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PDF: Terry Atkinson Talk (On the Occasion of JCHP) LANCHESTER GALLERY PROJECTS 1 TERRY ATKINSON for the occasion of JCHP 28 February 2014 RESOURCE DOCUMENT Terry Atkinson presented his commissioned paper EXHIBITIONISM, for the occasion of Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock’s exhibition CRITICAL DÉCOR: WHAT WORKS! CRITICAL DÉCOR was a determined bid to reformulate the conventions of the exhibition apparatus and disengage the relations of production with the relations of distribution, which are immobilised in their bind to one another in the art system. SK: Thanks all for coming and this afternoon’s talk is the final event for the occasion of Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock’s exhibition CRITICAL DÉCOR WHAT WORKS! Previous to this, we’ve had three critical bouts led by Michael Hampton, Alex Bowen and Lynda Morris who finished them off last night. I do think the framing of these critical bouts really… not really, but slightly which is good enough, set them apart from the usual polite complicity that exists between actors in the artworld. A big thing to come from these sessions was the reliance that the art system has on the hermetic compliance of the maintenance of the status quo. This afternoon I can drop this stupid artificial fighting language because it’s a straightforward talk given by Terry Atkinson, who from the early 60s has sustained a very formidable critique against the prevailing ideologies of the art system, and in particular the distortion that the market has had on the whole apparatus, including, importantly, art education. Terry has had a long ongoing exchange with JCHP and the latest output of this is his essay Exhibition and Exposition which breaks down his response into the chapters Exhibitionism, Stockholm Syndrome, Shift-work and Referencing, Excuse and Exhibiting. Terry will elaborate on this essay, the exhibition, on JCHP’s practice and CRITICAL DÉCOR: WHAT WORKS! and it really just leaves me to say first of all thank you very much to Terry for doing this and I feel very privileged that Terry’s here in the closing week of LGP. And of course thanks to JCHP for ending LGP because it brings every cynicism I’ve had with what I’ve been doing with the programme, right into my office and gallery space so it’s been an entirely welcome end. TA: Just an opening shot, last time I did anything public here, a couple of years ago when I did a joint exchange with Owen Hatherley and the guy I shared the exchange with was Dave Bainbridge who died last June. It was a big loss to me, I had known him since 1958, probably my oldest friend and was one of the founders of Art & Language. He was a very loyal friend so this is a dedication to Dave and it’s hopefully put out in the spirit of an ongoing enquiry which he always promoted and modeled. Note. The main body of this text was delivered as a talk at the exhibition Critical Décor: What Works by Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock (JCHP) at Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry on 28th February, 2014. Apart from some condensed references, the notes referring to the text were not included in the talk. 1 LANCHESTER GALLERY PROJECTS 2 TERRY ATKINSON for the occasion of JCHP 28 February 2014 RESOURCE DOCUMENT EXHIBITIONISM I begin with an attempt to set the specific issue of concern of this talk in a broad sociopolitical frame by setting out two brief scenarios, one widely political, the other one more personal. Let us call this issue, for now anyway, whether an exhibition can be used as a critique of exhibiting without the task itself appearing to be illogical. First, on the wider level: I take the main characteristic of the system we live in Western democracies to be that of capitalist accumulation, and that this system in now driven relentlessly by a grouping of what I call the Corporate Tyranny (the term is not an original one of mine, I copy it from Noam Chomsky). And although the precursor formations of today’s Corporate Tyranny were formed and activated immediately after WW2,for my purposes here it is worth noting that since especially the 1970s the Corporate Tyranny has been much more concerned with the advancement of finance capital rather than industrial capital. It has subordinated the requirements of industrial capital to those of finance capital. And it is also worth remembering that one of the main mechanisms through which finance capital has gained its hegemonic position in Western democracies is that of accumulation through dispossession and on a global scale. Thus in this pattern of development the Corporate Tyranny is not only a financial elite, just as significantly it has come to dominate the legislative elites – in our own case here, the elected governments of in the transatlantic world, the Western countries. We can roughly characterize the main players of the Corporate Tyranny as some such as the Party of Wall Street, the Caucus of the City of London and the European Bourses such as Frankfurt, Paris and Zurich, and the Lobbyists of the Global Mega-corporations. All are necessarily linked through the common drive to attain and maintain the 3% compound interest. [1] In gaining this dominant position of control and influence in Western societies, the Corporate Tyranny has also become, through its increasing financial hold on them, a dominant player in presiding over and regulating cultural institutions. The institution I am going to try and say more about in the context of remarking on this exhibition, Cultural Décor, is the institution of the avant-garde – more particularly the Corporate Tyranny’s control of what I call the avant-garde model of the artistic subject (which I abbreviate to the acronym AGMOAS). [2] Second, on a less broad and more personal level: My entire formal education programme through which I passed during the period 1945-64 was a manifestation of the arrangements of what is called the Bretton Woods Accord. In my case this was what then was called primary and junior school (1945-50), grammar school (1950-58),art school (1958-64). I have not the time here to detail out a thorough exposition of the history of the Bretton Woods Accord except to state that this was an international agreement set up in 1944 which was concerned with the kind of public policy it was thought, that capitalism should develop post WW2. Two of the main architects of the agreement were Harry Dexter White for the United States and John Maynard Keynes for the United Kingdom. [3] The Bretton Woods Accord was the predominant financial arrangement of British public policy, including education, during the period I attended the above mentioned type of schools. All my education was free, in my case courtesy of grants from what was then called the West Riding Education Authority. I note the latter point to mark a contrast between my financial passage through art school and that of many, perhaps most, art students today. The Bretton Woods Accord remained more or less intact until Richard Nixon in 1971 initiated the major break in it when what is now called the Nixon Shock was enacted. What this enactment comprised was that Nixon unilaterally cancelled the direct convertibility of the US dollar into gold. This enactment was a considerable achievement of the Corporate Tyranny lobby against the Bretton Woods Accord which had insistently been conducted during the prior twenty-five years since the end of WW2. [4] One of the primary aims of the Corporate Tyranny lobby was to subject all public services to increasing privatization, not least education. And the increasing privatization of education is one of the important instruments through which the Corporate Tyranny controls and regulates cultural institutions, not least art school education. And through this regulation of art school education the Corporate Tyranny increasingly directs and influences the character of the AGMOAS. [5] So to focus for a few minutes on the exhibition, I am going to endeavor to construct a brief analysis of two sets of relations. These relations I take to constitute both the act of art practice and the exposure and distribution of the products of that practice. These are the sets of relations (1) The relation between exhibitionism and avant-gardism (2) The relation between practice and career. 2 LANCHESTER GALLERY PROJECTS 3 TERRY ATKINSON for the occasion of JCHP 28 February 2014 RESOURCE DOCUMENT It is no (1), the relation between exhibitionism and avant-gardism that I shall mostly attempt to expand upon in these remarks To explain more what I mean by ‘exhibitionism’ and ‘avant-gardism’ the following. I attempted to state what I mean by the term exhibitionism in a short section from an essay titled Exhibition and Exposition that I wrote for the publication Critical Decor which is part of this exhibition. I quote the relevant passage thus. “The main target [OF THE EXHIBITION] is itself the event of exhibiting. What might be called some such as exhibitionism? The whole organum seems to rest on the question ‘Why exhibit?’ Since the event of the exhibition is the standard procedure for artists to expose their work and is therefore a critical part of the relations of distribution (hereafter ROD) it seems to be a dominant force on many, probably most, artist’s relations of production (hereafter ROP). Thus, a second question, how significant an influence is exhibitionism upon the ROP? It is perhaps worth pointing out that in a list of the stream of twentieth century art isms (say Cubism, Constructivism, Conceptualism) then just formulating that exhibitionism is a problem seems to indicate that this particular ism is not of quite the same character as Cubism etc.
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