The Institute of Beasts: strategies of doubt and refusal in a contemporary art practice

The collaborative work of Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells (Dutton and Swindells) can be seen in the context of post-conceptual artistic practices which play with and interrogate images, objects and texts through processes of collage, appropriation and multiple association. The aim of the collaboration is to foster complex interpretations, often from deceptively simple means; consciously working through varied rhetorical devices and tropes, modes of production and strategic interventions. We are tactical artists, preferring to focus on strategies, context and processes, frequently doubling, collaging, reversing, repeating and inverting images, objects and texts as a means of disruption. But a question remains at the heart of such contemporary art practices, namely, a disruption of what? My paper for ATINER focused on strategies of refusal, waywardness, the production of ambiguity and new fictional taxonomies in a contemporary art practice and asked if the use of tactics of doubt in the work of art are useful tools for production of new knowledge. At the heart of these questions are issues around the relationship between art and research, the possibility or impossibility of art within the contexts of the contemporary art/educational institution and art school and the possibility of creating and sustaining an art practice which refuses to align itself to any one canon, manifesto, school, industry, form, institution or critical method. The paper draws on the collaborative practice of Dutton and Swindells and also Michael Phillipson’s 1992 essay “Managing ‘tradition’: the Plight of Aesthetic Practices in techno-scientific culture” as a means of illustrating the potential absorption of the specific into the general under the auspices neo-liberal institutional and commercial agendas

Towards an office of institutional aesthetics

By exploring the territory between being within the zone of art practice and the zone of art educational institutions along with their attendant bureaucratic structures, Dutton will engage with the possibility of applying different types of (poetic) sensibilities that emerge out of reflexive art practice onto and into the heart of the controlling rhetoric and processes that function as normative behaviour within many institutions of art education. Thinking of the Art School as a site of an improbable constellation of subjectivities and political and institutional imperatives, Dutton will outline a path through which art and institution might begin to conflate in a zone of possibilities. Starting with a propositional ‘Office of Institutional Aesthetics’, which has its roots in real world scenarios, Dutton will characterise the tensions and strains of contemporary institutions of art education as ‘end’ obsessed—after which he will explore forms of practice which concern ‘becomings’ rather than completions. Dutton concludes that those of us who straddle art and art-educational spheres might need to re-think our institutions as networks of behaviours and tactics in much the same way we might encounter and engage in the process of art over the fetish of the artefact

Clueless: contradictions, malapropisms and tensions within a contemporary art practice

At a recent gallery opening of the work of Terry Atkinson, I got talking to an artist friend, ‘M’, and both of us were singing the praises of a certain mutual acquaintance, ‘D’ who happened to be ‘cropping up’ all over the place, in shows, in magazines, in his writings, even his teaching was being talked about. It was a genuine pleasure to see our friend doing so well but when my other friend ‘M’ made the point that ‘D ‘was really focussed and knew what he was doing’, and added wistfully, ‘I wish I did, I haven’t a clue most of the time’, I felt an immediate sense of empathy and it seemed entirely appropriate that we would have this conversation within the context of work by Atkinson who has recently described the art world as a ‘swamp’. Like my friend ‘M’, I too mostly seem to be little lost in my practice, but it’s a waywardness I seem compelled to cultivate in a far more profound manner than a simple inability to focus, yet something about this apparent lack of direction seems to indicate back to me an absence of something altogether more serious, of a sustainable intellectual argument perhaps, leading to the further academic threat of the loss of peer esteem or even more withering, the accusation of a shortfall of artistic ambition. When asked to describe my work I often still stumble like a first year art student on his or her first viva. However I know its not that I’m not articulate, it’s that I’m not able to articulate a practice, which I have steered all over the place, precisely in order for it to be un-speakable. David Bohm, in On Creativity suggests that we must ‘give patient and sustained attention to the idea of confusion’. My argument for my contribution to ATINER was be for a rethinking of practice, particularly within the contexts of research driven agendas of the Art and Design Institutions, in order to create conceptual space for this confusion and complexity to exist as aesthetic tensions, which are attempting to exist outside of the realm of the essentialising commodification of the art market whilst being implicitly sceptical of the progressive drive towards knowledge of the contemporary research culture. In the words of Jacques Ranciere, ‘Aesthetics is the ability to think contradiction’. I proposed to explore an argument that refused to isolate waywardness as a lazy or uncritical approach, and indeed, to suggest that such an approach is deeply engaged, politicised and recognises contradiction as an aesthetic force. It may be possible to argue that this impossibility of classification, this refusal (or inability) to ‘focus’ is in itself a highly charged and even ideologically informed approach, having its routes in libidinal forces, which, at their centre promote a deeply profound and necessary critical distance and attempt at detachment from what could be seen as the atomising effects of the confusion and manipulation of everyday media orientated life, presenting another model of confusion, in which tensions and stresses, contractions and disturbances have an aesthetic and dynamic dimensions which may experienced as a form of pleasure. I did this by drawing attention to my own practice within my collaborations of Dutton and Swindells and The Institute of Beasts, but I will also referred to the work Art and Language, Terry Atkinson, Fischli and Weiss, Arakawa and Gins, Liam Gillick as well as some emergent artists within the UK (Andy Spackman, Brigid Mcleer) and the thinking of David Bohm, Claire Bishop, Jaques Ranciere, Grant Kester and Elizabeth Grosz

The stag and hound

The second phase of Dutton and Swindells collaborative The Institute of Beasts project consisted of an installation/exhibition and a book-work. The large (7 adjoining gallery spaces) installation/exhibition at Project Space Leeds was open to the public for 12 weeks (from 20 January, 2011) and included a six-week open residency period during which time the artists were present. The exhibition continued to explore themes of ‘animality’ – previously developed in The Institute of Beasts – but this time in a more expansive physical environment using large-scale neon and sound. The Stag and Hound focused more on disturbing taxonomies by providing an elaborate ‘forest’ of signs, approaches, methods and materials, deliberately tripping up linear narratives and interpretations. The exhibition was open to the public for 12 weeks, including a six week open residency period during which time one or both artists, Dutton and Swindells, were present. During the exhibition the artists launched their book ‘The Institute of Beasts’, published by Site Gallery and distributed by Cornerhouse books ISBN 978 1 899926 13

Inhabiting the language of the Institution: how artists, teachers and students are occupying the institutional rhetoric which surrounds them

I aim to discuss a recent rise in the number of artists and artists groups who are setting themselves up as some form of variation of an educational model, i.e. as an Institute, a Faculty, a Museum, a Department or even a University. I will suggest how this may impact upon the ongoing debates about the art school, its survival (or indeed demise) and its challenges. Projects such as my own Institute of Beasts (Dutton and Swindells) , suggest a slight subversion. In effect, where artist-teachers may have rubbed up against the institution from within and encouraged students to do the same, in the age of extreme institutionalization and hyper-instrumentalisation this playful/ironic approach may no longer be possible. Instead the artist- student- teachers are taking the ‘mantle’ of the institution and occupying its linguistical and rhetorical frameworks instead of its architecture, and by doing so, are attempting to unraveling and explore what might be meant by an institution in the first place. This may have profound possibilities within the ‘walls’ and traditions of the art school where, the power of the institution becomes not only something ‘lessened’ but also something existing ‘in quotes’, thus empowering both staff and students to occupy and produce the ‘institution’ on their own terms. By creating and inhabiting these equivalents, in effect by inhabiting institutional terminology, change may take place from within. Students and staff no longer attend the institution, but attend to it by inhabiting it. The art educational institutions may have no alternative but to ‘listen’ to art/practice or dismiss it from the curriculum entirely. I will outline of what could be described as an attempt at a form of reverse interpellation and possible neutralisation of the neo-liberal educational project by using other examples of artists’ projects, such as Inga Zimprich’s Faculty of Invisibility, Wysings Art Centre’s The Department of Wrong Answers, Anton Vidolke’s Night School or The University of Incidental Knowledge and in which the nomenclature of the educational/research institution of knowledge production is often inhabited by production of different and less quantifiable sort

text + work = work

Catalogue published in connection with an exhibition held at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth 2006

Midpointness

Midpointness is an evolving project which seeks to equate itself along the lines of a conceptual model of the cosmic. Over the course of 4 weeks, this group exhibition, featuring works by 27 UK and international artists will change and evolve, grow and diminish, pulsate through the works of the artists and the participation of the audience. Curatorial control will, at times be handed over to Gallery staff and exhibition visitors, both live and remote. Through this egalitarian, hierarchy-free approach, Midpointness will seek to explore the nature of the artist, the exhibition, the audience and the work of art

Employee demand for skills: evidence and policy review : UK Commission for Employment and Skills Research Report no. 3

This report presents the results of a detailed review of evidence and policy relating to the factors that influence the engagement of the individual in skills development. It incorporates a broad range of formal and informal learning activities, delivered in a range of institutional settings and through different media, including work-based, classroombased, distance learning and community based learning. The review is deliberately broad in its focus, drawing on evidence and policy relating to people in different positions within the labour market - in or out of work, new entrants into employment, younger and older workers, people with and without qualifications and/or with higher and lower skills. However, a key focus for the research was the barriers and factors affecting access to skills development opportunities among lower skilled and lower qualified people. The review was undertaken by WM Enterprise and the Employment Research Institute, Edinburgh Napier University for the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UK Commission)

Smokejumper Magazine, October 2000

This issue of the National Smokejumper Association (NSA) Smokejumper Magazine contains the following articles: Bob Caldwell (added profile), Failure of Controlled Burning New Mexico, Early Water Bombing (Wally Henderson), Region 8 Smokejumping (Delos Dutton), The Video Project (Steve Smith). Smokejumper Magazine continues Static Line, which was the original title of the NSA quarterly magazine.https://dc.ewu.edu/smokejumper_mag/1028/thumbnail.jp

Employee Demand for Skills Development: a Review of Evidence and Policy

This report presents the results of a detailed review of evidence and policy relating to the factors that influence the engagement of the individual in skills development. It incorporates a broad range of formal and informal learning activities, delivered in a range of institutional settings and through different media, including work-based, classroombased, distance learning and community based learning. The review is deliberately broad in its focus, drawing on evidence and policy relating to people in different positions within the labour market - in or out of work, new entrants into employment, younger and older workers, people with and without qualifications and/or with higher and lower skills. However, a key focus for the research was the barriers and factors affecting access to skills development opportunities among lower skilled and lower qualified people. The review was undertaken by WM Enterprise and the Employment Research Institute, Edinburgh Napier University for the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UK Commission)