The position of art as a medium of reflection, representation and contemplation within this climate of extremism is no longer tenable. It is western navel gazing: it is the distraction of the intelligentsia who have chosen the comfort of self-congratulatory sophism over the real challenge of dismantling the ever-evolving oppression of capital driven politics. This situation can no longer be tolerated. It is evident from the activities of our predecessors, from DaDa to the Situationist International, that any activity no matter how extreme or challenging will always be absorbed and assimilated into an account of ‘Art history’ as a means of nullifying it’s fervour.

To ignore the mechanisms for the recuperation of art is therefore folly. So let us accept this role of ‘artist’ in the full knowledge that ‘art’ is an open system of knowledge, which since the advent of the collage has slowly been assimilating all manner of materials, gestures and situations into the logic of its cohesion. Let us accept this and the time and freedom it gives us so we may work on redefining arts function and definition within the social body: Art must cease to be the theorising of life and become instead life lived as an embodied pragmatic expression. Art must therefore shift from the position of being a reflection of society and become instead its reflex. In so doing art will become politics.

In this moment it will become apparent that the political significance and the artistic significance of even our most banal gestures are indistinguishable because both are an expression and therefore also a manifestation of our desires. Simultaneously in this moment poetics will cease to be an abstracted practice, as it currently is for most of western society, and will become instead the practice of cultivating social experiences and producing social contexts. The way to achieve this is not through overt political gestures, but to understand and react, in an embodied way, through the politics of consumption. To understand the politics of consumption we must understand not only how one consumes through ones environment: but also how one is consumed by ones environment. This typically happens through ideology, parliamentarian politics, legislation, morality, nationality, identity etc. all of which silently fill our environment with psychic noise. One must especially take stock of how these things interrelate in the fields of labour and leisure. This understanding must not be purely theoretical. Rather it must be pragmatic containing both conceptual understanding and practical action.

The concept alone is not enough; in fact it is squander. Therefore I will refrain from providing a conceptual model of the relationship between these things since this model could only ever be a projection of my own understanding of the interrelation of these things from my own perspective within them. Every individual must develop there own critique and their own means of action through developing an understanding of the unique conditions of their own life, resources and abilities.

All we have is our boredom and the things we choose to do with it. Industrial life, with all its flashing screens and potential attractions is a state of impoverished social inertia in which our actions and thoughts flux around the circuitry of consumption. We must cease to think of symbolic artistic actions as political effective and instead recognise the embodied poetics and politics of buying a can of beans form a local shop, or pissing our lives up a wall on a Friday night. Not only must we recognise this but also we must act upon it. We must take on board the ramifications of our actions and understand how they may be composed to enhance our lives. Further, we must understand how our actions as part of the wider social body may effect and enhance its composition. From these actions we may begin to create our own circuitry of consumption.

The artist is not unique as an individual in society. He or she does not posses some god like insight into existence that evades all others, no matter how much they may want to: No more heroes. However, what artists do possess is a practical working knowledge of the relationship between the physical materiality of the world, emotion and thought. Artists understand the relationship between how the eye sees and what the body feels: thus they understand how to construct desire.

Artists understand how vision anchors us in the materiality of the world and extends us beyond the surfaces of our skin to other places, other times, other situations. This understanding is all one needs to begin to alter ones relationship with society and societies relationship with oneself and through this pragmatically attack the extremism and alienation that capitalist society has produced. It is this factor that still makes art a valid discipline, although not necessarily in its present incarnation.

In light of all of this it is worth considering that one can be exterior to the State but not to society. The State only comes into being through its constitution in law, but law only comes into being in its enforcement. The reach of law is not absolute, but society is found everywhere one meets another human being, or even the sign of one. ‘Freedom’ therefore, like the rule of ‘law’, is a state of mind. Every artwork is necessarily political because it is created in dialogue with the politics of the world in which it exists. We therefore do not need to strive to create political art; art is already a political activity: it is simply that the relationship between art and politics remains to be fully understood and, more importantly, remains to be fully mobilised.

First Published in 2006 by Dissemination Machine Press on Behalf of SPART Action Group. Copyright SPART Action Group 2006

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