Agency

A Partial History of Live Art

Theron Schmidt, Theron Schmidt

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789380293
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

Notoriously difficult to define as a genre, Live Art is commonly positioned as a challenge to received artistic, social and political categories: not theatre, not dance, not visual art... and often wilfully anti-mainstream and anti-establishment. But as it has become an increasingly prevalent category in international festivals, major art galleries, diverse publications and higher education streams, it is time for a reassessment.

This collection of essays, conversations, provocations and archival images takes the twentieth anniversary of the founding of one of the sector's most committed champions, the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in London, as an opportunity to consider not only what Live Art has been against, but also what it has been for. Rather than defining the practices in oppositional terms – what they might be seeking to critique, reject or disrupt – this collection reframes these practices in terms of the relations and commitments they might be used to model or advocate. What kinds of care and recovery do they enable? What do they connect as well as reject? What do they make possible as they test the impossible? What ideas of success do they stand for as they risk failure? In this way, the central theme of the collection, and to which all contributors were invited to respond, is the idea of agency: the capacity for new kinds of thoughts, actions and energies as enacted by individual artists and groups. It seems appropriate that this question would be considered in relation to the history of one particular 'agency': LADA itself.

These questions are explored in a unique conversational format, bringing together a diverse range of emerging and established practitioners, curators and leading figures in the field, each paired with another practitioner for a live conversation that has been sensitively edited for the page. Curated within a structure of five overlapping themes – Bodies, Spaces, Institutions, Communities and Actions – this format produces unexpected insights and accounts of the development of the field. Each theme also contains two provocative essays by leading scholars, thinkers and makers, exploring the conceptual frames in more detail. The result is a collection that is as heterogeneous, ambitious, contradictory and inspiring as the field of Live Art itself.

Contributors: Aaron Williamson, Adrian Heathfield, Alan Read, Alastair MacLennan, Alexandrina Hemsley, Amelia Jones, Andrew Mottershead, Andy Field, Anne Bean, Barby Asante, Bryan Biggs, Cassils, Catherine Wood, David A. Bailey, Dominic Johnson, Gary Anderson, George Chakravarthi, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Hayley Newman, Heike Roms, Helen Paris, James Leadbitter, Jamila Johnson-Small, Jane Trowell, Jen Harvie, Johanna Tuukkanen, John Jordan, John McGrath, Jordan McKenzie, Joshua Sofaer, Katherine Araniello, Kira O'Reilly, Lena Šimi?, Leslie Hill, Lois Keidan, Lois Weaver, Manuel Vason, Martin O'Brien, Mary Paterson, Rajni Shah, Rebecca French, Richard Dedomenici, Ron Athey, RoseLee Goldberg, Selina Thompson, Simon Casson and Tim Etchells.

Co-published with Live Art Development Agency.

Winner of the2021 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize

GARY ANDERSON

BRYAN BIGGS

ROSELEE GOLDBERG

JEN HARVIE

MARY PATERSON

LENA ŠIMIĆ

JOSHUA SOFAER

JANE TROWELL

CATHERINE WOOD

INSTITUTIONS

PROVOCATION

JANE TROWELL

TITLE

STILL LIVE: THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, 2010-2013

Jane Trowell is a member of Platform, a collective that brings together artists, activists, researchers and campaigners who collaborate to make work on social and ecological justice. In recent years, Platform has worked with Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate to successfully campaign for an end to oil company sponsorship in the arts, and, together with LADA, Artsadmin, and Home Live Art, hosted the event Take the Money and Run? (2015) which looked at wider questions of ethics, funding, and art. Jane has an ongoing interest in radical pedagogy in and through the arts. In 2011, Platform proposed the LADA DIY 7 project Ethics will be the aesthetics of the Future. The Free University of Liverpool (FUL) was chosen to respond to it. FUL ran for three years 2010 to 2013, both a protest against UK government attacks on higher education and a living experiment towards an alternative future. FUL embraced contradiction and disagreement as much as community and shared vision, evidenced in the multi-voiced reflection that Jane has assembled here.

‘We were outraged and angry and somewhat energized by the injustice. We can do it, of course we can. A sense of capacity, possibly an arrogance to take it into our own hands. The Free University of Liverpool was born quickly, in an instant.’

‘Everything moved too fast. In this metaphorical relationship, the sex might have been incredible and the other person might have been utterly fascinating, but… there’s little chance that that heady start can be maintained and things turn sour really quickly.’

‘The bits that make me feel ill to think about, the sordid, bitter arguments that I engaged in—my fault of course! Whatever! Oh, honestly shut the fuck up and piss off!’

What follows is not an essay. After this introduction, you will read a curated collage of excited, puzzled, and painful testimony from eight artist-participants (including me) from the Free University of Liverpool (FUL), collected three and a half years after FUL closed itself down.

All the artists are engaged with Live Art practices, activism, and education, involved in questions of how we devise a way to work together; how we resolve differences and learn from conflict; how we overcome disappointment.

FUL was started as a confrontation with the state—as one of many protests across England in autumn 2010 against draconian cuts to Higher Education. Within weeks, FUL attracted a phenomenal amount of support from progressive artists and academics.

It was in September 2011, during a LADA DIY project, that FUL engaged in DIY Curriculum Making. The Committee of FUL had made a proposal in response to Platform’s DIY ‘Ethics will be the Aesthetics of the Future’ (V.I. Lenin).¹ After two weekends of DIY odyssey we arrived at a framework: F for filosophy (meta-thinking); U for utility (practical work); and L for location (place, belonging, and Liverpool). This genius fusion of praxis and place became the structure for the year-long FUL Foundation course.² FUL then evolved as a rich programme of art interventions, workshops, reading groups, skillshares and Liverpool-based work. It also developed a PhD, short for Project of Hope and Desire. Soon, FUL’s participants were frequently invited to speak and perform about the university. ³

When a group of us ended FUL, many observers were surprised but remained inspired. However, many regular FUL participants felt mixed, while others nursed wounds.

So what happened? FUL was activist in intent. FUL was intended to increase agency to act and educate—together and singly. FUL was intended as embodied, as ‘live’—living art as urgent protest. It’s not unusual for activism to burn brightly and then burn out, but FUL sustained its momentum for three years, as you can see from FUL’s website. ⁴

My questions here are: what are the impacts on FUL participants now? How was our agency affected, our belief in our capacity to change society? What can we learn for the wider movement, as creative activists and arts educators?

Here’s my email to twenty FUL-ers on 15 February 2017:

I’m really interested in … what stays, what falls away.

What now makes us laugh, that then made us cry. What still enrages.

What has changed our lives for the better, for the different... What never got resolved. What is living in us from FUL, right now...

Although aware of FUL’s ups and downs, I was struck by the tumult in the responses. It’s clear that the impacts of FUL’s practices will evolve long beyond the timescales of conventional ‘evaluation’. As one participant wrote: ‘feel free to take what you need/want from [my testimony], without having to satisfy “my truth”—which is changing anyway’. I’ve arranged responses through six themes: Politics, Ecstasy, Criticism, Ambivalence, Impacts, Learning. In Rancière’s style, I won’t explicate, leaving you to draw conclusions.⁵

Politics

FUL was born out of rage and protest and a beautifully naïve belief we could do something big in the light of the increase of tuition fees... FUL was born as a part of a political intent and a certain moment, to be a part of a social movement.

FUL was so exciting... It was during a moment when things seemed alive and people were trying to realise hope. There were a number of alternative academic, beyond-academic, against-academic-politico-intellectual projects being set up at the time... FUL looked actually like one of the most promising in terms of longevity.

I wish we would have done more to connect all the Free University projects to earlier free universities, to initiate ourselves into that longer history.

Some confusion about the political goals: outraged talk of youth in Liverpool, talk of class and race, getting a property and physically setting up an alternative university. Doing it.

But FUL started and remained all white people (I think?), and mainly, but not only graduates. Big problematic question: who didn’t we know, didn’t we reach, couldn’t we speak to/with? Did we mean it? Who was ‘we’?

I wonder now, in thinking about it, with FUL continuing as a force in my mind, what it does mean to protest against—what?

As always in my work… a tension between the anarchist and the socialist, creating autonomous mutual aid-based systems and fighting for the state to provide certain things like health and education that should be the core function of a state.

... the political agenda of FUL wasn’t in the foreground throughout our weekly meetings

First of all it failed as a protest as it wasn’t a part of a social movement , and secondly, it didn’t even become the Frankfurt School (joke).

I think when engaging in creative and political work together, groups benefit from something to hang on to, practices and systems to help work through challenges

Ecstasy

FUL addressed something that was and is vitally important, and it brought together a group of people who I admire and value and miss being with as a collective.

Those early months of FUL were incredible... In many ways though it was like a relationship where everything moved too fast.

There was a powerful energy. FUL acted to channel a lot of frustration.

It was incredible to feel we could challenge institutional power and dream of replacing it with a better one.

Meeting underground at the News from Nowhere bookshop: the food was great, the vibe was electric and exciting.

A sense of ‘we’re going to make this up, and, guess what, we can’. Oh my God the liberation. A sense that it mattered to me that the people at the core of proposing FUL were from live art, performance, theatre. But I didn’t know how or why.

I loved Deleuze’s Abécédaire video sessions and us making our own video responses to it. However, I also enjoyed ‘Conspiracy in the Hour of the Wolf’ six weeks online writing workshop I devised for night-time online encounters…. I loved the Merz Barn trip and I remember us on the top of some Lake District hill, screaming.⁶

I experienced a kind of ecstasy with FUL. We fostered new ways of learning and sharing insights together , new ways of performing ‘education’, new ways of exploring the complexity of art, education, politics and activism, confrontations with power (including our power), and how to (and how not to) organise ourselves. It was rare.

My guided meander: because I learnt stuff about Liverpool that might or might not be true, it doesn’t matter, it was a very creative venture anyway.

It was awesome. Bauhaus eat your heart out.

The proposed PhD programme—Project of Hope and Desire. Absolute liberation.

But I loved being in the free space with people trying to be free, and children, and hope and play.

FUL was an incredible opportunity to explore power... Power as empowering and dis-empowering, as sharing and taking from... And what is it that makes it possible to look at ourselves in our relationship to power and what makes it impossible.

The final session... I was in front of everyone breastfeeding my new-born baby and saying something about FUL... I remember feeling vulnerable, frustrated and sad, grateful and able to be who I was at the moment in front of everyone... For me that was amazing...

It liberates me right here and right now as I sit at my desk at work , writing this email to you with new superhuman understandings of what is possible in the everyday.

Criticism

...the relationship was definitely all-consuming; after a couple of months there’s little chance that that heady start can be maintained and things turn sour really quickly.

The lasting shaaaaaaame of it all. OMG. Whenever I think about it it feels like neural toothache, a nasty soft deadly pulse.

FUL of sickness.

I remember feeling very uncomfortable about the social dynamics that were in operation at a meeting in which we were supposed to be dealing with problems in the social dynamics.

...there was also something damaging about FUL (I nearly wrote the word poisonous)… some really unpleasant memories; people were hurt.

FUL was fraught with difficu...