gillian whiteley

The activities in this book have been inspired by an exhibition collectively curated by the Politicized Practice/Anarchist/Theatre Activism Research Groups based at Loughborough University, UK (May-October 2018). The exhibition centred on the concept of the citizen/citizen-artist/artistcitizen to explore the potential for art practices to re-imagine citizenship and it brought together a range of audio-visual and text-based responses with contributions by artists, researchers and students from across and beyond the University. It invited creative responses to a series of key questions. This activity book expands the range of approaches and ideas about citizenship and, in making them mobile, also seeks to make them even more interactive. In government parlance, being a citizen means to be recognised as a ‘subject or national’. How does this play out in our everyday relations? What is at stake in re-imagining new forms of citizenship and modes of civic participation? How can the notion...

Trash, garbage, rubbish, dross, and detritus - in this enjoyably radical exploration of 'Junk', Gillian Whiteley rethinks art's historical and present appropriation of junk within our eco-conscious and globalised culture. She does this through an illustrated exploration of particular materials, key moments and locations and the telling of a panoply of trash narratives. Found and ephemeral materials are primarily associated with assemblage - object-based practices which emerged in the mid-1950s and culminated in the seminal exhibition 'The Art of Assemblage' in New York in 1961. With its deployment of the discarded and the filthy, Whiteley argues, assemblage has been viewed as a disruptive, transgressive artform that engaged with narratives of social and political dissent, often in the face of modernist condemnation as worthless kitsch. In the Sixties, parallel techniques flourished in Western Europe, the US and Australia but the idiom of assemblage and the re-use of found materials and objects - with artist as bricoleur - is just as prevalent now. This is a timely book that uncovers the etymology of waste and the cultures of disposability within these economies of wealth.

This bespoke alchemy/schmalchemy manifestation put a section of text from Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007, page 3) to work, as a visual score, mini cut-up libretto, and incantatory spell with which to initiate a sonic/visual/live art improv assemblage of regular Schmalchemists Geoff Bright, Gill Whiteley and Walt Shaw and volunteer SIQR confederates. The performance worked respectfully, chaotically and ineptly with some of the tools, practices, and apparatus of Hoodoo Conjure (and with some transformational paraphenalia of our own).

Investigating art practitioners’ responses to violence, this book considers how artists have used art practices to rethink concepts of violence and nonviolence. It explores the strategies that artists have deployed to expose physical and symbolic violence through representational, performative and interventional means. It examines how intellectual and material contexts have affected art interventions and how visual arts can open up critical spaces to explore violence without reinforcement or recuperation. Its premises are that art is not only able to contest prevailing norms about violence but that contemporary artists are consciously engaging with publics through their practice in order to do so. Contributors respond to three questions: how can political violence be understood or interpreted through art? How are publics understood or identified? How are art interventions designed to shift, challenge or respond to public perceptions of political violence and how are they constrained...

In 2013, Erdum Gunduz’s passive "standing man" performance in Istanbul spontaneously attracted thousands of participants, online followers and copyists in public acts of dissent. But exactly what form of new social relations, or more precisely, what kind of collective emancipatory political engagement did this facilitate? This paper examines the consequentialities of performative modes of "being public" through addressing the shift from "being singular" to "being plural" or, more pertinently, "being-in-common" (Nancy 2000). Reflecting on the historical activities of the Dutch Provo, which briefly enacted mayhem in public in the mid-1960s through a set of performative strategies, it considers a disparate set of situated but transitory "improvisational forms of public assembly" (Butler 2015, 22) from passive acts of togetherness to collective viral performative utterances (e.g., We are Charlie 2015; Oh Jeremy Corbyn! 2017). I...

Throughout the twentieth century, the disciplines and practices of artists and designers were convergent and divergent in the way they developed similar ideas identified now with sustainability. Whilst under early modernism, artists concerned themselves with the retention of ‘aura’ (Benjamin [1936] 2008), designers released this in pursuit of reproduction. Consequently, designers discarded individuality for commonality, and old for new in the guise of economic and technological advancement, whereas artists concerned themselves with cultural artefacts. Both had social impact. The designer’s grasp of systems thinking and reproductive methods as ‘social systems’ (Nelson and Stolterman 2012) set against the modernist artist’s preference for the oneoff characterized different motivations. Subsequently, in the second half of the twentieth century design became closely associated with the mass-production and promotion of products, but subsequently became implicated in consumer culture and ...

This paper emerges from extensive primary research and interviews conducted for a retrospective exhibition, Radical Mayhem: Welfare State International and its Followers which I curated for Mid Pennine Gallery, Burnley, 26 April -7 June 2008.

This peer-reviewed essay on the work of Welfare State International (WSI) was commissioned by Professor John Bull (University of Reading) to carry out new primary research for a case-study published as part of a three-volume re-evaluation of alternative/experimental theatre companies, British Theatre Companies: from Fringe to Mainstream. The three-volume study brings together new scholarly research on key influential British theatre companies (for many of which there are few published sources) and is expected to become the essential resource in this field for other scholars and researchers. My chapter, based on extensive archive research and interviews with former participants, situates the company’s forty years’ history within the context of recent communitarian, collaborative and participative discourses, which have emerged as key critical debates since the 1990s. I was approached as an expert in the field and commissioned due to my standing and previous work on the company which ...

Constructivist style that he had worked in alongside avant-garde artists in Germany, in favour of a realist aesthetic based on the quotidian and human figure. However, given Péri’s political views and associations, it is clear that his change of style was not merely aesthetic, but was ideological and political.39 Péri himself made this clear in his own writings, describing the shift as a conscious change of direction and specifically referring to it as a ‘cleansing process’.40 As early as 1928 in Berlin, Péri had started to experiment with modelling in wet concrete on wire armatures, making small figures in a realist style. By the time he was established as an artist in Hampstead, Péri’s work, consisting of coloured wall reliefs and small, free-standing works in concrete – cheap, versatile, industrial – fitted well into the figurative New Realist aesthetic being promoted by leftist artists and critics. Klingender wrote in the communist journal Left Review about his particular brand ...

The activities in this book have been inspired by an exhibition collectively curated by the Politicized Practice/Anarchist/Theatre Activism Research Groups based at Loughborough University, UK (May-October, 2018). The exhibition centred on the concept of the citizen/ citizen-artist/artistcitizen to explore the potential for art practices to re-imagine citizenship and it brought together a range of audio-visual and text-based responses with contributions by artists, researchers and students from across and beyond the University.This activity book expands the range of approaches and ideas about citizenship and, in making them mobile, also seeks to make them even more interactive. The Activity Book is an invitation to re-imagine what it means to be a citizen, at a moment when the concept is being reshaped both by those who wish to reinforce the status quo and those who want to change it. Re-imagine, participate, respond! Help us stimulate and share new, creative approaches to citizenship!

... Sewing the 'subversive thread of imagination': Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture and the radical potential of affect. ... informed by notions of embodied and transmitted affectivity?Nuttall within and beyond the British countercultural scene. ...

This pamphlet accompanied a temporary assemblage of pamphlets and print-based ephemera I curated for Stages of Utopia and Dissent, a symposium at Loughborough University in London, 19 May 2018

Please note this is a PRINT VERSION so you can print it off and make it into a pamphlet so check the page numbers carefully!

Pamphleteering essay presented 18 January 2018 at The Do Nothing Club at the Live Art Development Agency, The Garrett Centre, London - at a Study Room Gathering at which Artists, Academics, Scientists, Activists and others, were invited to discuss together the topics of doing nothing, deceleration and taking care, and the implications on our body, brain and society.

Pamphlet produced for Alchemy/Schmalchemy performance at Summer Institute Qualitative Research conference at Manchester Metropolitan University, July 2017.
This bespoke alchemy/schmalchemy manifestation put a single page of Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway to work as a visual score, mini cut-up libretto, and incantatory spell with which to initiate a sonic/visual/live art improv assemblage by regular Schmalchemists Geoff Bright, Gill Whiteley and Walt Shaw and nine volunteer SIQR confederates. The performance worked respectfully, chaotically and ineptly with some of the tools, practices, and apparatus of Hoodoo Conjure (and with some other transformational paraphenalia of our own).

This paper builds on Isabelle Stengers' suggestion that we need to reclaim magic, sorcery and witchcraft as a means of refuting the stable rational subject. Working with current philosophical and critical ideas around 'new materialisms', it emerges from a longstanding set of research preoccupations related to the affective, disruptive and provocative properties of things. The episodic text ruminates on these ideas through a series of 'site-written' narratives on the traces of sorcery and radical political histories in the villes and forests of Limousin, France, intercepted by passages of analysis of the

This RaRa project, developed with Radar Loughborough University Atrtscentre, involved a weekend festival (May 2017) explored and celebrated the radical history and format of the pamphlet through a one-day research symposium, exhibition, public events, community workshops and lots more

Is there no alternative? Re-imagining the university

The cultural possibilities of this movement are immense…we should have no difficulty in recognising the spontaneous university as the possible detonator of the invisible insurrection…

In 1962, in the Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds, Alexander Trocchi outlined the prototype for a network of autonomous free universities: their ‘infinitely elastic’ structures would lead to the gradual crystallisation of a ‘regenerative cultural force’ and ‘creative intelligence everywhere’. A collective insurgent, insurrectionary imagination and a new revolutionary politics would emerge. Since the ‘free schools’ of the 1960s, the discourse of ‘de-schooling’  has returned: educational institutions are ‘exploding’,  universities across Europe and the US have (at least temporarily) been occupied and the managerialism of the academy is being challenged by a wave of ‘free’, DIY, often transient, sometimes virtual, universities. The recent curatorial project in Milan - Learning Machines: Art Education and Alternative Production of Knowledge  – testified to some of the genealogy of thirty years of alternative sites and pedagogies for art production both inside and outside the institution.

Supported by dispatches from a recent visit to Milan, my paper offers a short introduction to the recent history of the ‘free university’ and a brief exploration of some of the theoretical problems and political questions it raises. This will be followed by an interactive ‘playshop’ in which participants will be invited to work in small groups on an exercise based around the idea of actively re-imagining the university. What is a university? What should it be? What could it be? Participants will be asked to use utopian, spontaneous and preposterous thinking to produce diagrammatic and textual models, no matter how gestural, impractical or ‘uneconomic’.

Gillian Whiteley
School of the Arts
Loughborough University
g.whiteley@lboro.ac.uk
www.bricolagekitchen.com

bricolagekitchen aka Gillian Whiteley:
Sounding Transitory Utopias: Improvisation, Potenza and Praxis
Improvisation is frequently seen as an inherently radical cultural form for its spontaneity and its capacity to disrupt traditional notation and operate outside hierarchical musical structures and institutions. In a recent essay, Edwin Prévost argues that individual virtuoso improvisers persist, but the emphasis on collective play counters a capitalist ethos, remarking that during the activity of sound-making and performance, ‘the materials used are investigated constantly for their potential’. It is the radical nature of this potentiality – or more specifically potenza -  which I wish to investigate and develop here. Potenza, with its simultaneous implications of potentiality and power, is extensively employed and discussed in the recent body of writings related to Italian autonomous Marxism, politics and philosophy. Furthermore, every spontaneous ‘coming together’ in live improvisation establishes a transitory utopian space of possibility, a short-lived site of cultural resistance or perhaps what, in 1985, Hakim Bey termed a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). Free improvisation promises a new community in a permanent state of re-formation and, even if on a small-scale, revolution – a state of continually ‘becoming’. I will argue that the praxis of improvisation might be usefully conceptualised with reference to Agamben’s writings on potentiality and ‘the coming community’ and will explore its subversive