Precarious times symposium - Plymouth

Just got back from the British Art Show (in the day of the comet) at Plymouth where I was invited to take part in the Precarious times symposium at the art school. The conference followed a PHD workshop yesterday. Today's presenters consisted of Mel Jordan - from collaborative arts organisation FREEE, Malcolm Miles, (doyen of Public art and left wing cultural politics), UBERMORGEN (who were born out of the etoy group) Stevphen Shukaitis all rounded off be a group presentation by the members of the PHD workshop. 

The conference set about discussing possible strategies or thinking about the precarious times we live in. This was purposely contrasted with the thematic premise of the British arts show which was curated around a vision of what a comet means:


"We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future, and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how ‘the now’ might be understood." Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton, Curators of British Art Show 7."



With exception of Hans from UBERMORGEN and Malcolm MIles the presentations were dense, in part indigestible and not particuarily engaging to a mixed audience. There is almost a badge of honour in incoherence when academics and practitioners present around difficult topics, in this case labour, the politics of refusal and the modus of revolutionary acts. This was a real failing of the conference.

That said there were lots of interesting nuggets, just that they were not linked together in a coherent manner in most of the talks. Malcolm Miles talked about the interaction of modernism and socialism, both of which allegedly died in the 80's. In response he put forward the idea that we have now entered the promise of modernism, so its not that it has disappeared, just that we are in it and cannot see it. He also talked about an early autonomy in modernism which he contrasted to its later manifestation as formalism, which occurs in high modernism and cements the gap between artwork and audience, which is much criticised by NGPA.
Generally it was quite a difficult conference, it suffered from a lack of coherent flow, each talk was like a different new iteration that was unrelated to the previous, difficult for the audience and presenters alike.