My Agitations; The French Dissenter
by Laurence Dube-Rushby
Reflecting on
Domesticating Conflicts
On starting the laboratory of dissent, I was mostly interested to explore the question of responsibility, of citizenship and of audience focus.
Who are we making art for?
What is the true value of what we do?
What is it that we do, exactly?
I looked into my past work and pulled out some materials
that would help the enquiry; 800m of knotted red ribbon, a ball of hand spun,
hand dyed, red wool, black cards and white pens, words and questions.
Week 2 group, which I was part of, had decided to act as
agitators for the full duration of the project in order to
provoke/create/invite connections to be made with the full spectrum of artists
and art practices engaged (including the visitors, students, Uni staff…).
My intervention started on week 1, when invading the space
of the gallery allocated to group 1 with a pop up tent and a ‘chock question’;
‘What can art do for the migrants drowning at sea?’ The ‘Agitation’ aimed to
stimulate reflection on the social impact of Art, and on social activism as an
Art form inside and outside the gallery.
As the occupation of the gallery with the tent continued,
other underlying questions surfaced; I placed myself within the tent, reading
Gaston Bachelard’s
“ Poetics of Space”(the very book I was ‘accused’ not to
have read by a WSA tutor while applying for an MA place, 10 years ago. I was
then refused entry to the course). It is no wonder that I entered the
exhibition space of the Winchester Gallery, adjacent to WSA, showing a will to
fit in the academic frame but under my own terms.
A further layer of enquiry came to me when acting in the
space and discovering that I had created a ‘poetic private space’ within the
public space of the gallery; a ‘safe’ haven to hide in, if necessary, during
the collaboration.
The inside of the tent became a parallel imaginary world
within which I could plot, listen to others, hide and change character. By week
2, the tent had become a changing room for a set of experimental characters to
emerge from.
The tent intended to make us all reflect on our own
practice, brought in as a performance, I left it in the space as an
installation to invite interaction. Unexpected interaction happened while I was
away in Paris. Lydia Heath invaded the space, and slipped into my costume; the
notion of public and private space was again challenged. The threat of being
disowned of my work by others triggered a new enquiry; a pure mirror of my own
previous invasive act.
Simon Sheikh qualifies art as “a locus of possibilities, of
exchange and comparative analysis…a field of alternatives, proposals and
models” in his essay “ Pedagogy of the not known”. (mentioned by Elizabeth
Fisher in her book On Not knowing How Artists Think, p.12)
“The Ship of Fools”
On entering the space left by group 1, I discovered Isaac
Withcoombes words; “Port, Starboard, Bow… analogy to his reference of us as
embarking on the “Ship of Fools”, on a voyage of discovery motivated by the
“not-Knowing” as referred by Elizabeth Fisher in her introduction of her book
“ Art draws us into a space of not knowing, a space of
thinking in the widest possible sense, in which to test what it means to be in
the world”.
I embarked on the ship only knowing that social engagement
was an intrinsect part of my work, but willing to test and re-learn my own
practice. I used the microcosm of our group to observe and test the effects
one’s practice and actions can have on the OTHER, offering to echo the
observation onto the current migrants crisis as an evident model of a wider
conflict.(which I felt very deeply, increasingly, affected by over the past 6
months to the point of questioning the validity of my art practice)
The ship of fools
followed the tent in an organic way. The red knot I hung in the space on day
one was brought in as an invitation for the impossible task of untying the
knots of complex relationships developing in the gallery space and within CAS.
When looking at it in the space it became something else, something bigger and
wider than the sum of the small possible conflicts that may arise within the
limited space and the group.
I was also interested to use another artist’s words as a way
to create a conversation between two practices; the words were offered in the
space, I invited them in my work to create new meanings. (No reaction as yet
come from Isaac who did not claim ownership over the words or the statement.)
I am interested to open the question of artistic ownership and integrity
within collaborative practice to be discussed at the symposium.
I did not mark the work as my own either when presented in
the gallery or the blog.
The Hunger Strike;
On facing “Dissent” as a way of working, I was eager to act
in ways that I was not expected to act. Exploring acts of social activism in
the world, I decided to start a hunger strike on day one of my week at the
gallery, asking artists the impossible task to Define (and not question) the ‘True Value of Art’.
This extreme act aimed to force artists into shared self reflection
and for me to measure their will to engage with the rest of the group.
As an artist experimenting with the language of performance, this allowed me
to explore the edges between truth, and make-believe,
the level of trust needed to be created between the artist and the audience and
the limits between the private and the public body.
As the project developed, characters emerged from the tent,
into the space, in turns the French, the artist and the mother, sometimes
dissenting all at once in the space or online.
We used the gallery as a studio where the work evolved
organically over the week. The conversations we had everyday became part of the
work. The all week became a performance which we all ‘acted’ in our
personalised ‘Lab Coats’, as we opened the process to the audience. Each
visitor had an input mostly in the shape of a conversation, transforming our
thinking and opening new enquiries.
The relationship with all artists involved and with August Davis,our curator became a series of problems or questions raised and solved rather
than ‘conflicts’. We domesticated them, discussing and negotiating every
possibilities and acknowledging them as part of the artistic process.
The Concerto
While the conversations we had in the space during the week
brought us and our work closer, as Mothers, as Artists and as Foreigners, a
great sense of play grew. I had previously compared the CAS group as an 18
pieces orchestra needing to tune our instruments to each other’s. I invited my
fellow week 2 artists to unveil their hidden musical instruments, part of an
unaccomplished dream or simply part of our motherhood process (children
learning to play)
In our final performance, we related to each other creating
‘musical’ vibrations in the gallery space, offering a link between the various
works presented in the gallery. The sound of arising conflicts, some discussed,
some felt and experienced during the week.
‘Luncheon’
Our ‘Finale’, the lunch with no food, invited artists from
CAS to join our enquiries while empathising with people suffering from hunger
and deprivation in wider conflicts.
Artists were fed a grain of rice asking to feed them, dust
collected from their own home by artist Yonat Nitzan Green and questions shaped
during the week by the group.
The lunch ended with home made cakes, to regain friendship
and trust; playing once more with another instrument of manipulation and
control so inherent to motherhood.
A further peaceful
cryptic agitation;
The Dissenters’ Challenge;
“Are we tough enough”? ,asked the Dissenter Character in her
work dungarees, wearing her race number 20001(reference to the number of
migrants allowed in the UK+1)
I visited week 4 challenging game space of the gallery,
echoing once more the possible links between our doing in the gallery with a
wider conflict. Will our work rise up to the challenge of responding to wider
conflicts in the world but also will we be strong enough together to maintain
our relationship and will this further our impact in the art world and in the
society?
I will finish with a quote;
“ Not knowing contains within it the possibility of the ‘Not
Yet’ and ‘Still to Be’. It holds an ‘ethical promise’ that in recent years has
been taken up in the epistemological analysis of what might be termed
‘constitutive ignorance’ alongside the practice of knowledge production. The
same ethical promise underpins artists’ engagement with the world, and shapes a
space in which to encounter the other”… “the shifting status of the art object
and the re-contextualisation of artistic practice within expanded fields of
research, politics and the social, open new ways of approaching an ethical
position in relation to how we know as well as what we know and do not know-…”
…” Art draws us into a space of not knowing, a space of
thinking in the widest sense possible sense, in which to test what it means to
be in the world”.
Elizabeth Fisher
On Not Knowing How artists Think
By Elizabeth Fisher
and Rebecca Fortnum, Black Dog Publishing, 2013
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