ON BORrOWED TIMES 25.03.14 - 10.04.14
ON BORrOWED TIMES ON Critical Practice The idea that photography should be involved in the critique of culture is central to independent art and photographic work. The question usually asked then is how and what role such work should play in critique? On the one hand, this can mean the use of existing images to re-examine their function, and to open them up as habits to other meanings and critique. On the other hand, photography can be used to produce new ways of looking at things, so we can see them in almost literally a new light. Yet there may well be those who say we are again in an era of the ‘postcritique’, where ‘anything goes’ as it once seemed in postmodernism. Yet these periods of demise and rise of critical practice do seem to be linked, to modes of social satisfaction and media currents, just like the economy. Given the dominance of photographic images right across culture, we cannot ignore the different roles they all play in articulating realism, the setting and giving of social mood. What, for instance, are we to make of the constant distraction afforded by images across digital screens? What modes of desire and ambition do these systems allow or unleash? In what way does any walk down the urban street of signs help define our sense of social, personal or political life? How might such signs correlate or oppose any feeling of an economic ‘recession’? Indeed, what is a critical artist to do in a recession? The value of photographic culture in this situation is thus completely ambivalent, both a language of social existence and meaning, but also a form of testing what those things mean or signify. Against this, the idea of a digital ‘post-representational’ culture, as computer codes, tags and algorithms seems to be running away from precisely such issues. We can no more grasp the condition of a cat by counting the pixels in its image than we can by asking what camera was used to take its picture. The question remains the same, even if the formal construction of the photographic image changes: what does this image do?
DAVID BATE David Bate is course leader of the MA Photographic Studies programme and Professor of Photography at the University of Westminster, London.
ON BORrOWED TIMES ON BORROWED TIME(S) Less than a month ago a protest affiliated with the “Occupy Museum” movement erupted inside the Guggenheim Museum, New York. A group of 40 protestors including artists, professors, students and activists unfurled banners, dropped leaflets and chanted slogans. The protest was mobilised as a political gesture against a global art market complicit in the exploitation of precarious labour and the creation of a global social class of indebted artists and workers. Whilst these forms of art protests are not new, one could not but question the risks – especially given the art market’s increasing interest in “anti-capitalist art”– of this action being received as yet another spectacle accommodated by the museum itself. The dilemma remains; can political art ever escape its own spectacle? Inversely, can art survive the pressures of the art market and yet remain political? On Borrowed Time(s) showcases the work of alumni and current students from the MA Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster. The exhibition explores of the paradoxes of capitalism as manifest in the art world, corporate and consumer cultures. To endow On Borrowed Time(s) exhibition with the political project of anti-capitalism is to problematically claim that it has successfully made the leap from art as a spectacle of capitalism, to art as critical social engagement with the material conditions of life under capitalism. The fact that the exhibition is held in a visual arts organisation like INIVA inevitably positions it in a different light. At the level of display, the works are hung on walls in a manner that reactivates a desire to spectate. The exhibition also includes works that overplay the spectacle of capital through irony and satire. Does this undermine its political underpinnings? Does it risk echoing the same mechanisms through which the logic of commodity culture operates? Through a diversity of critical practices the exhibition attempts to open up a critical dialogue between capital’s alluring façade and the record of broken promises ranging from economic collapse to environmental degradation.
Layal Ftouni Layal Ftouni is a writer, visiting lecturer and a PhD candidate at the University of Westminster
ON BORrOWED TIMES Paula Gortazar Winter Holidays, 2011-2013 Lambda C-type prints 30x30cm
William Eckersley 24hr News, 2014 Archival pigment print, 140x108cm
Jan Stradtmann Belgravia, 2008/2012 Archival pigment print, 82x75cm
Basil Al-Rawi Façade, 2012 Digital C-type print, 60x50cm
Maria Tzili Life User Manual, 2014 Archival pigment print, 33x50cm
Xiaobo Fu Please do not touch, 2014 Archival pigment print, 30x30cm
Wilf Speller I went to the National Gallery and all I got was this lousy T-shirt, 2014 Acrylic on cotton, women’s XL
We would like to thank Iniva for providing the exhibition space as part of their professional development programme in partnership with the University of Westminster, and Teresa Cisneros, Iniva’s education curator for her support and enthusiasm for the project. Special thanks go to David Bate, Allan Parker, Andy Golding, Sheena Balkwill and the artists Basil Al-Rawi, Wilf Speller, Maria Tzili, Jan Stradtmann, Paula Gortåzar, William Eckersley and Xiaobo Fo. Curated by Layal Ftouni Assistant curator: Wilf Speller Catalogue by Allan Parker