May 28, 6.30 pm
«Unsocial Sociability»
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«Unsocial Sociability»
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, Cindy Milstein, Erik Ruin,
Sarah J Stanley
Curated by Monika Vykoukal
Social relationships as the center of our common life present themselves at the same time under the two opposing aspects of the «propensity to enter into society» and of isolation, that is, as Kant describes, our «unsocial sociability.» Starting from this duality, this project probes the potentials and restrictions of social relationships in the current social moment under the sign of the «crisis,» and which forms of resistance and the development of alternatives they could open up.
Sarah J Stanley’s text-image works and sculptures start from her personal life story, her childhood in a devout Christian family, where the apocalypse was an imminent, prophetic truth, and where divergent feeling or thinking led to damnation. Sarah explores the imagery and phantasies she developed around this as a child. She uses wit and humor to express feelings of loss, grief and hatred after her break with the religious community of her family. Her objects represent the imaginary propaganda of a «satanic new world.»
With this particular body of work Stanley wants to encourage the viewer to imagine a landscape of opposites. However, these opposing entities are like one and the same; the values of the western Christian Pentecostal Church, and the 'baddie' of their religion. As the modern church has evolved into the fundraising, recruitment machine that it now is, she poses the idea that the church of the Antichrist (as written about in the book of revelation) has been granted the same amount of time to develop, using similar tried-and-tested forms of attracting the experience-hungry crowds. This dynamic of community and correct behavior is also at the center of her new performances about norms in the domestic and arts contexts.
With their own family as a cell of society, dad Gary and mum Lena think, with their kids, as The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, about how the family fits into society with its own social relations and needs to conform or to what degree it can dissent. The Institute is also in particular concerned with climate change, and thus the future, passed on to one’s children, as well as the powerlessness of the nuclear family confronted with this question. Those questions will be posed anew through explorations of the Lakeside park and of its environment, and will be articulated in a family performance «From Liverpool to Here: The Institute’s Half Term Family Holiday Lakeside Conversation.» In addition the Institute will also show a new amateur video on those questions, «The Institute’s Anti-Oedipus Home Movie» in the tradition of family home-movies.
Conceptually, the Institute are currently engaged in playing around with themes developed in Deleuze and Guattari's 1972 book Anti-Oedipus. The intention here is to show the seemingly natural given categories of our lives, such as the family, as socially shaped and perpetuated and therefore open to change. The experience of norms as naturally given and eternal, here in the nuclear family unit, turns out to be, on an individual level, surveillance and imposed conformity in capitalist production, which inevitably leads, the Institute will argue during their stay at Lakeside, to runaway climate change.'
In a series of picture-essays in their book Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), Erik Ruin and Cindy Milstein strive to illuminate qualitatively different social relations already visible in both daily moments of shared lives in common and momentous re-creations of commons in places ranging from Wisconsin to Egypt. Their work gleans various potentialities for solidarity and egalitarian community, fragmentary and fragile as that might be, from concrete present-day practices, so as to reveal, Milstein writes, «cracks in the seemingly smooth surface of social control.»
For Ruin and Milstein, though, the precarious journey toward utopia is in fact «our road map to a liberatory society.» It is here that we stumble on unexpected encounters and discoveries of shared experiences along with the possibilities for collective action that they create. Their picture-essays portray the contradictions and experimental character, and indeed the surprise, held in movements like the «Arab Spring» and Occupy as well as places like libraries and parks. They tell stories, but rather than supplying narratives that lay out an inevitable route, they instead suggest paths of utopian directionality always paved, again in Milstein’s words, with «potholes and promises.»
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home is an art activist cell in a domestic space in Everton, Liverpool, UK. The Institute is co-organized by Lena Simic and Gary Anderson, together with their children Neal, Gabriel and Sid. The Institute is interested in generating critical arts practice which is informed by everyday family living, and hosts artist residencies and events at their home. Recent activities include family performances at protests and at art venues such as the Bluecoat in Liverpool (2010) and the Arnolfini in Bristol (2009). www.twoaddthree.org
Cindy Milstein is the author of «Anarchism and Its Aspirations» (IAS/AK Press, 2010). She is an Institute for Anarchist Studies collective member, and has been involved in grassroots social movements for a long time, and within the past year was an active participant in Occupy Philly as well as the Quebec student strike. You can find her writings on both movements along with other topics at cbmilstein.wordpress.com
Erik Ruin is a printmaker, shadow-puppeteer, founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and co-editor of «Realizing The Impossible: Art against Authority» (with Josh MacPhee, AK Press, 2007). He often contributes to collective projects, e.g. for urban farming. He lives in Providence, RI, USA. http://erikruin.tumblr.com
Sarah J Stanley lives and works in Glasgow. She studied painting in Aberdeen, Scotland. In 2007 she founded the artist initiative Project logan, which organizes an exhibition and residency program. Alongside painting and drawing her artistic practice also includes book-work, music and peformance. www.sarahjstanley.com
Monika Vykoukal studied art history and museum studies in the UK, and has since worked in Vienna, from 2003 on as curator in Aberdeen (Scotland), and from 2009–2010 in Wolverhampton (England). She focuses in particular on art in the context of political activism, socially engaged practices and graffiti writing. She lives in Paris.