Dave Beech

Presentation for the Panel ‘Curating Performance in the Age of the Global Contemporary: Chair Dr. Janet Marstine, University of Leicester; Ethan Lasser, Harvard Art Museums; Oscar Ho, Chinese University Hong Kong, Dr. Mel Jordan Dr. Andrew Hewitt, Freee art collective. A presentation on Freee’s art practice and reflection on a series of seminars by Freee with Museum Studies PhD students entitled Working within the Histories, Theories and Practices of the Public Sphere. Seminars and workshops, 12th and 15th April. Seminar Aim: an introduction to the histories, theories and practices of the public sphere. Through the content provided this seminar gives an introduction to understanding the historical roots and contemporary theorizing of the terms; Public, Public Art, Public Sphere, Citizenship and Civil Society in relation to art practice. We attempt to explore what the term ‘public’ means for art and curatorial practices and propose that by utilising the notion of the public in relation to Public Sphere theory we can rearrange our preconceptions of how art is produced, displayed and viewed. The seminar session will include presentations and exercises on how to be public. University of Leicester, School of Museum Studies 50th Anniversary International Conference: Museums in the Global Contemporary: Debating the Museum of Now,

Presentation for the Panel ‘Curating Performance in the Age of the Global Contemporary, Chair Dr. Janet Marstine, University of Leicester; Ethan Lasser, Harvard Art Museums; Oscar Ho, Chinese University Hong Kong, Dr. Mel Jordan Dr. Andrew Hewitt, Freee art collective. A presentation on Freee’s art practice and reflection on a series of seminars by Freee with Museum Studies PhD students entitled Working within the Histories, Theories and Practices of the Public Sphere. Seminars and workshops. Seminar dates Tuesday 12th April, Friday 15th April Seminar Aim: An introduction to the histories, theories and practices of the public sphere. Through the content provided this seminar gives an introduction to understanding the historical roots and contemporary theorizing of the terms; Public, Public Art, Public Sphere, Citizenship and Civil Society in relation to art practice. We attempt to explore what the term ‘public’ means for art and curatorial practices and propose that by utilising the notion of the public in relation to Public Sphere theory we can rearrange our preconceptions of how art is produced, displayed and viewed. The seminar session will include presentations and exercises on how to be public.

Sounds & Words 6 - 28 October 2017 This month’s Project Space exhibition focuses on Freee Art Collective and Caroline Devine’s two very different alternative portraits of Milton Keynes, Citizen Ship and City of Things respectively. Both projects were commissioned for City Club a programme of new art, performances, family activities, happenings and talks inspired by the original vision behind Milton Keynes. Throughout the summer Citizen Ship, a mobile kiosk based on the design of Milton Keynes bus stops, visited a number of events and locations across Milton Keynes including CityFest in Middleton Hall, centre:mk and Art in the Park. Freee art collective is concerned with how opinions are produced to form core social values. They worked with Citizen Ship visitors to create new slogans reflecting their thoughts and opinions which were then applied to badges and banners decorating the pavilion. Citizen Ship will return to Margaret Powell Square on Saturday 21 October 2017. Join Associate Artist Dylan Fox on Saturdays throughout October for badge making workshops in the Project Space. Caroline Devine creates large-scale sound installations exploring the unheard, hidden voices and imperceptible sounds of nature, the city and beyond. For City of Things, an immersive sound work installed in Field Walk centre:mk, 6 October – 5 November, Caroline has woven the sounds of Milton Keynes with her original compositions to create a sonic portrait of the city – which takes the Milton Keynes that is familiar to our eyes and opens it up to our ears. This exhibition includes a display of some of Caroline’s resource material and an opportunity to explore the on-line sound map www.cityofthings.co.uk which she has created to accompany the installation. City of Things was led by Bletchley Park working in partnership with MK Gallery, Heritage MK and The Open University.

Kiosks are more public, more intimate and more approachable than shops. They have a sociality that shops lack. By taking away the commercial profit-making utility of the kiosk we can capture its social dimension. The kiosk shows how socialism exists inside capitalism, trapped in financial exchanges we can see glimpses of a world of public exchanges. For the Common Ground event Freee produced 3 banners for the ‘Demonstrate’ space. Suspended over the reception desk the slogans read ‘All information will be common’, ‘Advertising For All; Or For Nobody At All'; 'Reclaim Public Opinion’ and 'Borders are for Crossing'. We also sited the Public Kiosk, made collaboratively with Curating PhD students at University of Leicester. By taking away all retail aspects of the kiosk and replacing its branding and advertising with opinions/beliefs garnered from visitors to this event we can draw out its full social potential. We published people's opinions in and on the kiosk throu...

The Freee art collective is made up of three artists, Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, who work together on slogans, billboards and publications that challenge the commercial and bureaucratic colonization of the public sphere of opinion formation. Freee’s recent works have been systems, constructions and kiosks that facilitate conversations and enable the exchange of individual views. We are preoccupied with the idea of ‘the collective’ and ways and methods in which we can all act more collectively within the public domain. The Freee art collective utilise the ‘slogan-as-artwork’ as a method of publishing ideas via different formats and in various sites. In their practice-based research they attempt to advance the debate around: the concept of ‘public’ beyond the conventional spatial understanding of inside and outside; address the concept of protest and opinion formation through written argumentation (i.e. the content of the slogan itself as well as artwork as texts); and ap...

How can artists and artists’ collectives best navigate the passage from our current neoliberalized art landscape to a radically democratic one? Organised in collaboration with Dr Emma Mahony, NCAD; this seminar focusses on the gradual de-politicization of public art spheres, by neoliberal values and practices. Freee Art Collective's remit is to transform and democratize art by subverting its debased institutions. Such a strategy relies on the political activation of the public against the state, which they aim to achieve by publishing their dissensual opinions in the public domain and encouraging others to follow suit. Their publishing predominately takes the form of sloganeering on bill board posters and, in so doing, they target one of the main ways that capitalism reproduces itself: through the medium of advertising. It is Freee’s goal to reclaim advertising as a medium for the public sphere by becoming guerilla advertisers and encouraging others to do likewise. As such, they...

The artwork Social Kiosk: The New Text Art of and Making Books a Difference by Ulises Carrion Freee was commissioned by RADAR Arts for ‘For & Against: Art, Politics and the Pamphlet’. The event took place on 26 & 27 May 2017 in Loughborough, UK. Social Kiosk and The New Text Art of and Making Books a Difference by Ulises Carrion Freee is a designed as a temporary public locus in which to disseminate badges and manifestos. The artwork is part-public structure, part-kiosk and part-publishing laboratory. The research focus in this project was on the role of the manifesto. Therefore, the project enabled us to experiment with how the manifesto operates beyond constative utterance, aiming to shift language and statement towards performative utterances. The aim is to use language and action in an artwork; the result is that the work does not only describe a given reality, but attempts to also changes the social reality that the words are describing. A manifesto, does not give an account of...

Citizen Ship is a portable pavilion designed as a public meeting place and with a resemblance to Milton Keynes bus shelters. The artwork is part-public sculpture, part-kiosk and part-publishing laboratory. Citizen Ship extends the concept of participation in art by engaging new groups in the production of collective artworks that are displayed in and on the structure. Through conversations visitors and passer-bys developed new slogans and published them by making badges, vinyl lettering, ribbons and teletext messaging. The participatory art methods applied are directed at opinion formation in order to understand how communities create and perform collective values. Citizen Ship, was funded by Arts Council England and Milton Keynes Art Gallery. Citizenship Plinth Text: A citizen is included in a political system based on the exclusion of others. A citizen is legally acknowledged as belonging to a state or nation or community. Citizenship is the practice of behaving, as an individual,...

Conceiving of art as having a social function either one chosen voluntarily by artists or one encouraged or imposed by big business or the state comes into conflict with the conception of art's autonomy. Art is not in a unique position in this regard; journalism, political debate ...

The Freee art collective create a wide range of text based and participation orientated work. Freee produce manifestos and instigate group readings of manifestos for the action of agreeing and disagreeing. Participants are requested to read the given text and make their own minds up about what they subscribe to. When present at the group readings, the participants only read out the words on the manifesto they agree with. The reading then becomes a collective process in which individuals publically agree as well as disagree and declare their commitment to Freee’s manifesto. While the use of a specific text by Freee is a given, the text itself can be used and reworked by those who read it to formulate their own opinions just in the same way Freee have reworked it from the original. Freee acknowledge that ideas are developed collectively through the exchange of opinion. In this way Freee offer a text that they produced but one that becomes the basis for the action of critical thinking. The content of Freee’s manifesto are an explicit call for the transformation of art and society and Freee readily take and use existing historical manifestos, speeches and revolutionary documents, such as, The Manifesto for A New Public (2012) based on Vladimir Tatlin’s The Initiative Individual in the Creativity of the Collective (1919) and the UNOVIS, Program for the Academy at Vitebsk (1920); and here the Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic art based on the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848). The Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemoni

The chapter critiques the rise of participation in art since the 1990s – a development that sees artists and curators searching continually for new and increased levels of audience inclusion. While there has been much discussion about what might be gained by participating in an artwork, we ask what might be lost by this act. We also question the extent to which participation is a useful social or aesthetic strategy in circumstances where it remains bound by the institutional structures of the artworld. For this reason, our work is an attempt to transform the broader ‘apparatus of art’ and to create works in which the roles assigned to individuals and groups remain fluid and subject to continuous negotiation. As a means of an attempt at resisting absorption into the institutional structures of the artworld, we privilege a form of participation that remains immanent in the work, but that never crystallizes into a single or definable role. Kathryn Brown , art historian and editor of In...

Description/Abstract:'The Politics of Beauty', responds to the revival of interest in beauty by deepening the avantgarde's politiciziation of beauty. Beauty needs to be indexed to the economies of taste.'Beauty has become utterly contentious.'

Freee write manifestos by taking a pencil (or a laptop) to an historical text, usually belonging to the entwined traditions of the avant-garde and political activism. Sometimes, as Tristan Tzara advised, we choose the text according to its length, while other times, such as in this instance, we selected the text according to the conditions of the invitation that triggered the writing of the manifesto. Our manifesto ‘To Hell with Herbert Read’ was written originally as a contribution to a conference held in Manchester that took its title from Herbert Read’s book ‘To Hell with Culture’. ‘To Hell with Culture’ is a book that cuts itself off from the world whereas ‘To Hell with Herbert Read’ relocates Read’s book in a world of cultural, social, economic and political actualities that are part of common experience. Read rejects culture because he thinks it is a useless, wasteful, elitist, puffed-up, decorative supplement to the functional, factual, palpable, purposeful world of things. H...

Open Letter addressing the issues the conference addressed: Art & Activism. Produced new social kiosk (artwork). The Engage International Conference 2016 explored how issues of access and activism impact on gallery and visual arts approaches to education and outreach. Freee invited delegates to join them in a spoken choir 1. Underline every sentence you agree with in the Open Letter 2. Bring the pamphlet to Freee's public kiosk and read out loud those sections you have under-lined.

Cutting Publics Out of Communities introduces students to theories and practices surrounding art for the public sphere. The aim of the course is to enable students to develop a rigorous engagement with what it means to be public. In a period of neo-liberal advance and the colonization of the public sphere by market interests and the third way state, art needs to function for social democracy and not become thoroughly debased by the surrounding apparatus. In order to address practical problems on ‘how we can live together’, which includes both critical deliberation on social issues and a recognition of economic difference - a social democracy not a Liberal Democracy is required. It is therefore vital we examine existing notions of art, publics and participation with the aim to exceed them - to bring to the fore arts potential for enabling political and social organization. Freee complicates the notion of the convivial in social practice by using witnesses instead of participants and ...

Recent debates on work have increasingly incorporated the figure of the artist and forms of political engagement in art. Creative labour has occupied a central place in the critical re-assessment of work, since the publication in 1999 of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s sociological study of the transformation of work via the analysis of the recuperation of avant-garde values into management discourse. Concurrently, artists and other art workers have increasingly embedded the politics of art and the critique of art’s institutions in the strategies of worker activism such as the withdrawal of labour, demands for wages and employment rights. The editors hope that this collection will enrich debates at the intersection between art and work and prompt further discussion of what is at stake—both practically and theoretically—when considering art and the politics of work as central to how we think about the contemporary world and how we can change it.

A project commissioned for the exhibition Touched, RE-Thinking Trade, curated by Lorenzo Fusi for the Liverpool Biennial. The production consisted of an installation of eight artworks by Freee produced as large scale vinyl prints applied to the outside of 14 windows covering most of the facade of the venue for the international section of the biennial sited in a disused department store on Renshaw Street, Liverpool.

Description/Abstract:'Shock versus Awe', argues that 'to shrug off the shock in avant-garde works–including learning to love them','We should preserve our shock at the sight of all these commonplace horrors as if we were preserving and protecting our very humanity. ...

Freee produce manifestos and instigate group readings of manifestos for the action of agreeing and disagreeing. Participants are requested to read the given text and make their own minds up about what they subscribe to. When present at the group readings, the participants only read out the words on the manifesto they agree with. The reading then becomes a collective process in which individuals publically agree as well as disagree and declare their commitment to Freee’s manifesto. While the use of a specific text by Freee is a given, the text itself can be used and reworked by those who read it to formulate their own opinions just in the same way Freee have reworked it from the original. Freee acknowledge that ideas are developed collectively through the exchange of opinion. In this way Freee offer a text that they produced but one that becomes the basis for the action of critical thinking. The content of Freee’s manifesto are an explicit call for the transformation of art and socie...

Open Letter addressing the issues the conference addressed: Art & Activism. Produced new social kiosk (artwork). The Engage International Conference 2016 explored how issues of access and activism impact on gallery and visual arts approaches to education and outreach.

A paper delivered at the CIMAM annual conference inquiring into the conditions for the current trend for contemporary artists to protest against the museum. What are the historical conditions for the emergence of the new critical attention being paid to art’s funding? What kind of funding is objectionable, and what kind of funding is being called for by a new generation of protesters? Does the new phase of protest in art signify a radical critique of art or a conservative preservation of its established privileges? Are the boycotts of art’s institutions, which continue to spread and to which Liberate Tate belongs historically, forms of strike or riot, and how does it relate to the occupy movement? Should we expect an increase in the frequency and intensity of protest against art’s institutions?

The future of work, as a speculative literature of fantasies and fears of what work might become, does not exist until the Tudor Poor Laws written sporadically between 1485 and 1602. Work has a future, I want to suggest, only when the traditional world of work and the poor is earmarked for changes. In the social imaginary of the Tudor landowners, English society is under threat from the workless poor, particularly vagrants and beggars who, it appears, refuse to work and therefore draw on the wealth of the nation without contributing to it. In a law passed in 1547, beggars could be enslaved for a period of two years and vagrants could be branded with the letter 'V' and enslaved for life. Before this, in 1533, the first house of correction was established using 'hard labour' as a punishment for the workless poor driven to prostitution, theft and idleness, two thirds of whom were female.