Gavin Grindon

This article examines the turn in Anglophone protest cultures since 2007 toward curating, museums, and heritage: a rise in the toppling of statues, demonstrations inside museums, and the creation of exhibitions, displays, and archives within the ephemeral spaces of protest camps and other mobilizations. The author argues for the historical causes of this curatorial turn in movement cultures, examines the structural power dynamics of this extrainstitutional curating vis‐à‐vis the practices and policies of cultural institutions, and puts these developments in critical dialogue with recent debates on “activist curating” and “institutional liberation.” Lastly, drawing on this analysis and firsthand experiences on both sides of this dynamic (as a core member of the collective Liberate Tate and as cocurator of the V&A exhibition Disobedient Objects), the author assesses this trajectory's potentials and limits as a cultural strategy for social change.

The catalogue essay for my 'museum of cruel designs' exhibition , which was part of Banksy's Dismaland show in Weston Super Mare, 2015. The exhibition examined 'hostile architecture' and other forms of design for social control and discipline: from timeclocks to biometric management technology; anti-homeless spikes, hostile architecture and social exclusion in urban space; border fences; and weapons of police militarisation. The exhibition mapped out the links in policy, business and design between them. It was a follow-up to 2014-15's Disobedient Objects exhibition at the V&A, kind of a study of 'obedient objects'!

Disobedient Objects was a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It focused on art and design objects produced within activist social movements since the late 1970s internationally. It opened from 2014-15. It was the most-visited exhibition at the V&A since 1946.

This is the illustrated introductory essay to the catalogue, written by co-curators Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood.

Further information:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/

The Situationist International (SI) have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists' participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations 'never work/all power to the workers' councils. I examine how the SI's representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around brainwashing, conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which 'makes people live' are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and 'demanding the impossible' is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI's policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of 'situations', involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists' more practically-engaged labour within social movements.

Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker existed from 1966-69 in New York, moving from abstract painting and intermedia environments to street posters and increasingly militant political happenings. They were definitive, influential activist-art groups, often cited as a key historical precedent for contemporary activist-art and social practice. Additionally, they represent a crucial but neglected moment in the contested radical legacy of the avant-garde of Surrealism and Dada. Their history has been previously available only in brief, mythologising accounts, but this article draws on interviews and extensive cross-archival research to present the first thorough historical account of their political art practices.

This article aims to explore the notion of activist-art, identifying it as a distinct tendency in Modern art through a re-examination of historical and theoretical approaches to the radical avant-garde, drawing on autonomist Marxist and materialist post-structural perspectives.

First, through a critique of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, I attempt to place the use of the idea of ‘autonomy’ by the avant-garde in its critical historical context not only in the negative sense of separation, but in the positive sense of freedom from restraint. I argue that for the avant-garde this took the particular form of a thematic engagement with the refusal of work. Secondly, I examine one particular form of this refusal: the engagement with social movements amongst Dadaists in Berlin. I set out a theoretical frame of ‘affective composition', in order to place avant-garde artistic production in relation to the art of social movements, whose production operates outside the institutions of art. I argue that not only is the avant-garde at crucial points influenced by the art of social movements, but that the Dadaists in Berlin attempt to imagine new forms of ‘activist-art’ which synthesise avant-garde and social movement performance and object-art in disobedient performances and performative disobedient objects.

This article examines Henri Lefebvre's concept of revolution-as-festival, its textual sources and its relationship to contemporary notions developed by Georges Bataille and the Situationist International. It is a companion-piece to the examination of Bataille's revolution-as-festival in Third Text 104, vol 24, no 3, May 2010. The author argues that Lefebvre's revolution-as-festival embodies the multiple methodological ambiguities of his ‘open’ dialectical approach, and his attempt to transplant Surrealist and Dadaist concerns into a Marxian framework. It is, paradoxically, these ambiguities that allow his revolution-as-festival to become a useful concept: firstly as a discursive making-visible and valorization of the art and culture of social movements; and secondly as a term through which to critically re-imagine this art and culture's limits and possibilities. This potential is borne out, not least, in the influence of Lefebvre's essay ‘Revolutionary Romanticism’ on the founding debates of the Situationist International.

This article examines Georges Bataille’s notion of revolution‐as‐festival and his attempt, in his writing of the 1930s, to place theories of affect within the framework of Marxist philosophy. Against the various negative characterisations of this project, it looks at Bataille’s ideas in this period in context, in order to understand their vivid contradictions as an attempt to assert a positive project of affect’s utility to the Left, within and against negative categories in early twentieth‐century cultural and critical thought.

This is a first-hand participant-observer account of the 'bike bloc' project conducted by activist-art collective the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination during the 'Reclaim Power' protests against the COP-15 Climate Summit in Copenhagen, 2009. It collects accounts of various participants.

The project re-engineered discarded bikes into 'machines of creative resistance,' to support and enable the mobilisation. The project was originally invited as part of a contemporary art exhibition on climate change and then excluded once the curators realised the project involved participation in the demonstrations.

With Hans Haacke, Mark Dion, and Gavin Grindon. Moderated by Steve Lyons

Institutional critique expresses and comes up against the limits of the institution. When the practice first came to the fore, artists were responding to the institution as a repressive and bureaucratic body. The institution denoted an exclusive, hierarchic, and unaccountable site marked by seemingly intractable power relations. At the same time, its critique indicated that the institution was worth fighting for as a site that both represented and supplied basic societal infrastructure.

More recently, market pressures on a wide array of social and cultural institutions have intensified. Instead of operating through mechanisms of centralized control, contemporary power relations are fragmented, decentered, networked, and privatized. Institutions are crumbling, losing power and resources. This disintegration of collective infrastructure reveals that no institution was ever as unified or total as some of its critics implied, relying instead on fluid and uneasy combinations of ideals, limits, and possibilities.

The panel looks at ways artists and activists borrow the vocabulary of the museum and in so doing extend the political potential already dividing the institution from within. Such artistic practices of political extension may be invited or uninvited, done in collusion with curators or to their chagrin. As they raise the question of who speaks on behalf of the institution, they activate a split, suggesting ways to work within as well as against—affirming the value of the institution as a resource for the production of culture, collectivity and social solidarity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFqyuCPQwfc

Tariq Ali's Rear Window takes us into the Disobedient Objects exhibition at the V&A with curator Gavin Grindon. Explore the art and design produced by grassroots social movements since the 1970s. (Broadcast on TeleSUR English in Sept 2014)

Exhibition website: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/