24. OCT.

2011
PRESENTATIONS / TIMETABLE:
10:30 - 11:00 Review of texts 11:00 - 11:30 Sean Baine Campaigner for social justice Member of the London Equality Group Mechanics of inequality, reason for and consequences of social injustice 11:30 - 12:00 Gareth Evans Writer, editor and curator at Gotogether Press and Artevents One of the most pressing requirements for independent imagemaking in an age of saturation and instant commodification is resistance to appropriation. What strategies might be employed to assist this process? BREAK 12:15 - 13:00 Killing us softly 4 (2010) Film. with Jean Kilbourne, feminist author, speaker, and filmmaker. Advertisings image of women LUNCH BREAK 14:00 - 14:45 John Dummett Artist, writer and curator who develops process-based and relational projects for and against the notion of public space dummyPublic: Smiles, hugs and handshakes; this is the face of the new contented public. This generic image of the public, operates as a script and visual demonstration of how to perform on the stage set that is public space. Gareth Polmeer Artist and writer who teaches at several UK art colleges and is undertaking his doctoral research at the Royal College of Art Aesthetics and Politics - A reflection on and challenge of the rhythms and social relations of urban experience and modern industrial societies. How does power manifest in the social experience of modernity? BREAK 15:00 - 15:30 Noel Douglas Artist, Designer and Activist and Writer for Eye magazine and other publications Signs of Revolt - Creative Resistance to a Commodified World.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
adbusters.org equalitytrust.org.uk noeldouglas.net signsofrevolt.net watch online: David Harvey: The crisis of capitalism, RSA Animate Benjamin, Walter. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In: Benjamin, Walter (1999) Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Berry Slater, J. and Iles, A. (2010) No Room to Move. London: Mute Books Fisher, Mark (2009) Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books Hannay, Alastair (2005) On the public. London: Routledge Minton, Anna (2009) Ground Control; Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city. London: Penguin Leslie, Esther. (2002) zeros, dots and dashes: drawing and the european avant-garde. In: Leslie, Esther. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level. London: Penguin

COMPULSORY READING: Social equality: The Spirit Level

Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level. London: Penguin pp. 3-5

Whose space? by Noel Douglas When the demands of Neoliberalism play havoc with our lives, it is time to fight back, and designers wield the sharpest tools
We live in a world dominated by Neoliberalism, which establishment politics accepts as the only way to run society. This economic doctrine claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum state intervention. The conditions that Neoliberalism demands minimal taxes, the dismantling or privatisation of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer (with a shift of wealth to the top tenth of one per cent), while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. But what does this have to do with graphic design? Well it helps to explain the current dominance of corporate culture in the forms of advertising and branding, to the point where graphic communication is merely a service industry for those interests. Outlined in these pages are practical examples of graphic resistance across a range of media drawn from artists, designers and studios who have worked within and around the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements of the past decade or so and have given voice to the social crises. Some projects are in the tradition of agit-prop; others are from the related field of culture-jamming. Each holds a seed of inspiration and hope for those pondering what is to be done. Neoliberalisms ideology of individualism is reflected in culture with the increasing obsession with the self and appearances. In the academic world, similar views are expressed through varieties of Postmodernism, whose claims for the fragmentation of reality, or the relativity of truth, echo the rhetoric of the Neoliberal cause. Becoming more decollectivised, more atomised and isolated as individuals, as these policies spread through society, has a psychological cost: depression is now the second biggest threat to health in the West.

And yet all this masks the fact that never has there been such interconnectedness when it comes to everyday life: each of us relies so heavily on the labour of others globally. Yet the institutions and social relations of Capitalism that organise such a high level of social cooperation also produce the alienation by not allowing us control over what we produce that separates us from each other. The system is now more destructive than progressive, and threatens life as we know it through climate change and war. In the cultural field, outdated intellectual property conventions constrain the potential of a free, globally shared culture, accessible to all. This is not to lay the blame on the shoulders of the beleaguered graphic designer who is attempting to make a living. Attempting to commodify creativity or innovation has been important for Neoliberal economies and this has put increasing commercial pressure on all areas of culture the ideas factory becomes then not so different from the traditional factory. Where the difference in designers labour does lie is in the intimate connection between value for Capital and our own minds and bodies. Creative labour practised by cultural workers constitutes a problem for Capitals command and control over it. This contradiction expresses itself in graphic design in debates over what is good design and the thorny topics of morality and ethics. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), Valentin Volosinov, a Russian revolutionary who was part of the Bakhtin school, developed ideas of signs, language and communication that placed the emphasis on the human utterance as a creative part of an ongoing dialogue between speaker and listener, in specific situations in which a creative role was assigned to each. In this is also outlined a dialectics of morality for sign production. His theories provide a better framework for understanding signs than the dominant theories from Saussure onwards, which have treated communication either as an abstract, structuralist inspired system of signifiers and signified somehow outside of human beings use of them and bracketed off from the material world or the free-floating postmodernism of the 1980s and 90s.

Volosinov saw a sign as an intersection of differently oriented social interests the site of class struggle. Different social groups or classes use the same sign or the same social language but with different accents. It is thanks to the social multi-accentuality of the sign that it can retain its vitality and dynamism, offering the capacity for further development. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many people as the greatest lie. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes, he writes. Design is not just an industry: it goes to the heart of what it means to be human. The ability to use our creativity to transcend our limits as individuals and as a society is surely needed now more than ever. Radical social change will be necessary to see off the triple threat of the war on terror, Neoliberal economic policy and climate change, but to be radical means to get to the root of the problem: Capitalism itself. One of the most organised expressions of designers collective desire to do the right thing is the First Things First manifesto (see Reputations, pp.60-69), which pointed to a different set of priorities for graphic designers. The revived First Things First 2000 (see Eye no. 33 vol. 9, 1999) created a stir, but that was eight long years ago. The time for pledges has gone and it is time for action. Graphic communication cannot be limited to the process of selling commodities, it is a powerful tool for both re-imagining the world, and expressing the truth of our situation. Those of us who love design must use it toward these ends or we may not have a future to imagine, let alone a present to enjoy. Neoliberalism has created a powder keg of possibilities maybe now is the time to light the graphic fuse. from http://eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=152&fid=657 accessed 16. October 2011 Originally published in Eye magazine, issue 66, winter 2007

Power and representation

Stuart Hall: Chapter 4: The Spectacle of the other, published in Hall, S. (Ed.) (1997) Representation. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, pp. 39-41

QUESTIONS: