Our pears have morphed into our books but the sketching continues, as does the codine, as does the BB Whites and BP Browns1 who continue to create a cultural elixir which certainly throws up some evocative associations and patterning.

Picking up again Mckee's Strike Art we can feel it has a warm cover from a night spent on the heated bathroom tiles. We open it at random and find a splendid list of the contrasting conceptual components of critical art. He says that "critique and autonomy, festivity and negation, identification and refusal, spectacle and participation, truth and fiction, singularity and community, imagination and effect, freedom and beauty - take on a new depth when art is liberated from enclosures of the art system and instead embedded in the living fabric of collective political struggle."

Two ideas prompted us, first the last point about art embedded in the fabric of collective political struggle, great yes we agree but it must point outwards also or risk tribal blindness and a logic of fight and competition that is not very imaginative and also risky in that losing is a possibility. Secondly, and with hindsight in our sails, is it not the case that the type of progressive critique he speaks of was to a great extent a product of the arts and humanities edu factories2  and that they flourished in a society (a capitalism) that valued and financed such things? We ourselves were beneficiaries in the shape of the AHRC3 but that was the tail end of neoliberal social turn but now, barring some abominable nrx4 flavoured cool britania, it seems clear that our new authoritarian far right world does not share the attitude towards progressive critique. So here's a question; what form would critical art have taken had the topic not been held in such high esteem by the previous world; encouraged, funded, celebrated as it was? Would there even be any? Critical art was of course not invented in the nineties but critique of society certainly became a commodity around that time, just look to the saga of institutional critique.5

We can agree with Yates generally about the end of socially engaged art in the sense that the political element has had to move to sit more squarely in the social movement camp. We might even point out that our breakage prefigured his text about 'the end' but look here, if one adopts fully Yates 'end' then one is essentially internalising the switch of the site of critique from the art context into a social movement imaginary but then what difference does this make at the moment of creation? How does a work enter into this imaginary? On the street? We know that there is no privileged form or site that is more critical but the vision of art into social movement described by Yates seems a little constraining, not to mention if you perhaps differ politically. Where can this imaginary of the social movement get out beyond itself? How does one get in? Does it exist only in the large scale critical flare ups of protest wherever they occur? Is the radical artist on the end of some blinking red hotline phone: "Yates! Its kicking off in Wisconsin, get your radical art ass down here and start instituting this thing". What of more distant, private, individual, critical art meditations? Is the social movement imaginary curated? All this you will say is a little conservative, a little reactionary but not a bit of it, we think like old Sholette6 of the potential of the political dark matter which is everywhere. You will say that the dark matter is the social movement but there's much more of it and it lays in bedrooms and sits on sofas and walks in the streets and surfs the waves. Its young and old, perhaps politically unsure or unconscious, perhaps manipulated and trapped in the tribal game. Surely the imaginary of critical art cannot be limited to the rinse and spin of the tribal mixer?

Is it not so that the move into social movement ensures that radical art is left bare to exactly the sort of tribal dynamics that have prevailed in the post truth era, its capacity to dream and travel is severely reduced in the process? Perhaps this new imaginary lacks imagination, but why do we even write of Yates and his friends at all at a time like this? Because this idea of the 'end of socially engaged art' and of the site of critical art marching and morphing into the imaginary of the radical left social movement was written just prior the Trump era and the devastating reality that so much of the imaginary public were actually far right in thought. Now the recently shifted critical art has a new enemy and the fight is on and as we know in the post truth era (and the era of alt right populism generally) a virulent, visible and vocal far left social movement is the ideal foil for their progress. Back and forth it went didn't it? It is terrible, too terrible for us to speak on it really. only to say that it seems like a contemporary tragedy that every wail of protest seems only to make the far right stronger, but has it in the end? As we sit here on the sofa we genuinely do not know the results. But let us already ask this; if Trump loses is Biden really the hero of the radical left, of Yates and co?

Now that's enough. Strike Art is four years old and we know nothing much about the evolved thinking today and in any case the seat we occupy is so cheap and privileged that I am quite certain that our going on is an insult both to those who fight and especially those from the myriad of backgrounds which are seriously under attack from the authoritarian turn. Middle aged white males notsomuch. So leave it out one must say but let us close with this; naive as we no doubt are we still attempt to speak to an imagined general public who suffer at the hands of the post truth era. Victims, as we all are, of the times, the tech and the tried and tested divide and rule power mongering that has never worked so well. So saying we speak to Yates as we speak to the living spoonful.7

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PS 

You know I can recall sitting in the Woodland Tavern in Leamington Spa celebrating my generous funding award, buying soups for all and sundry and trying to explain why I had been given such a lot of money. I can tell you that I was met by some frustrated bafflement. The government have given you how much? To do what? Full time? For so long? Hard to stomach for many, but we support the funding because it allows a rascal like ourselves to have a go rather than just the rich folk.

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1 BB refers to the television drama Breaking Bad and BP refers to the Alaskan Bush People. See Work 48.

2 General reference to universities. Negative sentiment.

3 Arts and Humanities Research Council. University funding organisation in the UK.

4 Neo-reactionary, see also Work 31.

5 Branch of critical art discourse about the changing relationship between critical art and the art institutions of society.

6 Author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture 

7 Refers to alt right Sweden Democrats politician Jimme Åkesson. See also Work 19, note 7.

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