B+B is a curatorial partnership between Sarah Carrington and Sophie
Hope. Since 2000, B+B have developed a discursive practice which supports
artists and their collaborators in situations ranging from residencies
and community-based projects to acts of consultation and activism.
For the Prague Biennale 2003, B+B have initiated Art of Survival,
which will transport specific strategies from the UK to Prague, activating
the space at the Veletrzni Palac through a series of interventions,
events and documentation.
Artists Ella Gibbs, Alasdair Hopwood, Sean Parfitt, Barry Sykes and
Paula Roush will present tactics, strategies and attempted expeditions.
These projects are each in some way moving toward a space of self-determination,
independence or resistance. Testing metaphorical or physical limits,
creating alternative economies for artists’ working lives, outsourcing
and managing spare time are some of the responses taken to the amazing
challenge of the Prague Biennale.
Rather than contribute a series of artists’ statements for the
catalogue, we have included an excerpt of a conversation held to discuss
the idea of Art of Survival at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London
where B+B are currently in residence. This text runs throughout the
catalogue and is featured on each Art of Survival artists’ page.
“Consider the way that the artist is at once highly specialised,
yet infinitely re-trainable, willing to volunteer enormous time and
labour to generate cultural capital (that is typically accumulated
by others), while in theory remaining subversive towards institutional
power, even though seldom is the artist willing to subvert the power
that most affects her: the art industry itself.”1
1 Greg Sholette, ‘Some Call it Art’, Dürfen die Das?
– Kunst als Sozialer Raum, eds. Stella Rollig and Eva Sturm,
Verlag Turia + Kant, 2002, p.168
ART OF SURVIVAL DINNER
Date: 16 April, 2003
Time: 7.00 – 11.30pm
Location: Austrian Cultural Forum, London
Menu: salads, bread, quiche, Austrian chocolates and Kendal mint
cake
Hosts: B+B
Guests: Ella Gibbs (presenting Spare Time Job Centre) Alasdair Hopwood
(presenting Works In The Home) Sean Parfitt and Barry Sykes (presenting
Staying Alive) Paula Roush (presenting msdm) Halt + Boring (Artists
in residence with B+B)
Sarah Carrington: How do we want to define survival for ourselves,
individually or collectively?
Barry Sykes: Would we want a collective definition?
SC: It’s not about saying that we’re a group or that
we have a collective approach but perhaps we are an unconnected
network. One of the things we wanted to talk about is how each of
us sees taking a strategy of survival (however we define that) from
here to another place. This also comes from the idea of surviving
through the structure of the biennale that has few resources.
Paula Roush: I had a question for you, in terms of what Art of Survival
means; I was wondering if you think there is an aesthetics of survival?
And what are the problems with an aesthetisation of survival? Particularly
in the context of war that we are living in, in which the banalisation
of the war in the media has created an aesthetic of survival, and
consequently I have become neutral about certain images. You see
things in the newspaper that can be completely horrible, and they
become beautiful.
Ella Gibbs: It does have that absolutely contradictory affect doesn’t
it?
PR: On the other hand, the images I want to make, are definitely
of war too because that’s what’s on my mind. I have
a lot of ambivalence at the moment in terms of producing things.
It has become very difficult for me to think about producing things.
I think the war is the catastrophic dimension of things, of struggles
that you have in daily life. There are all kinds of moments of survival,
or moments when you have to fight for survival.
AH: I think that’s complacent. These things are real and are
actually happening. I cannot look at those images as being beautiful.
I find them horrific and disturbing.
Sophie Hope: I think it’s to do with the process as well because
anything you’ll see for the first time will provoke a certain
reaction. It’s also the density of images and the way that
we’ll see the same image across papers and television.
AH: I still don’t think that desensitizes the impact of that
image. There’s almost a rhythmic pattern to the way the images
work. I’ve made this comparison to Steve Reich’s music
where you start off with a certain set of rhythms and then they’re
constantly repeated over a period of time and then a new rhythm
is introduced and I was interested in comparing that language to
the news coverage of the war.
PR: For me it’s like when you see an artwork that you’ve
never seen before there’s a moment of revelation and I have
had that looking at images of war. For instance, in the recent images
of the looting of the museums in Baghdad, we’re dealing with
art but in a very unexpected way. All of this discussion about heritage
that is now emerging because of the looting becomes an unbelievable
story in terms of aesthetics of survival.
SP: It feels very uncomfortable to sit here talking about these
moments when we can have no possible sense of what they feel like.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that there was looting and chaos.
The one genuine survival strategy that people can have is to grab
everything they can because they have no idea what’s going
to happen even in the next ten minutes. And once that momentum gets
going you can take anything and you become an individual, you become
your family. It feels difficult talking about those images here,
and aesthetics in relation to experiences that are a chaos that
we cannot possibly imagine.
Something that I was thinking when we were discussing the notion
of an aesthetic of survival and strategies for survival is that
perhaps the most important thing about any survival strategy is
the beginning and end point. With what Barry and I do, what happens
in the middle is perhaps the most interesting thing and the end
point is the exhibition say, where we set ourselves a scenario.
Perhaps we could think about survival with this as our starting
point. What is each of our end points? What do we want to get and
what is our survival tactic for trying to get there?
SH: One thing that keeps coming up with the work that we’re
interested in is failure and never reaching your end point. It’s
more the process of getting there and the ideals that are never
reached. The journey as a survival strategy is key and we’re
interested in mapping those journeys. For us, finding the starting
point is really fundamental. Why are you setting out on that journey?
What’s your motivation to survive? We’re trying to get
to the crux of the very different motivations for people to come
together around a table for a specific project.
SC: It’s also surviving through constantly bringing people
together around tables.
(continues on Ella Gibbs’s
page)
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