A balls out approach to art

After last week’s sensational scrotum story, Laura Wilson nails down art as a protest.

Last week, Pyotr Pavlensky grabbed the attention of the public by nailing his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square, Moscow, in a political protest towards what he called the ‘apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society.’ Whilst Pavlensky was able to sit in the Kremlin staring at his testicles for almost two hours, he could now face five years imprisonment for hooliganism. Evidently, the not-so apathetic Russian society reacted to Pavlensky’s protest by protesting against it themselves, and this circular idea of protests through art begetting protests against art is far from a new reaction.

Image credit: Reuters via the Metro

Making a statement is a key element of creating art, staging a protest, and combining the two. Many schools of art arise from challenging the status quo, such as Cubism’s deliberate opposition to the classical representation of objects and Pop Art as a self-aware, ironic reaction to consumerism. This relationship between forms of protest is expertly demonstrated in the defacement of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which occurred in early February this year. Delacroix’s painting represents the ‘vanguard’ of the French Revolution, with Lady Liberty and her followers protesting against the monarchy of France. This term is often seen as the etymology for the Avant Garde movement, a school of art that prided itself on pushing boundaries and reacting against social norms. The woman who defaced the work scrawled AE911, a message relating to a 9/11 conspiracy, in permanent marker at the bottom of the canvas, thereby inscribing yet another level of protest onto an already multi-layered work of objection.

Perhaps the reason for many of these protests atop protests is the knowledge that a piece of art able to draw public attention can be manipulated so that the true focus is placed onto your particular cause. Damien Hirst’s work has often attracted attention for its controversial nature, so where better to get across your political opinion than by spray-painting ‘Occupy’ onto the leg of his anatomical sculpture Hymn? Here, the protesters directly linked Hirst’s ‘capitalist approach to art’ to their act of graffiti, yet betrayed a dependence on the artist’s reputation to gain greater recognition for their own fight. It would seem that art needs protest as much as protest needs art.

Mainly art-related protests come from performance artists who see themselves as ‘engaging’ with the works. Another Russian political activist, Alexander Davidovich Brener, has performed a number of stunts as part of the Moscow Actionism movement which included defecating in front of a Van Gogh and painting a dollar sign onto a Kazimir Malevich painting. When questioned in court for this outburst, Brener defended himself by claiming to be in ‘dialogue’ with Malevich’s work.

What’s more is that almost half a dozen performance artists have attempted to ‘contribute’ to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, considering it the greatest triumph to have succeeded in urinating into his mounted toilet bowl. Hans Richter, a friend of Duchamp’s told him of art in society: “you threw the urinal into their faces as a challenge” clearly labelling the original work as a protest against aesthetics. Therefore, whilst these public pees may look like protest, when considered in relation to the statement Duchamp was making with the work, they are actually continuations of some Dadaist ideals.

In these, and many other examples, art and protest appear inextricably bound up together, making statements, having conversations with one another, and, perhaps most importantly, keeping the public talking about art.

 

Laura Wilson

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You can't have your cake and eat it too – The Response

Carlus Hudson responds to an article believed to be targeted at Exeter Socialist Students.

Back in June, there was an article written by Rachel Brown about an alleged ‘boycott’ from Socialist Students of the Let Them Eat Cake event which she was to chair and I to be on the panel for. The event was intended to be a discussion of the way activists in the Western world, but particularly Exeter, could go about changing the world without feeding into a racist, oppressive paradigm.

“It almost goes without saying that there is going to be an unavoidable level of frustration along the way as [a genuinely healthy, vibrant and inclusive activism at the university] develops, and it shouldn’t be that surprising that a panel event to discuss this issue was not able to go ahead on the first try…”
Photo Credit: ginnerobot via Compfight cc

I expressed concern to the other organisers early on in the process of formulating the question we’d be discussing at the event to avoid it falling into the trap of being too Western-centric and limiting as a topic, which the whole event was (in my opinion) intended to be combating. Perhaps it would have been worth spending more time redrafting the question during that planning process, but ultimately I decided to go with what seemed like the best draft we’d get and aim to spend a good chunk of my talk at the event critiquing the question itself.

As it happened I was heavily – and quite stressfully – involved with a number of other socialists and anarchists working on a political response to the crisis within the SWP and incidents like it in other left-wing political organisations. Additionally, a number of members of Socialist Students (and comrades at the university but outside the society) had been made to feel uncomfortable at how the event was unfolding, as a result of abuse received over Facebook.

Indeed it was an incident not too dissimilar on Facebook during the Oxfam Bake Sale for International Women’s Day which the article rightly points out was the background to why the Let Them Eat Cake event was organised. Arguably, this issue stretches back to the campaign against the safer sex ball theme as well. With the deterioration of the event, on top of the genuine pressure I was under from the workload of my other activism, I didn’t feel I was in a position to either adequately prepare for or present my arguments at the event.

At the heart of this issue from ‘The Socialists’ (whatever exactly is meant by this label) is a genuine desire to totally change cultural, socio-economic and even political structures so that racism (and all other oppressions) are no longer issues. It’s quite fashionable (though not quite as much since the recent economic crisis started) to imagine we live in the ‘end of history’ in a post-political or post-ideological world where things like exploitation, oppression, discrimination and so on, are either gone entirely or that the people opposing them actively or even just taking a strongly critical approach to systemic problems today are just exaggerating about their extent.

But for anyone who recognises that there is a major systemic problem that needs to be addressed, there’s no doubt that it’s necessary to link up with like-minded people (whether they identify themselves as anarchists, socialists, feminists, environmentalists, etc.) and start working on that systemic problem. In practice, no one trying to effect change on that scale can pretend that people who don’t share 100% of their views don’t exist or refuse to work with them in any context whatsoever.

The idea that there is some ‘non-engagement policy’ is even more ridiculous when you look at Socialist Students’ record over the past academic year. The Socialist Students-led campaign Rape Is No Joke reached out to and involved many students outside the society and immediate supporters.  The society’s Valentine’s Day public lecture which included a very thought-provoking material geography case study for chocolate (symbol of love, after all) was one of our best attended events of the year with plenty of faces not even a seasoned activist like me recognised. Not to mention that members of Socialist Students have been involved in Friends of Palestine and the Gender Equality society, and have been involved in organising the Reclaim The Night event. Socialist Students has even hosted a discussion with an advocate of the IF campaign (a campaign supported by Oxfam GB, who were at the centre of the controversy over the International Women’s Day bake sale).

However, Socialist Students even at its best can only be one part of a genuinely healthy, vibrant and inclusive activism at the university. It almost goes without saying that there is going to be an unavoidable level of frustration along the way as that develops, and it shouldn’t be that surprising that a panel event to discuss this issue was not able to go ahead on the first try for reasons I’ve discussed above. I certainly don’t think anything is helped by the article putting the blame for the event not going ahead exclusively on ‘The Socialists’, throwing around accusations of being conspiracy theorists, patronising one half of this discussion with the label ‘angry activism’, and by grossly misrepresenting the views of Socialist Students and others.

The article seems to fall into exactly the same trap of an unhealthy and oppressive discourse that it accuses ‘The Socialists’ so strongly of. If students interested in making the world a better place take the view expressed in the article that ‘this is not about setting the facts right’ when it comes to the barriers to an inclusive activist discourse, how can any of us understand those barriers in a way that’s even factually correct let alone overcome them? How can anyone possibly expect the discourse to improve without understanding what made it so awful to begin with?

Carlus Hudson

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NUS conference 2013

The National Union of Students held their annual conference in Sheffield City Hall early last week, 8-10th April. The conference saw over 1000 students from over 400 higher education and further education institutions come together to discuss current issues facing students, vote on proposals and elect next year’s NUS representatives.

Toni Pearce, the first NUS President not to study at University Photograph:Will Bunce/ NUS

Toni Pearce was elected NUS President, beating fellow candidates, Vicki Baars, Conservative Peter Smallwood and Samuel Gaus, who was representing the Inanimate Carbon Rod.

Pearce is notable for being the only NUS leader to come from a further education background, previously being union president of Cornwall College.

She ran on a platform of supporting further education students, developing an NUS employment strategy, and building the NUS movement through increased engagement with student unions.

The conference covered issues such as ‘lad culture’ and the on-going struggle with the government over tuition fees. The effectiveness of Demo2012 was examined with outgoing President Liam Burns pointing out in his speech that there are other ways to lobby government.

President of Exeter Labour Students, Daniel Richards agreed with this sentiment saying, “For me, the highlight of the conference was Liam Burns’ stand against pointless demonstrations.” He went on to explain, “The NUS has become more irrelevant in recent years because of the tactics it has used to highlight real issues students are facing and changing its approach could make it a standard-bearer for student issues once more.”

Proposal 701 put forward the introduction of quotas on female representation in the NUS and caused much debate. A majority of delegates voted against the proposal, including Exeter Student Guild President, Nick Davies.

A key incident at the conference also concerned women’s rights and representation. A walk-out occurred during hustings for Vice President of Higher Education when Socialist Worker Party member, Tomas Evans defended the SWP from allegations of rape-apologism. Fellow High Education candidate, Naomi Beecroft, railed against the SWP in her hustings speech saying “It’s a disgrace.”

Further controversy was reported over delegates allegedly applauding when informed of Margaret Thatcher’s death, causing Burns to issue a statement advising delegates “to think very carefully indeed about how [they] respond to this news”.

The conference also featured much criticism of the NUS itself with students criticising the increased careerism within the union. The ineffectiveness of the NUS in representing students was also highlighted, particularly by the campaign of the Inanimate Carbon Rod. The Rod’s representative, Samuel Gaus, ran in order to satirise the superficiality and inaction of the current NUS committee.

Burns spoke of divisions in his speech and NUS attendee, Nathan Akecroft, wrote of the conference: “…the stark fault lines and divisions running through and threatening to tear apart the cumbersome and often-obdurate beast that is our national union were unseamed to their fullest.”

However, though these divisions may remain, the NUS will be taken forward by Pearce who, in her speech, promised “an NUS that’s fighting for our members, not fighting with each other”.

Olivia Luder, Site Manager