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.

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

Bolivia

Re: Bolivia vote shows depth of divisions

Dear Ms Boaden,

This story is now a few days old, but after re-reading it I felt the need to complain.

This story is very misleading, and shows heavy bias in favour of the Santa Cruz autonomy movement.

Please consider the following section:

“Conscious that the autonomy debate is proving deeply divisive, Mr Morales has called for dialogue even though he declared the vote to be illegal after knowing the results.”

This paragraph contains two untruths. 1, Evo Morales and the government has always stated the the vote would be illegal, before and after the vote. 2, No one knows the results, otherwise you would have published them.

Now take this quote from the corresponding story on the Al Jazeera English website:
“Local authorities say 86 per cent of voters backed autonomy, an unsurprising figure since the president, Evo Morales, had declared the referendum “illegal” and urged citizens not to vote so as to deny it legitimacy.”

This gives a far clearer, truer, representation of the situation.

Your next paragraph states:
“The Organisation of American States and the Catholic Church also called unsuccessfully for dialogue in recent weeks.”

This is also misleading, a half truth.

In his very balanced article for openDemocracy John Crabtree states:
“OAS members have pledged their support to the democratically-elected government of Bolivia. They have noted the government’s willingness to negotiate and how this contrasts with the obduracy of the prefect and the president of the Comité Pro-Santa Cruz [Branko Marinkovic].”

If this is true, then your qualifying quote from Branko Marinkovic:
“We have always been willing to hold dialogue and we will always push for a national pact,” is untrue. Yet his assertions are uncontested presented as fact by your article.

Further to this, your article contains quotes from the leader of Santa Cruz’s pro-autonomy movement, and the leader of the national opposition, but has no place for a quote from president Morales.

Al Jazeera’s quote from Morales shows clearly the Government’s position and sheds greater light on the situation:
“”The referendum failed completely,” he said in a nationally televised address. But he ended his remarks with an invitation for more talks with autonomy leaders. “Let’s work together tomorrow for a true autonomy,” he added. “For the people, and not just certain groups – an autonomy that permits the people to decide their destiny.”

Your article contains instead an almost irrelevant, decontextualised semi-quote from Venezuelan President Chavez. Why?

I hope you will agree that this article is completely unbefitting of an impartial news organisation and will endeavour to offer more complete, balanced reportage on this story as it continues through the coming weeks and months,

Yours,

John Hill

Discussion

There is a fairly interesting discussion about all manner of things going on in the comments to my 2 month old post 500 words of intenet pseudo-politics. Why not come on over and consume some participation?

Class values and steak pies

I just wrote the following in response to a news story (and comments) my father emailed me from the Sunday Herald – here.

Wonderfully Edinburgh. We got banned from that garage at school for flicking egg-fried rice at the cars (not me personally, obviously). How do you spell aline? [edit, how do you spell stake? (it's steak, btw.)]

———-
Why don’t we attempt a proper class analysis of this story and the comments?

Plobotsky is happy because (safely-assumed) middle class students are arrested by police and seems to feel that this asserts his class values over the values of the middle classes (university education, environmentalism, etc.). He therefore alines him with the police as defenders his beliefs.

If Plobtsky wants to defend his class values (though he may well be 100 years late to save the truly independent working class) which seem to be those of the steak pie diet over veganism (which is reasonable, I’m not being disparaging) then we have to ask whose interest this serves. Is the steak pie made by a revolutionary worker’s piemaking cooperative? Or is it made by a multinational corporation serving it’s billionaire shareholders who promote inflationary economics that make your pie 50% for expensive while paying you no more for your working class shelf-stacking job.

And whose interests do the police serve? It has been suggested above that in general police come from a “narrow socio-econmic group” which I will again assume to be lower-middle or working class. As a petite-bourgeoisie, they will strive to secure it’s position as a part of the middle class by maintaining status quo and will be inherently conservative. A true defence of working class values would require an overturning of the status quo. Class alliance of workers and students have been the basis of most revolutionary movements, for example the Cuban revolution. By defending the the right of the bourgeois students to assert their class values, the workers in turn assert their own right of value defence. By supporting the forces of state authority, the workers disempower themselves.

What are your material interests as a shelf stacker or a piemaker, a student or a police officer? How can we aline our interests for mutual benefit?

CV

Look up and you’ll see a link to my CV, and from my CV links to lots of other lovely things.

500 words of intenet pseudo-politics

Let’s say there are two social classes.

There are normal people, who believe themselves to have power because they can choose their own path in life, what they do to earn money and what they then do with it. They can be whoever they choose to be through the choices they make. Let us call them the consumer class.

Then there are people who believe they have power because they have influence. These people make decisions that affect others. The writers who tell us our stories or the key to our weight-loss. The critics who tell us which writer is best. People with opinions whose opinions matter. Let us call them the political class.

Democratisation of the media offers class mobility. Normal people, bloggers, can have opinions, and their opinions can matter. They can create, comment and review faster and more frequently than their political masters. They are closer to the people whose choices they wish to effect, writers of their own narratives.

This is of course ridiculous. Mark Mardell’s Euroblog is not the same as my friend Rachael’s fashion diary. Bloggers are a petite bourgeoisie. They believe that by acting like the political class they will be the same as them, express your opinion and you will have influence. This is Web 2.0. Choice and opinion become the same thing. You don’t just watch YouTube, you express your opinion in 1-5 stars (“Thanks for rating!”). You don’t just read the Guardian, you comment and your comment displayed on the very same page! But what every blogger hopes is that their post will be picked up by a major (establishment) blog, or even better by a newspaper, and then their opinion will really matter.

But the political class are consumers too, and still a petite bourgeoisie, aspiring to be recognised as having the best, most influential opinions, as susceptible to influence as the little people, and not necessarily more aware of it.

The question is then one of where the power went. Obviously the power to influence the choice of the consumer is no real power at all. Parliament has little power, its members even less. No one really believes Alistair Darling has power, he is merely reactive to global forces outside his control. It’s tempting to see a reptoid class running the world for its own benefit. But does Rupert Murdoch really have all the power that we don’t? Is he really above the political class? His opinions have influence, on elections for example, but is he freer from global forces, and while they benefit him financially, are they any more in his control?

In a world that no one runs, in which we all have an unequal apportion of powerlessness, in which to influence is as disempowering as to be influenced, its difficult to know what to do, especially as an aspiring artist you aspire to the political class, to influence, to a place in art history. Maybe aspiration is the problem. But blogging is definitely bad.

Abhishek Hazra

I did some photo taking for Abhishek Hazra, current resident at Gasworks, on Thursday, documenting a performance in various locations in central and the west end, where he delivered a lecture on the work of some 1920 chemist who developed a theory of Solutions. Was good.

Abhishek’s talking at Gasworks on the 11th of March at 6:30 with Goldin+Senneby. I will go. More info…here.

Dissertaion – 15 Nov 07

I handed in my dissertation which was called “How has a movement to a service economy been reflected in the economy of art, and how can the effects on contemporary art production be seen in the work of Tino Sehgal and Santiago Sierra?” – haven’t read it since, expect it was quite bad.

Then I got drunk and went to Martine Borge’s Exhibition here

I’m wearing blue and Rob’s scarf. I asked Martine to be in a show.