My Agitations; The French Dissenter
by Laurence Dube-Rushby
Reflecting on
Domesticating Conflicts
Laboratory of Dissent was a collaborative residency with Chapel Arts Studios and the Winchester Gallery. Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic model (2007) inspired our interactions. My working group, inter alia, explored the role of the artist as agitator, proposing to ‘domesticate’ rather than ‘eradicate’ conflicts (Chapel Art Studio Archive, 2015). Mouffe’s text served as a starting point to explore matters of identities and institutional politics. Agonism was explored through performative works between artists, audiences, arts institutions and academia.
On starting the laboratory of dissent, I wished to explore matters of responsibility, citizenship and audience focus.
Who are we making art for?
What is the true value of what we do?
What is it that we do, exactly?
My proposition:
Drawing from previous residency and commissioned works, I selected materials that would support 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 (thus provocatively trespassing on other group's time) to provoke, create, and invite connections to be made with the full spectrum of practices engaged (including the visitors, students, Uni staff…). I responded with a series of interventions and provocations that tested the edges of our collaborative practice in the context of Dissent, bringing a burning subject: the migrant crisis, into the gallery context and making it impossible for others to ignore.
My intervention started on week 1, when I invaded the space
of the gallery allocated to group 1 with a pop-up tent and a provocative question: ‘What can art do for the migrants drowning at sea?’ The ‘Agitation’ aimed to
stimulate reflection on the social impact of art and social activism as an art form, inside (symbolic) and outside (active) the gallery.
As the occupation of the gallery with the tent continued, further questions surfaced. I placed myself within the tent, reading
Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (the very book I was accused of not having read by a WSA tutor while applying for an MA place, ten years before, and therefore was refused entry to the course. 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 I realised that I had created my own ‘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 identity. By week
2, the tent had become a changing room for a set of experimental characters from which I could emerge at my convenience.
The tent, intended to stimulate reflection on our own
practice, brought in as a performance, became a pedagogical space, whcih I left it in the space to invite interaction. I soon realised the extend of my invitation when unexpected interactions happened while away in Paris. Lydia Heath invaded the tent and slipped into my costume, challenging the
notion of private versus public space. The threat of losing ownership over my work seemed to mirror my own
previous invasivion of their creative space.
Simon Sheikh qualifies art as 'a locus of possibilities, of
exchange and comparative analysis…a field of alternatives, proposals and
models' (in Fisher and Fortnum, 2013, p.12)
The Ship of Fools
On entering the space left by group 1, I discovered Isaac
Withcoombes provocation: the words laid in the space: Port, Starboard, Bow… invited an analogy for our group embarking on the 'Ship of Fools', a voyage of discovery motivated by the 'not-knowing' referred to by Elizabeth Fisher in her introduction of her book, On not-knowing, How artists think (2013), she invites to relfect on our communal engagement: '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 intrinsic part of my work, but willing to test and relearn 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 project the
observation onto the current migrant crisis, a prominent conflict in the world, which I felt very increasingly affected by over the past 6
months, to the point of questioning the validity of my art practice in context.
The ship of fools organically followed the tent. 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, its meaning was transformed by the context, beyond original offer.
I was interested in using another artist’s words as a way
to create a conversation between two practices: the words were offered in the
space, I invited them into my work to create new meanings (no interjection has yet
come from Isaac, who did not claim ownership over the words or the statement). My provocation interestingly opened up questions of artistic ownership within this collaborative context. Artistic integrity within collaborative practice was to be discussed during our final symposium.
I did not mark the work as my own either when presented in
the gallery or on the shared blog, however, creating this blog became my means to claim ownership and tell the story.
The Hunger Strike:
On facing Dissent as a way of working, I was eager to act
in ways that I was not expected. Exploring acts of social activism in
the world, I began a hunger strike on day one of my week at the
gallery, challenging all artists involved in the residency to define the true value of art.
This extreme act aimed to force artists into shared self-reflection
and to evaluate their commitment to engagement with the rest of the group.
As an artist experimenting with the language of performance, I explored the limits between truth, and make-believe, a symbolic engagement with truth, doubled with an embodied response, tested the level of trust required between artist and audience and
the limits between the private and 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 every day became part of the
work. We performed the residency each wearing personalised lab coats that reflected the emergent identity of our engagement. Conversations and questions from visitors transformed our
thinking and process of enquiry.
The relationship between artists' groups was mediated by August Davis, curator: a series of problems or questions were raised and solved rather
than perceived as conflictual. We 'domesticated conflicts', discussing and negotiating every
possibility and acknowledging them as our artistic process.
The Concerto
While the conversations we had in the space during the week
brought us and our work closer, as Mothers, Artists and 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. 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: a means to link the various
works presented in the gallery. The sound of arising conflicts, some discussed,
some felt and experienced during the week.
Our ‘Finale’, a 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 that emerged during the week.
The lunch ended with homemade cakes, to regain friendship
and trust, making visible an instrument of control inherent to motherhood.
A further peaceful agitation to be deciphered by the audience:
Asking the question: Are we tough enough?, asked the French Dissenter Character in her
work dungarees, wearing her race number 20001(reference to the limited number of
migrants allowed in the UK+1, earlier announced by the government)
I visited week 4 challenging game space of the gallery,
echoing once more the possible links between our actions in the gallery with a
wider conflict. Will our work rise to the challenge of responding to wider
conflicts in the world, but also will we be strong enough together to maintain
our relationship? How will this further our impact in the art world and in 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.
On Not Knowing How artists Think
Elizabeth Fisher
and Rebecca Fortnum, Black Dog Publishing, 2013
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