Art of Survival conversation (continued from Barry Sykes’s and Sean Parfitt’s page)
Alasdair Hopwood: With my project I try to negotiate the idea of all of your activity being part of your practice. Through getting a tattoo that says “me at work now” you’re labeling all of your activity as your work. That’s your gesture.
Sarah Carrington: I think something that connects both of those projects is the idea of art consumed as a leisure activity.
AH: It also relates to the ethos of the everyday and everything as art.
SC: And the fact that notion has been so jumped on recently and that it’s
everywhere around us and is incredibly oppressive.
Paula Roush: I think this current notion of art as an instrumentalization of Labour’s political agenda is very interesting. Since Labour came into power there’s been a new definition of art as having a social role.
AH: That’s because there’s no money in art education and it’s cheap labour.
SC: How did it feel to have Spare Time situated in a public gallery with the
pressure of their expectations from policy?
Ella Gibbs: Well I think it was a response to that agenda. Recently, just in terms of making work, it’s become a response process.
Sean Parfitt: Art by its very nature is the worst horse to back because it bites the hand that feeds it. What I like about Ella’s project and what we’re talking about here is the fact that we’re bringing all of those expectations into question. Yes, we’ll work in the community but we’ll utterly question what that means, what our position is, what their position is as audience, and acknowledge that they’re not necessarily going to come out of it enlightened and better off. But it’s asking
questions and that’s what art should do.
The important thing is taking the context as an impetus and as a catalyst
for our art practice and exploring, expanding upon it, and testing it constantly
so what seems like a really rigid situation becomes a scenario where we
can test the water.

The msdm b-shirts for the Prague Biennale will be presented at the Sharjah Biennale and the Venice Biennale.
msdm is an imaginary organization founded in 1998 by Paula Roush to research mobile strategies of display and mediation. A hybrid of artistic, curatorial, and experimental practice operating in the interstices of institutions and social systems, the organization aims to propose participatory alliances for transversal, critical, cultural, and aesthetic outputs.
The collaborations have extended into the domains of open source software,
publishing, para-architecture, public signage, radio streaming, and mobile media platforms. They have been shown in galleries, museums, non-governmental organizations and independent spaces, including the Institute of International Visual Arts, the Bauhaus Foundation, Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst, and the Living Art Museum.