited public museum, which contains unique collections of
documents and artefacts. The collection includes the British Labour
Party and Communist Party of Great Britain papers, extensive amateur
and documentary film holdings and the largest trade union and protest
banner collection in the world. The Museum suits our particular brief
of radicality in its focus on histories of radical collective action.
The RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt
(RaRa) project was initiated in 2009 at Loughborough University (LU) under the auspices of the Politicized Practice Research Group (PPRG). The
RaRa project and its associated book series (with I.B. Tauris)
explores the meeting of contemporary art practice and interpretations
of radicality to promote debate, confront convention and formulate
alternative ways of thinking about art practice. Previous RaRa events
have included ‘DIY cultures’ and Radical Footage: Film and Dissent at Nottingham Contemporary.
Book here: http://store.lboro.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=199&deptid=252&catid=72
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