What we do and what is done to us : teaching art as culture

Carl Andre’s opposition between an activating art and a pacifying culture becomes the impetus for wider reflections on artistic autonomy and agency with special reference to how fine art is taught at college. I propose that artistic agency might better be accounted for and enacted by conceiving of it not as something set against or at a distance from culture in general, but ‘as’ culture. Through an overview of various institutional and discursive accounts of artistic production which describe the ways in which art is itself influenced and determined by external factors, and an extended analysis of Raymond Williams theory of culture as ‘collective advance’, I propose that fine art education needs to confront the question of contemporary art’s wider cultural embeddedness, and the political culture of art itself—a politics based in the nature of the social relationships art practice engender

Untitled

New kinetic sound installation made for the exhibition ‘Social Growth’, Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh

Diagramming Politics

A live drawing lecture, mapping out a political landscape that has witnessed the rise of authoritarian populism in an era of neoliberal crisis. Following Brexit and the US election, I will draw on a range of political theories to broach questions of identity and representation with respect to individuals, communities, countries, networks and markets. I will make a large chalk drawing, detailing in speech what I am doing as I go. The completed drawing will be the focus for audience discussion. The methodological approach is a combination of the diagrammatic and the allegorical, premised on the notion that one ‘thinks through drawing.’ It is a proposition to engage with visual representation as a means for artists and researchers to analyze, compare, question and propose models of the political

The origin of life

The origin of life was the title of my solo exhibition at Beaconsfield Gallery (London), which included as the main feature an interactive kinetic sound installation of the same name. The installation consisted of twenty-one second hand synth keyboards which were 'played' by motorised flaccid finger-like appendages cast from silicone rubber. Motorisation of different 'fingers' were triggered by heat sensors reacting to the physical movement of visitors around the gallery space. The result was the creation of random symphonies as the notes of various keyboards were hammered out as a consequence of the movement of a body or bodies. One important impetus of this work, which built ambitiously on past kinetic work with keyboards, was to construct an automated parody of creative autonomy and vitalist impulses

Building the Fetish

Building the Fetish was a research project and ten hour public art event on Granary Square to map the ‘value’ of the multi-billion pound 67 acre private development north of Kings Cross and St Pancras railway stations. It was made in collaboration with BA Fine Art students at Central Saint Martins, the college located on the square. Mixing clay with earth dug from one of the nearby building sites we constructed a three dimensional schematic diagram of the development on top of a plinth. Referring passers-by to an informational map pasted on the surface of the plinth we explained that the relative heights of the lumpy mud towers corresponded to annual estimates of the value-producing power of the buildings and sites they represented - offices, retail units, apartments, restaurants, parks and squares, an art college, a hotel, student accommodation and public amenities. The higher the tower, the larger the economic value. Throughout the day workers, residents and users of the square discussed and debated specific effects of the development and the wider social, cultural and political issues the work raised about ‘value’ as well as the private investor regeneration model adopted by Camden Council. After completion the fetish was left standing in the square until dusk, when it was torn down, and the muddied stone paving washed clean. Building the Fetish was part of ‘Unannounced Acts of Publicness

Renaissance Man

Renaissance Man is a mechanised figure, with casts of the artist’s face, hands and feet, assembled around an aluminium trough with moving limbs. Two versions were commissioned in 2017 by Greene Naftali gallery and Piper Keys (supported by Elephant Trust). The works were concerned with two main, related, research concerns. The first was to develop a ‘compulsive’ anti-aesthetic, one that would challenge a contemplative, and class bound mode of artistic spectatorship, and to eschew a professionally slick and conceptually refined type of contemporary art whose surfaces exclude material slippage. In this respect horror, humour and ‘idiocy’ (see Kenning, ‘You Cannot Be Serious! Art, Politics, Idiocy’) were employed to produce something weird, crude and unnerving. The second research concern was to undermine the idealized, humanist model of intellectual progress, represented by the male modern artist, with his technical prowess and creative assertion of selfhood, and in its place to assert something more abject, compulsive and machinic, closer to the decentred and sexually determined subject put forward by psychoanalysis. In the work Kenning imagines himself metamorphosed into a mechanised animal, on all fours, locked in a single repetitive movement. He is rendered into what Jacques Lacan has called, in a reversal of Cartesian ontology, a ‘jammed machine’ (Seminar II). The artistically debased genre of kinetic art enabled a method of production whereby Kenning relinquished control over an array of compositional effects, focusing on getting the mechanism moving rather than on formal concerns. The finished sculptures displayed a compulsive character, embodying a ‘weird’, unnerving, somewhat crude (anti) aesthetic through seesawing and hinging movements and accidental sounds. The effect of this was witnessed in audience reactions to the work, which ran from laughter to wonder, anxiety to offence (Dan Graham: ‘it’s the most offensive work in the show!’

The Political Nature of Art Today

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