Still no Ducks, Newbury port so the reading is on hold at present but the watching has continued with the Whites and Browns still running amock while we represent the pears. Our peek at the Data Browser steeled us to have a look to see if we could locate, if one exists, the contemporary critical art context. What do we know of it? Not much and certainly not now but we hoped to discover a theme or even the critical 'fashion'. The last of these fashions that we dealt in was self institution and the broader topic of institutional critique but that came to a conclusion of sorts in Occupy did it not? At least it seemed that self institutional strategies became internalised into a default way of behaving and framing during and after Occupy. Perhaps that is too far but Young Mckee's 'post occupy condition'1 points that way and indeed it shows the type of art into social movement dynamic that really coalesced after 2012.
Opening Strike Art at random one again finds cause to wonder at how quickly the things changed when the post truth era put the lights out, or perhaps rather, set the strobe off. The issue that swings it for me is one of the imagined public that lays within ones proposed radical practice; who is it? Is it there even? Are there opposing publics and are they recognised? Are their attempts to bridge divides? These questions of public and audience are rather integral and ordinary in art making but with such a change in the once calm status quo of imagined public as the apathetic but supportive exploited masses then one might want a rethink. With Trump, Johnson and the popular success of far alt right politics across the globe generally it is for sure real that one cannot casually imagine support and equally it is important to imagine news ways to bridge build from within the inevitably tribal fight against. Fight won't work if there is no reconciliation; slowly slowly catchy monkey as my mother likes to say.2 But what does all that mean to us here in L'estaque where we hear nothing of the debacle we know to be brewing. Here we have withdrawn in wilful ignorance and while there may be no dignity in that, it is at least a strategic retreat as well as an act of self preservation. Can one count on participation in any case?
1 Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition.
2 Appears to be an old English saying of unknown meaning.
