gillian whiteley
Loughborough University, School of the Arts, English and Drama, Senior Lecturer Art History and Visual Culture
My research interests include historical and contemporary theories and practices of creative dissent, ludic protest, art activism, sites of transitory utopia, bricolage and detritus, focusing on trans-disciplinary practices and cultural production within socio-political contexts. With members of the Politicized Practice Research Group, Anarchist Research Group and Theatre and Performance Research Groups at Loughborough, I am currently working on collaborative projects around Re-imagining Citizenship and Art Activism and Political Violence. I also operate as bricolagekitchen www.bricolagekitchen.com a multifaceted project space for creative-critical practice, emerging from my preoccupations with the art and politics of improvisation, bricolage, assemblage and trash. In Autumn 2009, I curated Pan-demonium at the AC Institute, Chelsea, New York, featuring the work of over 50 sonic, visual and text-based artists. In May 2010, I devised and performed a Pan-demonic suite at The Knot, a nomadic platform for art practices and experimental social interaction in the public sphere.
Key current projects; I am currently working on a book (co-edited with Jane Tormey), Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer (forthcoming in our Bloomsbury book series RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa). Recent publications include ‘From Being One to Being-in-Common: Political Performativity, Proxemics, and the Joys of Provisional Unity’ in special issue ‘Performance and Bodies-Politic’, in Performance Matters, A Journal about the Materiality and Consequentiality of Performance (Vol 4.3, Winter 2018) and ‘Welfare State International’ in J.Bull and G.Saunders (eds) British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream, (2016).
As a sonic (and multimedia) artist-improvisor, I have been involved in various improvising groups including the Sheffield-based improvising collective, Gated Community and (with Geoff Bright and Walt Shaw) Alchemy/Schmalchemy. My current improvisation projects/collaborations include Les Petroleuses, yelpawsqueezescrapebash and [the gathering... the chewing] and Juxtavoices.
For more on my publications, performances, projects etc see www.bricolagekitchen.com
Key current projects; I am currently working on a book (co-edited with Jane Tormey), Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer (forthcoming in our Bloomsbury book series RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa). Recent publications include ‘From Being One to Being-in-Common: Political Performativity, Proxemics, and the Joys of Provisional Unity’ in special issue ‘Performance and Bodies-Politic’, in Performance Matters, A Journal about the Materiality and Consequentiality of Performance (Vol 4.3, Winter 2018) and ‘Welfare State International’ in J.Bull and G.Saunders (eds) British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream, (2016).
As a sonic (and multimedia) artist-improvisor, I have been involved in various improvising groups including the Sheffield-based improvising collective, Gated Community and (with Geoff Bright and Walt Shaw) Alchemy/Schmalchemy. My current improvisation projects/collaborations include Les Petroleuses, yelpawsqueezescrapebash and [the gathering... the chewing] and Juxtavoices.
For more on my publications, performances, projects etc see www.bricolagekitchen.com
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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
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