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[Refresh until you are ready to summon the full force of your anger.]

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I had booked this post-election vacation to a spooky castle in gloomy perfect Wales before I knew how much I would really need it.

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"I think my work has got more and more angry and overtly political."

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Heather Phillipson is talking human hearts. "I had it installed especially," she says, "to catch all the cliches. Hearts are the best bins for cliche. Hearts get top marks for looking at home pretty much anywhere. Hearts are there to catch passing feelings and strangle them. I wish I were as alive as my heart - and as deadly."

So begins Commiserations, her eulogy to the heart and all its flailings. For heart, read hurt. Phillipson's long poem provides the voiceover to one of the two films for which she has just won the £10,000 Jarman award. The prize is named after film-maker Derek Jarman, who was also a painter and a marvellous writer. It seems apt that Phillipson, whose work you could also describe as "multi-disciplinary", should win.

In the past few years, Phillipson has had me following an audio-guide around Gateshead and Newcastle, watching videos while seated in a boat marooned in a gallery, and in the back seat of a car. We spoke last week, in a bar near her Hackney studio, before the winner was announced. I knew she'd won. She didn't. My heart was pounding. Phillipson has published three volumes of poetry (shortlisted for the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh first collection prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial prize, and she was named a Next Generation Poet in 2014), but the page is not enough.

Her poems have become the core of her videos and installations, read with deadpan assurance over cheesy visual effects, cartoon elements, explosions and scraps of found footage. Her work has a horrible sort of hilarity. Sometimes people don't get the switches in tone, she tells me. There always has to be a moment of electric charge between the different elements. "My work often deals with anxieties of the present moment," she says. "One recurrent theme is our relationship to animals."

At Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Commiserations became part of a huge installation under the museum's cupola. Red binbags, giant cartoonish cutout human eyes and wriggly sperm were suspended overhead, and the installation was dominated by a giant human foot. A very superficial reading of her work, she says, is that it's really poppy and fun. "But I think my work has got more and more angry and overtly political. Looking back at my old work, there was a lovely innocent time when I could make a video about french kissing. Not that it was really that, but I didn't have to think about fascism, that it was on my doorstep."

The US election has crystallised what she wants to make next. "It is quite abject, and also absolutely furious. It's really angry. The most angry thing I've made, or it will be." What's the process? Do she know how things will end up, as stand-alone poems, video works, installations? "Generally the writing goes into videos. I use audio to highlight certain bits of language or set a tone, along with pieces of music that I use strategically.

"The first point of contact with the work is usually through a single screen. That's where I sample and appropriate things from the internet. And I feel that my work needs to go back out in that form - which is why I put it out on Vimeo and make it freely available. Seeing my videos with a giant foot is one iteration, but it could also be that you watch it on your mobile phone, or have a one-to-one relationship with it on your computer."

We are all video-makers these days, she says. "Walking around with a video camera in our pockets. There is no exclusivity any more. It's gone, which is nice. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's not made by anybody who has anything to do with the art world. Structurally, it's all very interesting."

She samples her own words, in achingly bright hand-drawn script, on the screen to add emphasis to her laconic and deadpan voiceover. "I used to think that the tone of voice was peculiarly English and wouldn't translate. A lot of it is quite subtle." She's also one of the few artists - or poets for that matter - to make me laugh out loud. "I'm not going for a big laugh. People aren't sure if they are meant to laugh."

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'Good news for people who like death' ... True to Size. Photograph: Arts Council Collection

Recently, she has shown in New York, at the New Museum and at the Performa festival, as well as in Germany. "I seem to be getting asked back. In non-English-speaking countries, I assume that loads get lost. But even as an English speaker the works are so dense, you catch the tone or musicality, phrases, but you don't get the whole thing. Not that there's something to get. You can't parse it in that way. It's so dense, like reading a poem."

Another new work, True to Size, commissioned for the 70th anniversary of the Arts Council Collection, is a meditation on consumerism, climate change and the end of the world. "Good news for people who like death," it begins, the phrase repeated in a childlike voice, then goes on about glutes "till there was so much beauty coming out of my ass", having sex on volcanoes, and whether women have the balls. A lot of artists are working with language now, I say. "I do quite a bit of visiting tutoring and they say, 'It would be good for you to come in, because a lot of students are working with text.'"

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'I quite like being an amateur' ... Heather Phillipson

The job of all creative art is to make things fresh and real again. Her work, I suggest - with its playfulness with language, the flip-flops of alliteration and digging through commonplaces to take things somewhere else - is a sort of inoculation against cliche. "It's important to go straight to the cliche and look at it. Not being able to accept anything at face value. It's not a one-sided critique. There is something of me that is also somehow complicit, as much as you can be savvy to those things. Like the use of music - when you go to a film, and you know exactly what its designs on you are, you still find yourself welling up with tears. And feeling self-hate when you find yourself buying into it, against yourself."

She can go on the road, do readings, make installations - I envy this, I tell her. "There was a turning point when poetry started to be fashionable and consumed by the art world. Before, I was doing readings in the literary world and suddenly the art world became interested. I resisted it for a while. Then it stopped being a separate thing."

It's the artist's duty to use the latest technology - since it has yet to be properly explored

Does she think it gets harder as you develop as an artist, that you begin to know too much? "I quite like being an amateur. Like Peter Greenaway said, it's the artist's duty to always use the latest technology. That would always render you as an amateur. You would always be engaging with something that hadn't properly been explored yet."

How you renew things is open to question. "Language is a technology that is constantly under renewal, and it has clearly changed and evolved over the past 10 years. The internet has made so much possible. Everyone is on Twitter, involved in writing, sharing images and sounds. People move so fluidly between those forms. We don't separate those things in the same way that we used to, because they come out of the same form."

She thinks this levelling was anticipated by people such as Jarman. "He moved between different areas so fluidly," she says, "not caring about people telling him that if you're good at this, you're going to be rubbish at that. Jarman was a world-builder."
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Jarman winner Heather Phillipson: 'My next work will be furious. Fascism is on my doorstep'

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Heather Phillipson is talking human hearts. "I had it installed especially," she says, "to catch all the cliches. Hearts are the best bins for cliche. Hearts get top marks for looking at home pretty much anywhere. Hearts are there to catch passing feelings and strangle them.

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by David Osa Amadasun Follow @DavidOAmadasun

Since childhood I have always been curious as to why rich people were rich and the poor were poor. Fast-forward two decades and that same curiosity has evolved into a call for action to do something about the insidious ways in which inequalities infect our daily lives. It was during the second year of my undergraduate degree, at the age of 32, that I became aware of the limited exposure I had had to certain social and cultural resources as a child and young adult. As a teenager my experience and aspirations were heavily influenced by two things: the media (mainly TV and music) and the church - my mother was an international evangelist. During one of my undergraduate courses I was mentally conversing with a lecture about the ideas of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on I had one of those eureka moments, Social and Cultural Capital. Bourdieu's writing and research. I wonder if I can use these ideas to increase my kids' life chances? Bourdieu was the son of a farmer who went on to become an academic and public intellectual. Despite his success Bourdieu always felt out of place among the middle-classes, 'like a fish out of water' - a concept he called 'hysteresis'. The matter of how class is reproduced by the unconscious imbibing of tacit rules, values, dispositions and tastes was to become an enduring theme in

In order to get on in life Bourdieu believed that you had to have a 'feel for the game' of different social situations or 'fields' and the different types of cultural capital and taste that each demanded. For Bourdieu the body, how we carry ourselves, how we dress, how we feel, was key to how the game of power within any field was played out. When there is a fit between us and a particular social field there is 'ontological complicity'; we are like a fish in water

It does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted.' (p.127)

Inspired by Bourdieusian ideas I began to think about how our tastes and cultural capital affect our aspirations. How plausible is it that taste creates a disposition that favors certain aspirations and is aversive to others? For example, might engaging in certain types of social and cultural activities help a child's (or adult's) social, cultural and educational development and progress? Could the rejection of particular cultural tastes and activities impede or make difficult the realisation of hopes and dreams such as going to university or getting into a certain career? I thought that if these propositions were true then there must also be a way to apply Bourdieu's ideas to interfere with the everyday reproduction of hierarchies of cultural value and taste. I worked with a simple hypothesis: that a parent's cultural orientations form part of the cultural capital that their child draws and builds upon.

In October 2010 I began an experimental campaign called Project U.N.C.L.E (Unite in Nurturing our Children's Life Experiences) to investigate but also to try and dismantle the cultural barriers experienced within working class communities of colour. As part of my research I decided to explore the extra-curricular activities that middle-class parents expose their children to and the institutions that they routinely participate in. It is important to remember that not all of our tastes create social distinctions and division in the way Bourdieu suggested. A large, multi-method study carried out in Britain between 2003-6, found that liking police dramas or whodunit type books, and not liking eating in Italian restaurants or reading religious books had very little impact upon cultural capital. As the authors put it The Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project 'sometastes ...do not carry any symbolic 'baggage', and do notcluster with other distinguishing aspects of cultural life.' (p.51).

I chose to focus my attention on what I felt was a divisive cultural activity and space: the gallery, traditionally seen as being a white middle-class milieu, associated with social, cultural and educational benefits. I thought hard about why working-class people of colour didn't use such spaces and I organised a visit to an exhibition with a few friends and family. My eldest daughter's reaction to a visit concretised the painful reality of how the exclusions of cultural value are deep-seated and felt in the body.

The juxtaposing of these two images are highly symbolic for me. In May 2011 I took my daughter, who was 14 at the time, for a surprise trip to see the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. We arrived at the Southbank Centre, parked underneath the gallery and walked up the stairs towards it. Shaniah glared at me as we neared the Hayward. Before I could say anything, she froze and said that she wasn't going into the gallery. "It's not me dad, it's not me".

I was speechless. The daughter who I have seen hold her own in a rough school and area was visibly affected by a building. I was so upset that I nearly swore at her. I wasn't upset or disappointed with her, it was because in that brief moment I felt my family's vulnerability to the mundane violence of cultural value. As a parent I felt powerless, unable to protect her. Thankfully with some coaxing and the promise of a Caramel Frappucino, Shaniah agreed to 'try' the exhibition. She loved it. The swearing and sexual explicitness intrigued her and caught her imagination.

That initial experience led to a small ethnographic study ' Experiences of exclusion within the mainstream art gallery - an ethnography of black and minority ethnic visitors'. It consisted of three art related activities, which I used to attract parents into a gallery space in order to explore how they felt whilst engaging with it. The first obstacle I had to overcome was actually getting the parents to the gallery. Tiredness, financial pressures and a lack of time were all given as reasons to avoid the gallery visit. This is not to say that any of these issues do not exist but these same parents would also spend £40 to go to the cinema or to eat out. Devising fun and interactive projects, coupled with a good exhibition, plus free entry into premium exhibitions helped.

In each of the exhibition visits with the parents I could see that observational learning was taking place. Albert Bandura's Social Learning theory focuses on how we are shaped by social experience and observational learning. The concept of self-efficacy plays a key role in social learning theory and concerns our belief in our ability to succeed in certain situations. In the gallery it became apparent that the parents were experiencing self-efficacy issues, although the kids, aged between 5-14, were not. The dialogue below is an extract from a longer conversation I had with a participating parent, Richard, during a visit to the Jeremy Deller exhibition at the Hayward in 2012,

Richard: Black people don't go to galleries.

Me: What are you talking about? Am I not black? (I laugh)

Richard: I know, but you're different.

This seemingly light-hearted exchange shows some of the circuits and flows between class, race, gender and cultural value. Richard's assertion 'Black people don't go to galleries' is a part of the very phenomena and the experience that he was having. His choice of words, which are based upon his understanding, visceral experience and observation at the gallery, articulate an unspoken norm: it is natural/normal for Black people not to participate in mainstream art galleries and that 'real' black people do not use these spaces. This version of an authentic black identity is created against the whiteness of the gallery, and in the process other black people, like myself, who are found in such places are 'different': read - not really black. A Russian doll of othering opens up, revealing smaller hierarchies of taste and what Sarah Thornton has called 'subcultural capital'.

During the exhibition Richard was clearly uneasy. He looked uncomfortable and kept glancing around at the other gallery visitors. In his video account of his exhibition experience he said that due to the lack of representations of his culture, it was as if he and his culture had never existed. Why? Because the exhibition was supposed to represent popular working-class culture in Britain but in reality it was an exhibition of white working class lives and cultural artifacts. It later transpired that Richard's conversation about black people not going to galleries was in part a response to his own feelings of anxiety within the gallery space. Richard, as well as a few of the other participant parents, had developed personal strategies for avoiding painful situations and settings in which they felt inferior or out of place. In effect they were using strategies of self-policing and elimination with regard to places of 'high' culture, deploying their own versions of subculture as a rationale for their own exclusion.

This small interaction shows the workings of something larger and sophisticated: how part of the negotiation of everyday life for those who are marginalised involves the tacit development of bodily practices and social maps that help us to avoid situations where as Bourdieu put it we 'can feel the weight of the water'. At the same time because of the ways in which cultural taste is value-laden, our subcultural capital and the places that we inhabit because they affirm us, can protect as much as confine us.

As I mentioned earlier, my aim in Project U.N.C.L.E is to co-develop strategies with parents to develop self-efficacy in the hope that empowerment will break out of these vicious circles and broaden our children's horizons as well as our own. So how can self-efficacy be developed?One way is through representation. Seeing people similar to one's self succeed by sustained effort can help the observer to believe that they too possess the capabilities needed for success. During Project U.N.C.L.E the issue of representation came up again and again in different ways. During the 'Me, My Face and I' activity day, I found out just how important it was for black children to see themselves reflected in the mainstream.

Here's the scenario: two children, one white and one black, walk into an exhibition filled with portraits of white people. Both children enjoy it. After the exhibition they make self-portraits out of food. The black child asks for brown ingredients - cocoa pops, hot chocolate powder - to represent his skin in the portrait. The white child does not bother with colour in the same way. Her whiteness is not a colour that needs to be marked or thought about, it is naturalized as normal, a seamless part of the wall-to-wall whiteness of the surrounding exhibition. On closer inspection the portraits show further nuances of colouring and also commonality. Other features such as nose, lips, eyes and hair were not represented mimetically. As the brown skin colour of the portrait on the left stands out because of its purposeful colouring, it creates a link between the child and their artwork, making visible what is taken for granted in this space - whiteness.

There has been progress in the diversity of representations within exhibitions, for example the Meshac Gaba and Ibrahim El-Salahi exhibitions at the Tate - which the kids and parents loved. But adequate progress has not been made in how these institutions, funded by public money, encourage those from underrepresented groups. As Dr Eleonora Belfiore from Warwick University has pointed out, there are fundamental and 'awkward' questions that need to be asked about the social and institutional structures that support and maintain hierarchies of taste, 'if the debate on cultural value is to go beyond an empty rhetoric of self-celebration' Belfiore writes 'then it needs to be an occasion in which awkward questions are asked of the sector as a whole. Questions such as 'For whom does the sector generate value?', 'What do organisations big and small do to live up to their status as public cultural organisations?'

It is because of questions such as these, that I have felt compelled to work within Outreach initiatives and to try and contribute to institutional change. By understanding and valuing different orientations to cultural value I was able to mobilise pop-cultural sensibilities to begin playing with and eroding the "low/high" culture divide. For example, I was able to attract parents to the George Condo exhibition at the Hayward and to research self-portraiture. How did I succeed where mainstream cultural institutions with bigger budgets had failed? I made visible the connection between the work of George Condo and the work of Kanye West and I made the day interactive.

The work of questioning and rearranging cultural value is not easy or straightforward, more 'awkward questions' arise. Do we want to encourage cultural omnivores by diversifying taste and/or do we want a radical overhaul of the very values that make distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture? How do we survive and make some progress in our day-to-day lives? Since completing my research I have worked within higher education outreach and have seen first-hand how a lack of the 'right' cultural capital can continue to impede the realisation of aspirations. I am also painfully aware of how subcultural capital can work to exclude us through a valorization of stifling ideas about what it means to be black. And this will continue until we begin to question and unravel the limitations and complexities of such worldviews, particularly when they can be a protective/defensive response to the injuries of exclusion. Increasing our own self-efficacy is just one way forward.

I want to end with a video in which George the Poet shows us the imaginative potential that awaits us in the gallery. This is not about a passive 'viewing'. It is about entering into conversations, participating in art, taking up provocations - being moved.

Gwarn George the Poet
All work published on Media Diversified is the intellectual property of its writers. Please do not reproduce, republish or repost any content from this site without express written permission from Media Diversified. For further information, please see our reposting guidelines.
David Osa Amadasunis an award winning cultural entrepreneur with a passion for widening access to the experiences that help a child develop into a future innovator. Being a creative thinker, problem solver, and entrepreneur helped him survive the tsunami of adversity that he experienced as a young father. When he's not strategising on how to solve social issues relating to social mobility/diversity via Project U.N.C.L.E (his action research initiative), you'll find him scooting along the Southbank or in the Royal Festival Hall with his daughters on his black scooter that has a red bandana tied to the handle bars
This article was commissioned for our academic experimental space for long form writing curated and edited by Yasmin Gunaratnam. A space for provocative and engaging writing from any academic discipline. If you enjoyed reading this article, help us continue to provide more! Media Diversified is 100% reader-funded - you can subscribe for as little as £5 per month here

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"Black people don't go to galleries" - The reproduction of taste and cultural value

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by David Osa Amadasun Since childhood I have always been curious as to why rich people were rich and the poor were poor. Fast-forward two decades and that same curiosity has evolved into a call for action to do something about the insidious ways in which inequalities infect our daily lives.

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Fermynwoods Contemporary Art

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If you are dismayed and looking for a way to make a difference, to feel like you're actually doing something even from outside of the USA, I urge you to donate to the ACLU.

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Freee Art Collective are made up of three artists, Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, who work together on slogans, billboards and publications that challenge the commercial and bureaucratic colonization of the public sphere of opinion formation. Freee occupies the public sphere with works that take sides, speak their mind and divide opinion. Dave Beech is Professor of Art at Valand Academy, University of Gothenberg, Sweden; Andy Hewitt is Senior Lecturer in Social Art Practice at The University of Northampton, UK and Mel Jordan is Reader in Art and the Public Sphere, at the Royal College of Art, London.

Slogans are used extensively in their work, emblazoning them across billboards, scarves, balloons, badges, placards, t-shirts, fireworks and more. The group are concerned with opinion formation and write deliberately antagonistic slogans in order that its readers might agree or disagree with them and in doing so consider their own stance and how they arrive at it.

Freee are using the space at NN Contemporary Art to present their new public kiosks. These brightly coloured kiosks will be active during the exhibition for a host of activity including badge-making, talks, design workshops and a starting point for walking tours. Freee have invited artists, designers, critics and theoreticians to create workshops and activities, available for all to join.

Events:

A panoply of drop in activities will be popping up weekly at NN at Freee's Public Kiosks. In addition regular NN events will be taking place:

Thursday 24 November 2016, 2-3pm
Thursday 22 December 2016, 2-3pm
Bumps & Babes
Get messy with your baby or pre-schooler in these crayon-fuelled, finger painting sessions. Make sure you wear clothes that can handle paint!

Friday 2 December 2016, 4-7.30pm
Freee Comedy Evening
Dave Green is a comedian who went to art school. He will be working with Freee's texts and manifestos to make some new material that he will perform in the NN Cafe. Dave Green has been doing stand-up comedy since 2011. Since then, his surreal one liners and deadpan delivery have fast proved popular with audiences and promoters alike. In 2013 he won the wild card vote in the BBC New Comedy Award securing him a place in the semi final which was broadcast on BBC Radio 2. In 2014 he was nominated by a panel of industry professionals to take part in the Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year.
Watch the set here.

Friday 9 December 2016, 1-4pm
Freee Public Kiosk on Market Square
Freee's Public Kiosk will be in Northampton's Market Square to work with passerby's to use the kiosk as a focus for the collection of data and conversations. On this occasion the kiosk will host research staff and students from politics, law and psychology. There is an urgent need to record the arguments that the public are making for and against leaving the EU. The aim is to capture this important information to inform public debate. It is intended that the project does not draw conclusions on the strength of the case for or against Brexit. Participants arguments will be used to create an argument map which comprehensively captures public discourse on the topic.

Freee's Mel Jordan and Andy Hewitt in conversation with Catherine Hemelryk

Catherine Hemelryk
You've been trialling the Public Kiosks throughout the year and we can see the final kiosks in the gallery space, can you talk a little about that process.

Mel Jordan
Previous to the development of the kiosks, we were pairing everything down to a series of very minimal performative works and when we utilized things such astheSpoken Choir through our manifestos, we found there was no focus for people to attach themselves to. The kiosks have become a moment of focus, a visual marker of when we are about to do something or when we can call people forward. Prior to the kiosks, we had rejected the idea of conviviality and then we decided we had been incorrect and we began to rethink, conviviality; the convivial as part of the process of establishing opinion formation. So we see the kiosks as that sort of convivial moment when we open them up, we share some of the badge making activities or the ideas that we've had and we can talk to people. They draw people in to talk to us when we are behind them and generate activity, to do things together and through this they become a process of conviviality in a different sort of way, not like a cup of tea or a slice of cake, they are like a different version of conviviality.

Andy Hewitt
Yes that is right. We have done projects where we have invited other people before, forexampleProtest Is Beautiful where we have invited people to come along and be in an image with us and join in with something that we are saying and doing. However, I think we've tried to avoid some of the clichéd ideas of what it is to ask someone to participate because what we are looking for in a participant is dissensus as well as consensus. That's what the Spoken Choirs aim to generate, you are invited to read the manifestos we write, out loud collectively and you either read it out or you don't. The aim is to make people decide for themselves and consider carefully what's on the page. If it gels with their thinking about a topic, then they can say it and stand by it. We put a bit of pressure on people I suppose, by asking do you agree, do you agree enough to say it out loud? We have that method and the kiosks are another extension of that or something that runs in parallel. They attract people in and it's those conversations that can occur through production of something as simple as a badge, which can be the beginning of a whole set of discussions, where people can open up.

MJ
We tried to run slogan workshops previously where we got people to think about what slogans they might like, but it's difficult to crystallize what you really believe in. Saying it out loud because you're always worried about consensus and what people might think of you when you say something, can be difficult, especially if it is not understood as liberal or respectful. So I think that the kiosks have been able to give people a chance to adapt our slogans and generate new ones. A conversation is created through making a badge for example. When choosing one of our slogans to make into a badge, they would then say it would be better if it's like this and we'd say, "that's a brilliant idea - OK ,well we'll change it and we'll add that to what we've been doing so far and adopt it". Slogans only work when they are adopted collectively; a slogan doesn't mean much if only one person uses it!

AH
There is a certain amount of authority or authorship that we provide in terms of this exchange. These are our slogans, these are our manifestos and what I hope through having the kiosks and in having the readings, is that people come along and we hear what other people have got to say and we can agree or disagree with them. They can also do the same and that's an idea of an ongoing production of political subjectivity - this is what we are interested in affecting.

MJ
The idea of us publishing a slogan is not just about authorship because slogans change and they are re-authored all of the time, but the thing about us issuing and publishing a slogan means that people can situate themselves in relation to that slogan. So they can then say they disagree with it or agree with it. In a way we purposefully write slogans that are antagonistic, stating the things we believe in. This is in order for people to situate themselves in relation to the slogan because if you have a very neutral slogan it's very difficult to understand what your opinion is. The process of our participation is about opinion formation and the relationships to the slogan and development of political subjectivity.

AH
We put a value on dissensus as being something that is essential for democracy and that is nothing new but it is how our work tries to operate because we think those values or those traditions of discussion, debate - protest even - are things we have to maintain as rituals. We're not alone in doing any of that but we see the space that art provides as a public sphere, as a place it can operate to ask questions about culture, politics and art.

MJ
Bringing the kiosks here we started to think about how they operate differently in the gallery. So we are making a series of shutters for them and wrapping one of them up when it's closed because we didn't want them to look like sculptures just because they are in a gallery. When we have activated them before they haven't been left in a place as an object.

AH
They have tended to be up momentarily when we are with visitors and then we take them down again so in this long period we have at NN, we are going to shut them so they become and object of documentation and then when we are with them, which will be regularly, they will open up for production to take place. It is very much about making things with people in the space as often as we possibly can.

CH
You have a very clear aesthetic so I see the kiosks as sculptural objects when they are not in use and you are using some of your previous works as backdrops as well to complement them and to create an entire environment for the people who are coming to be in and for the kiosks to be situated within that wider practice that you have. Can you consider them as sculpture objects or can that be considered as a bi product?

AH
We call them props, we don't see them as sculpture; we see them as having a function, which is for this discursive interaction with people. We will have some of these things that are historical objects for us, some we bring in that people hold, so the flowers in Protest is Beautiful were props for the embodiment of an idea that people held aloft together. As objects they have a purpose and are part of the ritual that we invent around them. In that respect they aren't sculptural things in the respect that you look at and contemplate as you might with sculpture, similarly the images aren't necessarily images to contemplate as with painting, but they are documentation of processes and rituals; they are a version of those rituals at certain points in time. We don't have a preciousness in terms of using the same image and that's why this is the first time this billboard poster's been produced as it is but there have been plenty of other versions used of Protest is Beautiful and hopefully it will continue.

The things we make have a social life and that's why they exist and why sometimes new things exist and it's usually based around words because each one tends to be a prop as a slogan and the props and slogans become images when they are embodied by other people so there is this sequence of things that happen.

MJ
But as Catherine says there is an aesthetic to them. The last yellow kiosk has a sense of nostalgia, a look, as if we are trying to recoup some idea of political protest. There is a relationship to that; we do want to revive those processes.

CH
There is such a strong art historical precedence as well from Rodchenko and Klutsis' Constructivist kiosks all the way up to the Bloors and more.

AH
Jonas Staal pointed out the other day all those agit prop kiosks that were symbolic of those different points of Modernism.

MJ
Yes it is that avant garde tradition and we wholly admit we are very interested in all of the way the avant garde continued to question and rethink - anti art is part of what we think about our own work. Our work seems to have five axis:
Montage, Text Art, Participation (Participatory art practices), the history of the Avant garde and the culture of political protest (badges, slogans, placards, etc)[3]

AH
These are art historical ideas about artistic production and [...] it is this axis we tend to be thinking about and sometimes we might be testing out one or two of those in more detail or we return to them without preoccupation for making things visual or visible.
MJ
It was interesting being at IMMA recently talking with Jonas Staal, Mel Evans from Liberate Tate, Kerry Guinan and us and it was quite a spectrum of what you might think of as political artists getting us together in one room and of course while we might share the same politics we absolutely differ in approach. We wouldn't be campaigning like Liberate Tate because our enquiry is much more about the politicisation of the subject, the individual and so we go back to that, it's one of our principles rather than a particular type of campaign. For us, art has lots of problems.

AH
Democratise everything!

MJ
We wouldn't instrumentalise art to do some of those things. We wouldn't think of art just as a creative process but also acting as social division, which is an avant garde position.

CH
You have said that you are not activists.

MJ
We are thinking about the whole - art, politics and social relations; we are looking at opinion formation because that's what we think affects people's political subjectivity. We're worried about the dominance of the press and the way it is creates certain value systems. That's why we want to imagine everyone as publishing to one another.

We're also interested in art not being autonomous and if you start thinking about art as publishing rather than as objects or exhibition, that immediately changes the work.

Here at NN we've called the exhibition/project Freee-Carracci-Institute because we are really interested in that idea of the Baroque. There is never one version of the work and we don't mind re-saying and re-doing the work and we will get rid of work that doesn't matter any more. We really wanted to think about publishing, republishing and rethinking our work during the project here and to see what happens when we do this. That is why the idea of a programme of people visiting and engaging with the works is very exciting for us. In some of the events we are proposing, the remit is quite specific in terms of getting artists and members of the public to interpret, disagree or agree or come up with their own slogan in relation to ours. It is always in relation to what we have presented [in the exhibition] but at the same time we think that the minute you start thinking about what someone else thinks it helps you to crystallize what you really think.

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[1] Mel Jordan, Freee art collective, The Public Sphere and the work of the Freee art collective, talk at IMMA, Dublin, 26 October 2016

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Freee-Carracci-Institute by Freee Art Collective at NN

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Freee Art Collective are made up of three artists, Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, who work together on slogans, billboards and publications that challenge the commercial and bureaucratic colonization of the public sphere of opinion formation. Freee occupies the public sphere with works that take sides, speak their mind and divide opinion.

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Oh, Tappa Tappa Tappa 5, you are immense!

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soothing

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Eventually an artist's practice becomes a fruitless search for a very specific, nostril-heavy photo of young Rik Mayall.