Summit I wrote

Small article published on my fear of the police state over at OK. Go read.

Independence and democracy

This is a first (actually, maybe second) draft of a sample piece of writing with which I’m going to apply to and OurKingdom internship, so please check grammatical/political errors. All suggestions welcome.

You can’t have a real country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of a football team… but at the very least you need a beer.”
Frank Zappa

Of course in these post-post-national times it all gets a bit more complicated than that. Kronenbourg is brewed in Edinburgh by Heineken, but Scotland still has some real beer. The Iraqi-Dutch-Spanish-Greek Air Scotland is no more (the CIA being your only chance of a direct flight from Prestwick to Baghdad) but as Mike Small reports at least we now have matching trains.

It seems more and more that Scotland is a national identity without a nation, a country in all but actually being a country. The Scottish Government may well be fooling itself along with George Foulkes that its concerted re-branding really is “independence by creep” but it’s not, it’s a substitution.

Much to everyone’s surprise the SNP have proved themselves quite capable of managing the powers devolved to Scotland, to the extent that most people seem quite willing to let them have a go with a few more. However, the whole of Europe is suffering from constitutional inertia, and all the brand/national-identity in the world wont change that. No one will take to the streets to demand a Scottish six o’clock news. For the SNP these things may be important first steps but if they are serious about the leap to independence then what is required is not Management, but Politics.

The danger is that the SNP will play it safe, and Scotland will be left with a creep to independence that will never actually arrive. As Alex Law points out in Glasgow’s excellent Variant:

“amidst the unselfish altruism of nationalist rhetoric, the social base of nationalism often rests on groups that are suitably positioned to gain from it – not just politicians but also cultural workers like writers, academics, lawyers, journalists.”

Independence will appear in culture to be managed by the cultural elite but a popular independence that would empower people to decide what they want Scotland to be will not therefor emerge as a result.

A independence movement that can bring the majority of people along with it cannot be based on culture management. It needs to be based on an active, engaging politics which shows that a Scotland on its own can allow what is missing from the apolitical Union, democracy.

If the SNP are serious about independence they must realise that it will take more than a National Conversation to convince the Scottish people that the risks of full, permanent independence are outweighed by the potential Scotland would have as a real country. This is the test of the Scottish Government, not whether people like, trust or support Salmond enough to let him run the country but whether they can convince the people of Scotland that it’s worth them taking the real, personal risk on their own self-determiantion.

Poster Editions

Editions of the work Treaty of Lisbon amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community/Playmobil catalogue 2008 are now available. They are semi-gloss inkjet prints sized 50 x 40 cm and can come with or without charming IKEA RIBBA solid birch frames.

The initial run is 10 of each of the three. The total run will be 150 of each. Posters from the initial run are priced at €60 each (€85 framed) and €140 for the set of three (€215 framed). The full image rights for the works (including the rights to the remained of the run) is also available, at a price that is negotiable.

All inquiries, please contact.

Free stuff

Here are some examples of the free to take flyer/posters from the show. Some were more popular than others but there are still a few left. If you’d like one, message me and I’ll post one to you. For free.

Some writing about my work

This is the artist’s statement that went along with the work for degree assessment.

When a text is orated it changes both the performer and the text; each is part transformed into the other.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech of the same name and places them into the mouths of a number of young, female Americans currently living in London. The small pool of people that the speakers are drawn from has no pretensions to be representative, they are each individuals with a specific encounter with their national culture. The distance between the original and re-enactment is clear, but the distance between our foreign exposure to American culture and a first hand experience is far greater. The interviews that accompany the readings of the speech are not an attempt to close this gap, they in fact only serve to reinforce it. Young Americans, speaking from behind TV screens, are inevitably viewed through the prejudice towards American culture.

In my work, words that are political, that in one voice have political intention, loose their meaning when spoken in another. The mediation of a performer depoliticises what is performed but, at the same time, their activity is itself political. The performer is activated politically through their enactment of political activity.

This is as true of visual enactment as it is of spoken performance. The relation of a text to its visual presentation, its presentation as art at all, will transform it as it transforms its presentational form. Elements of appropriation can never be completely removed from their social origin, but still they are removed. This displacement is the ‘destruction’ that Adorno sees as the key to a work’s effectiveness.

The works in the series Treaty Establishing…/Playmobil catalogue… enact the text from the Treaty of Lisbon with the images from toy catalogues. The work is presented in two forms, as framed, mounted collages and free to take prints. The first draws on the aesthetic of domestic or corporate decoration, the second from political pamphleteering, or rather its appropriation by advertising and popular culture. The same piece of work is commodified in two different ways, one that costs money and one that is free. Although the intention would appear to be for them to circulate in different economies, they in fact require each other. One sells the other.

It is with its circulation within, and interaction with, its economies that I hope for my work to find its effectiveness.

Treaty amending…/Playmobil…

After failing to sell my collages at the show, which were available at the bargin price of €130 each, of €350 for the lot (they were meant to be editions of 10) I decided that I couldn’t possibly be bothered making 27 more of them and that intsead I would do poster editions. I think the originals will now be not for sale, and I might send them on permantent loan to my sister, though other loans can be arranged. However, the rights to the works are for sale, meaning I will sell the rights to produce and sell the poster editions, and all other potential image royalties. I’m thinking of entering into a distribution deal with Digital Arts Distribution, but Richard’s not here, so I’ll have to wait until he gets back.

Beyond Vietnam, YouTube edit.

This is a YouTube edit of the almost finished Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. I’d like to 1. finish it and 2. submit it for this, the deadline for which is the 11 of July.

I hope this version, and the one that was in the degree show, is a little less racist than some of the earlier ones. I watched it the other day and I actually think it’s quite good. Let me know what y’all think.

Camberwell College of Arts Summer Show

You were all invited to my degree show, which is now over.

Here’s some pictures of people looking my work.

photos chdot

For markers: How to use this blog/pile of paper

I use my blog to store documentation of my work, information about exhibitions I’m involved in, my writing on art and non-art subjects and quotes or images I find relevant to what I’m doing. Posts are separated into categories Work, Exhibition, Quote and Other, and this printout is organised into these sections. Blogs present the most recent information first, so please be aware that posts are in reverse date order.

I find the blog useful, it allows me to always have access to the information I store here (if I’m near a computer) and gives me a place I can direct people to to showcase the various things I do and some very important context for my work. It is also useful for other people to have access to the things I post such as exhibition information and installation shots.

I try also to engage with the materiality of the blog and the political implications of blogging, with my writings and my interactions with the infamous ‘blogosphere‘.

Obviously, the online blog is far richer than this printout, with access to important external links, larger images (in colour), videos and comments, as well as a much prettier interface. If you have time please do visit http://johnsartblog.wordpress.com.

Palestine

I have lots to do at the moment so am putting it all off by writing emails of complaint to the BBC. First, one about their coverage of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and below, one about the coverage of the autonomy referendum in the Santa Cruz region of Bolivia. I was at the yet-to-be mentioned rally in Trafalgar Sq. and it re-affirmed to me the importance of countering the media’s Israeli bias. The Bolivia complaint is a bit self-censored, what I really wanted to say is “You’re all a bunch of fascist, pro-establishment, washington-consensus, anti-Chavez-conspiracy capitalist pig-dogs.” At least in the Palestine complaint I called them racists.

—-

Re: 1948: The State of Israel is founded

Dear Ms Boaden,

“Thousands of Palestinians had fled or had been driven out.”

This is a shocking and despicable statement. The writer or writers of this potted history of Israel (though how you can be narrow minded enough to begin a history or the modern sate of Israel in 1948, I do not know) must know full well that this type of misinformation verges on the racist lies that have made up the Zionist narrative of Israel’s history, and are an affront to the honest and balanced journalism that the BBC should be delivering.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was a requirement for the founding of the State of Israel caused 750 000 people to be displaced, 400 000 before Israel declared its foundation, 95% of whom left because of violence or violent intimidation. (Kapeliouk, Amnon (1987): New Light on the Israeli-Arab Conflict and the Refugee Problem and Its Origins, p.21. Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Spring, 1987). Over 400 villages (Abu Sitta, Salman (2001): From Refugees to Citizens at Home. London: Palestine Land Society and Palestinian Return Centre) and possibly 70 000 homes were destroyed. (Saleh, Abdul Jawad and Walid Mustafa (1987): Palestine: The Collective Destruction of Palestinian Villages and Zionist Colonisation 1882-1982. London: Jerusalem Centre for Development Studies)

But of course you know all this. Anyone writing a history of Israel will know this. Consider the following statement:

“Palestinians, in turn, designate the 15 May as the Day of al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”, and they use it to commemorate the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of their people who were made homeless as Israel was born.”

This is a quote from, of course, the BBC News online, Tuesday, 15 May, 2001

“Thousands of Palestinians had fled or had been driven out.” 750 000 is “thousands”, 6.5 billion is “thousands”. To say “thousands” is to misinform your readers. To say “thousands” is to deny the history of the Palestinian people.

The catastrophe befell the Palestinian people, which was commemorated by “thousands” (perhaps five thousand) rallying today in central London, was the dispossession and massacres, the theft and destruction of homes, lands, belongings, livelihoods and lives, not “the declaration” as your article states, in a faint nod to balance.

Why, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, does the BBC now choose to blatantly ignore the crimes committed by Zionism in Israel’s name?

The article doesn’t even mention Zionism. To say 1948 was “the culmination of nearly 2,000 years of hopes by Jewish people that they would one day return to the land from which the Romans expelled them” is surely a slur on the Jewish people, branding them all with Zionism’s racist ideology. As a statement of fact it is dubious, but it is an important part of the Zionist narrative, which this article seems content to present as fact.

History is history, but racist lies and misinformation and killing people today, killing Palestinian and killing Israelis. Killing fathers in Qassam rockets attacks and killing mothers in childbirth. Peace is not possible without justice, justice is not possible without truth. The BBC must be impartial, but this is only possible by a singular commitment to the truth. Lies, half-truths and misinformation are acts of violence, most of all against your readers.

Yours,

John Hill