Praxis #1
Criticality, in any art and/or educative endeavour that seeks to encourage transformation, is vital and without it we'll just keep spinning around in the sameness of the status quo for ever.
The inescapable contradictory nature of living in a capitalist society
I've been thinking about the inescapable contradictory nature of living in a capitalist society; the tension of opposing value systems and how we navigate through this friction.
The older I get the more I notice I simultaneously conform with and attempt to act against inequity.
Eg my personal wealth as a home owner increases alongside my undeniable sense of entitlement of comfort alongside my increased awareness of wealth inequality and commitment to social justice through my work.
I wonder:
What should I be doing more / less?
How can I reconcile my power and privilege with life-worlds filled with suffering and oppression?
Crucially, how can art help us collectively think about this stuff and work through all this contradiction?
I think we should talk/make about it because it's part of the problem that it goes largely unspoken. Where i'm not convinced we can avoid the contradictions, I do believe by becoming conscious of it; by feeling it and by sharing the burden two things happen. One is that we begin to process the shame of it all and secondly we become more collectively able to act against it. Disassociating with the contradictions helps no one and I guess a symptom of neoliberalism and the inheritance of Romanticism is the invention of the individual, which laden's us with illusions of importance.
Art that invites us to imagine and embody alternative versions of reality, particularly in the social realm, with others and the more than human, holds the possibility of dismantling what Deluze called the dogmatic image of thought - the imposition of the conformist and restrictive ways of thinking/knowing of traditional philosophy - put simply, the way we think is a construct of political influence.
Criticality, in any art and/or educative endeavour that seeks to encourage transformation, is vital and without it we'll just keep spinning around in the sameness of the status quo for ever. Much like Grant Kester's claim that the Avant Garde will always be subsumed by the art world and therefore never create any meaningful change.
Question everything!
And while in the art world 'Value is only expressed through the cash nexus' and arguably 'has no critical edge.' mainstream art education has inevitably absorbed the same molecular make up, whether consciously or not, and genetically mutated into a marketised data beast, numbing the senses rather than activating life, experience and critical consciousness. The recent Visualise report by Runnymeade Trust and Freelands Foundation proclaims there is a 'creativity crisis' so how can we redefine or rather reclaim a largely forgotten purpose of art/art education?
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It should probably be acknowledged that all this is subjectively constructed through my white, cis, het, middle class experience. I don't in any way pretend to speak for anyone but I do want to invite my peers to engage in consciousness raising through critical dialogue and art.
What contradictions are you conscious of?
Who wants to talk / make about this stuff?
