Only one week to go

Only one week left to have your say on the post conference Blog- feels a bit sad that only one person has found time to post a comment. I think socially engaged arts practise offers a new way forward towards relevance, function and audience. It's important to learn from the past but in some ways this is a forward looking movement which needs to shed a lot of baggage if it's to move forward to quote Ludwig Wittgenstien

"getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beggining to think in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed, they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expresion, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment."

unfinished Business

Please join this Blog. I really enjoyed the socially engaged business the other day but felt that the Q and A session left a lot unsaid. So in the spirit of third space encounters and relational aesthetics I thought we could try a two week Blog. I felt really angry with the session on lots of levels but really pleased it had got me thinking. I've worked in the public realm across this shared terain and think the session was a little up it's own arse and very artist focussed. Most of this work is commisioned for a specific purpose and with money ringfenced within a remit - I like the fact that artists challenge this remit and push the boundries but we are brought in to perform a social function within a context. The place for the artists ego and broader discourses around the social function of the arts can be a distraction. The examination of relevance, audience and context would be more productive in moving this work forward. If context is only 50% of meaning whats the other 50% I hope it's not encoded in an outdated irrelevant philosophy of Art Faculty Aesthetics. Hope this is contentious enough to encourage others to Blog

STEVE