Publications by Harry Weeks
Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice, 2014
To The Reader, Oct 2013
Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.
Middle of the Beginning, May 2013
The understanding of community in its more traditional senses has largely been predicated on a ra... more The understanding of community in its more traditional senses has largely been predicated on a rarely posited assumption. It is explicitly stated in any number of texts on the subject that community is constituted firstly by a membership -a congregation of individuals or singularities whose plural operation and association make up the body of the communityand secondly by a space -some forum within which this congregation may assemble and operate. Yet the role played by time in the constitution of community goes almost universally unstated. Underlying our sense of what community means, or what it means to exist within a community, however, there is a tacit presupposition that there must exist a degree of coincidence or coexistence between the membership of the community. Of course this is not to suggest a blanket simultaneity between all members, rather that community is constituted by a network of smaller meetings in time, in which two or more members encounter one another according to a shared temporality. Face to face contact (which up until very recently represented the bread and butter of what we understand to be community) is predicated on such a mutual experience of time.
What should be taken from the Greek election is that the political institutions of the country of... more What should be taken from the Greek election is that the political institutions of the country offered, and the electorate seriously considered, an alternative.
In our contemporary globalised world in which a complex network of multinational corporations and... more In our contemporary globalised world in which a complex network of multinational corporations and nations maintains hegemony, a new type of ‘Empire’ as Hardt and Negri would say, it may perhaps seem an anachronism that the 19th century construct of the nation state retains near exclusive and universal control over the flow of humans across the planet’s surface. The passport – issued, owned and controlled by the nation state – remains the primary means of identification of citizens and – barring certain exceptions – the sole means of crossing borders internationally. Its small and insignificant physical form belies the sheer weight of abstract meaning held within. Each stamp, each unintelligible alphanumeric string of characters, each photograph is simply a streamlined frontispiece for a wealth of issues buried beneath, such as citizenship, migration, sovereignty, nationalism, nationhood, belonging, identity, exclusion and inclusion.
Contemporary art in the Baltic States has recently undergone a ‘documentary turn’, part of a glob... more Contemporary art in the Baltic States has recently undergone a ‘documentary turn’, part of a global tendency towards the use of documentary aesthetics and formal structures in art. In the Baltic context, this has been the result of a desire amongst artists to both recognize and re-cognize the post-Soviet condition, a subject that was consciously avoided by most artists in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the 1990s. Re-cognition has involved an attempt to de-flatten and humanize the post-Soviet condition, which, although a valid framework for the theoretical discussion of Eastern Europe, has a number of shortcomings. This re-cognitive tendency has derived from a shift from ‘hot’ to ‘cold’ memory, the product of distance and detachment from the Soviet past and the rise of a new generation of artists, who were not active participants in the Soviet Baltic Republics. Artists have utilized documentary, as well as ethnographic and pedagogical strategies in order to achieve this re-cognition.
Conference Papers by Harry Weeks
Paper delivered at ‘What is the Contemporary?’ conference, St Andrews University. 1 September 201... more Paper delivered at ‘What is the Contemporary?’ conference, St Andrews University. 1 September 2014
Amongst the most prevalent manifestations of contemporary participatory art practice are projects in which audience members are invited to interact and modify an installation over the course of the exhibition. In such works collaboration does not derive from shared or collective experience, as is the case in examples of what Grant Kester has termed ‘dialogical aesthetics’, but from a cumulative or diachronic co-operation, in which participants act in isolation from one another, intervening as temporally atomised individuals, whose actions only manifest themselves as collective upon retrospective viewing. Two particularly apt examples are Oda Projesi’s ongoing project Tongue (2009-) – in which the public is encouraged to submit their own neologisms to an ever-expanding lexicon – and Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery (2011) – a pyramid of 72 000 bottles of Efes Pilsner gradually dismantled and consumed over two months.
Despite the disparity between the modes of collaboration entailed by these works and examples of dialogical aesthetics, both are commonly spoken of through a rhetoric of community. In this paper I explore the modes of community espoused by each, with specific attention paid to the significance placed on temporality. Conceptions of community formulated in the nineteenth century by the likes of Ferdinand Tönnies, and which held sway for much of the twentieth century, are predicated on the existence of some shared temporality between members. It is this form of community which works of dialogical aesthetics appeal to. The growth of online communities, on the other hand, has disturbed this presupposition. While the latencies, lags and delays that characterise online interactivity preclude the possibility for a common temporality to exist via the internet, this has not prevented web-based communities from flourishing. For example, the construction and modification of Wikipedia entries by the ‘Wikipedia community’ consists of a series of temporally isolated interventions into the content of the page by individuals. In this sense a great deal of structural commonality can be discerned between Wikipedia and the practices of the likes of Oda Projesi and Cyprien Gaillard. Through an elaboration of this commonality, I wish to point to two seemingly opposed models of community, via an examination of their differing artistic manifestations – one dependant upon diachronicity and one on synchronicity.
Paper delivered at London Conference in Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, London. 28 June 2014
Alt... more Paper delivered at London Conference in Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, London. 28 June 2014
Although, as Nicolas Bourriaud argued in Relational Aesthetics, the modernist, teleological function of art in preparing and announcing ‘a future world’ has receded, this is not to say that it has disappeared from the aesthetic realm entirely. Rather, that this task has shifted disciplines, and in the process become co-opted by political agendas that avant-gardist art had long positioned itself in opposition to. One of the most visible manifestations of this co-opted quasi-utopian aesthetic function in recent years has been the architectural render.
In this paper, I circuitously interrogate the politics and governmentality inherent to this aesthetic form through the work of contemporary art practitioners who have adopted the idioms and forms of the architectural render. In particular I focus on the work of the Croatian-Scottish collective Eastern Surf and their project Quartermile Rendered Ghosts (2012) in which the renders for Foster and Partners’ recently completed mixed-use redevelopment project in Edinburgh, Quartermile, were physically recreated upon completion of the site. The target of this analysis is the subject of community; the manner in which a self-proclaimed community is prefigured, predetermined and fashioned through aesthetic means by planners, architects and urbanists, and conversely how related aesthetic strategies have been deployed by artists in deconstructing precisely this process.
While the work of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has, for over twenty-five years, retained a striden... more While the work of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has, for over twenty-five years, retained a strident political character, the manner in which she has conceived of both her practice and her agency as an artist has altered vastly. Most notable is an attitudinal and positional shift in the conception of herself as exilic subject to social subject whose productive capacities are articulated in a dialectic with social struggles. Her early work displays a feminist preoccupation with issues of identity and individuality, most visible in her eleven-year project ‘Tribute to Ana Mendieta’ (1985-1996) in which she re-enacted the work of an artist whose practice was described thus by Gerardo Mosquera: ‘I do not know of any other case where artistic creation is so deeply linked with individual existence.’ In recent years, however, Bruguera has concerned herself with subjects such as precarity, globalisation and migration, casting herself and her work in a social role that displaces the self to make room for the ‘body of the multitude’.
The shift, from an emphasis on what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as ‘the limiting logic of identity-difference’ to the ‘open and exclusive logic of singularity-commonality,’ provides the basis for this paper. The broader question posed is how such shifts in artistic practice can be approached through art historical analysis and to what effects. How can we negotiate the political meaning of such a shift in thinking about a contemporary socially engaged art history?
The Estonian artist Kristina Norman has since 2006 located her practice firmly within highly poli... more The Estonian artist Kristina Norman has since 2006 located her practice firmly within highly politicised territories, largely related to the specific socio-political situations deriving from Estonia’s independence after the fall of the USSR. One particularly prominent focus of her work has been the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet monument which until 2007 was located in the centre of Tallinn before being hastily and controversially moved to a less visible space on the outskirts of the city by the Estonian government. In this paper, her installation ‘After-War’ (2009) will provide the case study for an exploration of contemporary convergences of community and post-communism in contemporary art practice. In particular, the focus shall be on the attempt to rectify a supposed post-communist void of community and on debating art’s possible role in such a discussion. Norman’s methods are as absurd as they are activist, provoking criticism both for the ethical transgressions of her actions and for the apparent playfulness of her interventions in such tumultuous sites. In one action, documented and displayed as part of ‘After-War’, she reinstalls a gold replica of the Bronze Soldier in its original location. Are such artistic interventions entropic or generative with regard to the discourse surrounding community in a post-communist context? Is art even a suitable site for such discourse, and what are the implications of this and other similar interventions on our understanding of a supposed post-communist void of community?
The writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are being widely employed in explications of art'... more The writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are being widely employed in explications of art's recent 'social turn' (Claire Bishop) - especially with regard to how art can become a site of experimentation with emerging political subjectivities. However there exists a theoretical blindspot in contemporary art theory concerning the nature of art’s involvement with what Hardt and Negri describe as the ‘production of the common.’ In this paper, Artur Żmijewski's video 'Them' (2007, 30') will provide a case study for exploring how artistic intervention can be seen to relate to a politics of radical democracy. In particular I am interested in discussing the conception of a ‘spiral, symbiotic’ and ‘expansive’ relationship between production of the common and production of subjectivities.
The Polish artist's rapid ascendance to a leading position in the international art world has not been unrelated to the controversial aspects of his artistic methodologies. In 'Them' Żmijewski invites four groups representing various political and religious standpoints to create, modify and discuss artworks which embody their subjectivities. Each group begins by creating their own work, and then over a series of four workshop sessions, groups manipulate the works produced by others. Throughout this dialectic process, the presentation and negotiation of difference is encouraged by the artist, a perpetually visible presence in the background of the work, not with entropic intentions but rather in a generative, discursive manner.
However, does the ‘spiral’ nature of the repetitious negotiations of subjectivity inherent in Zmijewski’s work entail a production of the common in line with that related by Hardt and Negri? Is art even a suitable site for the production of the common, and what role does art play within a wider politics of radical democracy? What are the implications of such artistic interventions in the politics of the common for our understanding of radical democracy and its possibilities?
Kristina Norman’s ‘After-war’ (2009) and Shlomi Yaffe’s ‘How I changed my ideology in Prague Mark... more Kristina Norman’s ‘After-war’ (2009) and Shlomi Yaffe’s ‘How I changed my ideology in Prague Market’ (2009) both confront the relationships between community and nationalism through the medium of an unannounced intervention into public space. They are antagonistic in mode and provocative in execution. They share a desire to highlight the plight of an unrepresented, subaltern, minority community through the means of public performance and lens-based documentation. In this paper, I will characterise both works as being exemplars of a tendency with the ‘Social Turn’ in art in which the transformation of community is central. While Norman is a member of the community she is implicating, Yaffe is not. Does this internal/external dichotomy of intervention impact on the ‘success’ or ethics of the two artists’ works?
Norman exploits the mass media as a means of highlighting the contentions of community, while Yaffe assumes a false persona in order to draw attention to the subject in question. As such they both share a great deal with the realm of Tactical Media. But I shall argue that this does not preclude them from being community-transformative by demonstrating the similarity of fundamental concerns common to both Tactical Media and what Grant Kester has termed ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’. This paper will question whether antagonism is a viable means of achieving the transformation of community through art. Furthermore, is there an ethical problematic concerned with such artistic interventions in community? And do such ethical considerations impact on any potential criteria for critique of community-transformative art practice?
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Publications by Harry Weeks
Conference Papers by Harry Weeks
Amongst the most prevalent manifestations of contemporary participatory art practice are projects in which audience members are invited to interact and modify an installation over the course of the exhibition. In such works collaboration does not derive from shared or collective experience, as is the case in examples of what Grant Kester has termed ‘dialogical aesthetics’, but from a cumulative or diachronic co-operation, in which participants act in isolation from one another, intervening as temporally atomised individuals, whose actions only manifest themselves as collective upon retrospective viewing. Two particularly apt examples are Oda Projesi’s ongoing project Tongue (2009-) – in which the public is encouraged to submit their own neologisms to an ever-expanding lexicon – and Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery (2011) – a pyramid of 72 000 bottles of Efes Pilsner gradually dismantled and consumed over two months.
Despite the disparity between the modes of collaboration entailed by these works and examples of dialogical aesthetics, both are commonly spoken of through a rhetoric of community. In this paper I explore the modes of community espoused by each, with specific attention paid to the significance placed on temporality. Conceptions of community formulated in the nineteenth century by the likes of Ferdinand Tönnies, and which held sway for much of the twentieth century, are predicated on the existence of some shared temporality between members. It is this form of community which works of dialogical aesthetics appeal to. The growth of online communities, on the other hand, has disturbed this presupposition. While the latencies, lags and delays that characterise online interactivity preclude the possibility for a common temporality to exist via the internet, this has not prevented web-based communities from flourishing. For example, the construction and modification of Wikipedia entries by the ‘Wikipedia community’ consists of a series of temporally isolated interventions into the content of the page by individuals. In this sense a great deal of structural commonality can be discerned between Wikipedia and the practices of the likes of Oda Projesi and Cyprien Gaillard. Through an elaboration of this commonality, I wish to point to two seemingly opposed models of community, via an examination of their differing artistic manifestations – one dependant upon diachronicity and one on synchronicity.
Although, as Nicolas Bourriaud argued in Relational Aesthetics, the modernist, teleological function of art in preparing and announcing ‘a future world’ has receded, this is not to say that it has disappeared from the aesthetic realm entirely. Rather, that this task has shifted disciplines, and in the process become co-opted by political agendas that avant-gardist art had long positioned itself in opposition to. One of the most visible manifestations of this co-opted quasi-utopian aesthetic function in recent years has been the architectural render.
In this paper, I circuitously interrogate the politics and governmentality inherent to this aesthetic form through the work of contemporary art practitioners who have adopted the idioms and forms of the architectural render. In particular I focus on the work of the Croatian-Scottish collective Eastern Surf and their project Quartermile Rendered Ghosts (2012) in which the renders for Foster and Partners’ recently completed mixed-use redevelopment project in Edinburgh, Quartermile, were physically recreated upon completion of the site. The target of this analysis is the subject of community; the manner in which a self-proclaimed community is prefigured, predetermined and fashioned through aesthetic means by planners, architects and urbanists, and conversely how related aesthetic strategies have been deployed by artists in deconstructing precisely this process.
The shift, from an emphasis on what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as ‘the limiting logic of identity-difference’ to the ‘open and exclusive logic of singularity-commonality,’ provides the basis for this paper. The broader question posed is how such shifts in artistic practice can be approached through art historical analysis and to what effects. How can we negotiate the political meaning of such a shift in thinking about a contemporary socially engaged art history?
The Polish artist's rapid ascendance to a leading position in the international art world has not been unrelated to the controversial aspects of his artistic methodologies. In 'Them' Żmijewski invites four groups representing various political and religious standpoints to create, modify and discuss artworks which embody their subjectivities. Each group begins by creating their own work, and then over a series of four workshop sessions, groups manipulate the works produced by others. Throughout this dialectic process, the presentation and negotiation of difference is encouraged by the artist, a perpetually visible presence in the background of the work, not with entropic intentions but rather in a generative, discursive manner.
However, does the ‘spiral’ nature of the repetitious negotiations of subjectivity inherent in Zmijewski’s work entail a production of the common in line with that related by Hardt and Negri? Is art even a suitable site for the production of the common, and what role does art play within a wider politics of radical democracy? What are the implications of such artistic interventions in the politics of the common for our understanding of radical democracy and its possibilities?
Norman exploits the mass media as a means of highlighting the contentions of community, while Yaffe assumes a false persona in order to draw attention to the subject in question. As such they both share a great deal with the realm of Tactical Media. But I shall argue that this does not preclude them from being community-transformative by demonstrating the similarity of fundamental concerns common to both Tactical Media and what Grant Kester has termed ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’. This paper will question whether antagonism is a viable means of achieving the transformation of community through art. Furthermore, is there an ethical problematic concerned with such artistic interventions in community? And do such ethical considerations impact on any potential criteria for critique of community-transformative art practice?
Amongst the most prevalent manifestations of contemporary participatory art practice are projects in which audience members are invited to interact and modify an installation over the course of the exhibition. In such works collaboration does not derive from shared or collective experience, as is the case in examples of what Grant Kester has termed ‘dialogical aesthetics’, but from a cumulative or diachronic co-operation, in which participants act in isolation from one another, intervening as temporally atomised individuals, whose actions only manifest themselves as collective upon retrospective viewing. Two particularly apt examples are Oda Projesi’s ongoing project Tongue (2009-) – in which the public is encouraged to submit their own neologisms to an ever-expanding lexicon – and Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery (2011) – a pyramid of 72 000 bottles of Efes Pilsner gradually dismantled and consumed over two months.
Despite the disparity between the modes of collaboration entailed by these works and examples of dialogical aesthetics, both are commonly spoken of through a rhetoric of community. In this paper I explore the modes of community espoused by each, with specific attention paid to the significance placed on temporality. Conceptions of community formulated in the nineteenth century by the likes of Ferdinand Tönnies, and which held sway for much of the twentieth century, are predicated on the existence of some shared temporality between members. It is this form of community which works of dialogical aesthetics appeal to. The growth of online communities, on the other hand, has disturbed this presupposition. While the latencies, lags and delays that characterise online interactivity preclude the possibility for a common temporality to exist via the internet, this has not prevented web-based communities from flourishing. For example, the construction and modification of Wikipedia entries by the ‘Wikipedia community’ consists of a series of temporally isolated interventions into the content of the page by individuals. In this sense a great deal of structural commonality can be discerned between Wikipedia and the practices of the likes of Oda Projesi and Cyprien Gaillard. Through an elaboration of this commonality, I wish to point to two seemingly opposed models of community, via an examination of their differing artistic manifestations – one dependant upon diachronicity and one on synchronicity.
Although, as Nicolas Bourriaud argued in Relational Aesthetics, the modernist, teleological function of art in preparing and announcing ‘a future world’ has receded, this is not to say that it has disappeared from the aesthetic realm entirely. Rather, that this task has shifted disciplines, and in the process become co-opted by political agendas that avant-gardist art had long positioned itself in opposition to. One of the most visible manifestations of this co-opted quasi-utopian aesthetic function in recent years has been the architectural render.
In this paper, I circuitously interrogate the politics and governmentality inherent to this aesthetic form through the work of contemporary art practitioners who have adopted the idioms and forms of the architectural render. In particular I focus on the work of the Croatian-Scottish collective Eastern Surf and their project Quartermile Rendered Ghosts (2012) in which the renders for Foster and Partners’ recently completed mixed-use redevelopment project in Edinburgh, Quartermile, were physically recreated upon completion of the site. The target of this analysis is the subject of community; the manner in which a self-proclaimed community is prefigured, predetermined and fashioned through aesthetic means by planners, architects and urbanists, and conversely how related aesthetic strategies have been deployed by artists in deconstructing precisely this process.
The shift, from an emphasis on what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as ‘the limiting logic of identity-difference’ to the ‘open and exclusive logic of singularity-commonality,’ provides the basis for this paper. The broader question posed is how such shifts in artistic practice can be approached through art historical analysis and to what effects. How can we negotiate the political meaning of such a shift in thinking about a contemporary socially engaged art history?
The Polish artist's rapid ascendance to a leading position in the international art world has not been unrelated to the controversial aspects of his artistic methodologies. In 'Them' Żmijewski invites four groups representing various political and religious standpoints to create, modify and discuss artworks which embody their subjectivities. Each group begins by creating their own work, and then over a series of four workshop sessions, groups manipulate the works produced by others. Throughout this dialectic process, the presentation and negotiation of difference is encouraged by the artist, a perpetually visible presence in the background of the work, not with entropic intentions but rather in a generative, discursive manner.
However, does the ‘spiral’ nature of the repetitious negotiations of subjectivity inherent in Zmijewski’s work entail a production of the common in line with that related by Hardt and Negri? Is art even a suitable site for the production of the common, and what role does art play within a wider politics of radical democracy? What are the implications of such artistic interventions in the politics of the common for our understanding of radical democracy and its possibilities?
Norman exploits the mass media as a means of highlighting the contentions of community, while Yaffe assumes a false persona in order to draw attention to the subject in question. As such they both share a great deal with the realm of Tactical Media. But I shall argue that this does not preclude them from being community-transformative by demonstrating the similarity of fundamental concerns common to both Tactical Media and what Grant Kester has termed ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’. This paper will question whether antagonism is a viable means of achieving the transformation of community through art. Furthermore, is there an ethical problematic concerned with such artistic interventions in community? And do such ethical considerations impact on any potential criteria for critique of community-transformative art practice?
This session focuses on collaborations mediated by communication channels and technologies. The speakers complicate assumptions that collaboration foregrounds immediacy, presence and duration to consider the politics of working together. How might feminist, queer and post-colonial perspectives on space and time inform understandings of the media involved in collaboration? How have communication channels from television and the radio through to mail networks and the internet impacted on the relations or relationships constituted through artistic collaboration?
The papers in this session consider these questions from a variety of perspectives, encompassing video art, web-based technologies, interdisciplinary collaborations and social art practice. Together they map out moments in the complex histories of collaboration and its media that embrace their recursive, retrogressive and heterogeneous potentialities.