Episode 385- Useful Art explodes what your sense of Art with a capital "A" is and can be, with John Byrne, author of "Useful Art- How Activist Artists Can Change the World"

Introduction to Useful Art

0:00this is the conversation it's a podcast that goes behind the scenes of the contemporary art worlds including the useful art world or worlds hello and welcome to the show i'm michael shaw this is episode 385 with john byrne he is a professor of useful art at liverpool john moore's university

0:30school of art and design as far as we know the only professor of useful art in the world and he is also the author of the book useful art how activist artists can change the world and indeed there is a lot to talk about there is a lot to consider the website for this show is the conversationpod.com where i highly recommend as always i know that you as a listener are not taking

1:00enough advantage of the conversationpod.com because websites they're so 2000 and what 14 uh yeah no their images there you know i recorded a whole other intro where i said it's really tricky capturing useful art in images but that's not true there are actually a few very compelling and intriguing images that you should go check out on the episode page at theconversationpod.com

1:31that are from useful art projects and what is useful art i'll get to that in a moment i do want to tell you that i just not 20 minutes ago came back from the no kings march 28 2026 protest this is as far as i know the third

No Kings Protest

1:48no kings protest in the u.s uh and how funny that we are having an episode with an english guest speaking of no kings ironically but the reason i want to mention it and i could do a whole episode potentially with you know some of you listeners special guests etc about the efficacy of these protests but i will just say very briefly that there has been some mutterings in various places if you listen to the robbie canal episode from a few

2:21episodes back you hear he and i talking about that i challenge it with this sentiment of skepticism and he says no no these protests are important they're necessary they make change i would have followed up with him by saying okay let's get granular about this how do they make change exactly um certainly the perception of a lot of citizens in the street protesting the powers that be having a lot of angry

2:52signs a lot of signs with you know who behind bars i happen to carry around a very basic black and white printout of a guillotine that says stay positive and i colored in a little orange marker at the bottom little orange circular marker uh to make it a little more graphic but all that said and again i got to cut this off so that you guys can get to the episode but i did see a post on social media saying you know

Useful Art Concept

3:20these no kings things don't do anything people should be in the streets every day cutting off commerce you know whether it's a factory or you know obviously the tech giants etc i don't remember the specifics but you probably have seen or heard something similar all that to say that useful art that we this new concept to you presumably new concept to you which has to do with doing art that makes some form of change some form of change whether it is in your community in your neighborhood or

3:55something more broad in terms of scope or reach it's a very interesting thing to think about and not only is it interesting it's a paradigm shift in thinking about what artists can do this is the

Neoliberal Occupation

4:10sort of most consequential sociopolitical political activism episode that we have had since the max haven episodes several years ago his book money after art art after money we talk about art and activism and activist art projects and things like that if you haven't heard those they can be found on the libsyn l-i-b-s-y-n iteration of the podcast or you can just go to max haven site where he has all four of our episodes on one page highly recommend if you're not familiar with those but

4:47this is the first time since max haven that we've really gotten into how an artist a visual artist can make change and what that looks like and there are many examples everything from an artist you may have heard of tanya braguera to a collective ruin grupa that you may not be familiar with just from the sound of it but they were the ones who curated documenta 15 that had all that controversy controversy because of that one image but in fact it was a very different story on the ground and

5:21document as john and i talk about particularly in the latter half you will hear as a public feed listener to the show a little more than the first half of our conversation to hear the full nearly two hours about an hour and 48 minutes you have to go to patreon.com slash the conversation pod where for as little as a dollar a month you can support the show and in fact you can also support the show non-financially at the conversation pod.com by by giving us a great rating on apple podcasts

5:52or spotify or whatever platform you listen on also go to our youtube page look up the conversation art podcast on youtube um and i plan to have this the video version of this conversation on youtube at a certain point it's it's in the queue oh i do want to tell you about one very crucial reference that i neglected to include in my last intro recording that is the association of arte utile

6:23which is basically a you know a version of useful arts playbook there is a recipe book for useful art making slash project slash thinking slash learning at arte that's a-r-t-e dash util util dot org it's going to be linked on the episode page so if you are curious about past projects that you can use to inspire you that's where you want to go thank you for listening to the show i hope you are doing well uh as i say i hope you're doing well relatively speaking or despite it all which is to say the

Art World and Activism

7:00nightmare that we are living in on so many levels yes we are still very much there and yet we can also i know a lot of you do compartmentalize so you can be and do your thing oh one other thing i want to share is that i did we did have the first iteration or the first meeting of the film discussion group that i was interested in starting you might have heard me mention in a prior intro and it went okay and i think the next one's going to be even better we're going to have at least one more person if you are interested reach out via the conversation our podcast at gmail.com or dm on patreon or on

7:40instagram and let me know your top five films and then we will talk about possibly bringing you on i'm not going to be hugely elitist about it it's just to get a sense of what your taste is make sure that you're a listener to the show on in some shape or form and then we'll take it from there all right thank you for listening and i will talk to you again briefly at the tail end until then enjoy

8:16so you are not the first scouse that i've had on the show did i see did i get close scouse or scouse it's scouse usually scouse scouse scouse scouse yeah got it you are you're the second scouse to be on the show do you want to take a guess or should i just tell you who the prior one was oh just tell me do you know a woman named gabrielle de la puente um i don't you know do you know the white pube oh

8:51yes of course yes yeah yeah yeah yeah no that makes sense yeah they they did form in london but but now her partner is in still in london but she's back in liverpool yeah no there was a couple yeah there were some people from um representatives in the white pube when i did a a book talk in deading books in liverpool they're great and and what's the liverpool art community like from your perspective the liverpool art community is um and very good

9:22it's kind of it's quite quite expansive really it's it's liverpool's a funny city it's quite small how many people roughly um city is about 400 000 to 450 000 the um council area that surrounds it's

Liverpool Art Community

9:40just over a million um but the city itself is very navigable you can walk from one side to the other pretty quickly um but it's one of its kind of boasts online is that it's got more museums and galleries than any other city outside london which it has most of those have kind of old pillars outside them i mean it's a legacy of liverpool's brief wealth um and we've got because of that you know there's a there's a tate tate liverpool here yeah uh we've got quite a few um interesting museums

10:17and galleries so around that and via the art school there's quite a good there's quite a good arts community and it's always been a thriving cultural community as well there's lots of film making going on and lots of um lots of music still mm-hmm how many how many galleries would you say they are rather either a combined commercial and uh non-profit roughly oh combined commercial non-profit that's a that's a tough question um because they're kind of popping up all of the time if i kind of extend

10:50it to sort of the maker spaces and they go into the spaces that are kind of maybe more associated with graphic design and illustration i'd say kind of sort of 15 to 20. but like let's say on a typical weekend would one of your colleagues and or former or current students say hey john you got to come to this opening at such and such place yeah there's quite there's quite a lot of openings there's quite a lot you know quite quite a lot of bits and pieces going on um a lot of my ex students uh have been

11:23pretty proactive in the in the art scene so they've set up um studio spaces with galleries attended to them etc so there's there's usually there's usually something going on and and on a typical weekend are you you game for that or do you want a little bit of a break since you know i'm nobbing all week

11:47i'm pretty i'm pretty game for it because like uh you know if people are kind of getting out again getting on with stuff and and doing stuff it's it's nice to go in and and see some things um as long as that doesn't interfere with my football i'm i'm quite happy you are not alone in that all right well let's talk about one of the main reasons that we are here it's your book and i want you to have the pleasure of seeing my uh my stickies that's okay that's

12:19awesome yeah so we started with uh we started with the um the cheapies this little you know cat guy and then we eventually we eventually upgraded to the professional oh oh that's when it got serious yeah yeah so so you are the professor of useful art at liverpool john moore's university school of art and design yeah and one of the things that i don't even think i got a chance to ask you when we spoke before but are you how many other people in the world are professors of useful art at this time

12:55i think at this moment in time if i'm correct in saying um i may be the only one

13:03wow yeah and how long have you had had this particular title i've been professor of useful art for just over four years now wow okay got it yeah but as your book underscores this uh movement

Book Publication and Events

13:20or this uh phenomenon or trying to find the right word this school if you will of art useful art started taking root at least in the early 2000s yeah yeah yeah it's been a while around for a while um but before we get into it one other thing i want to ask you is just like when is this book officially published or what is the official launch date of this book has it already happened it's already happened in the uk i think it might have happened in the us as well now but it was it was a couple

13:55of weeks it was about four weeks ago in uk uh okay in europe got it i think and how many events signings slash reading slash events have you done so far i've done two events so far i've got um several lined up um this this podcast is is is part of it it's great i've done a couple of little interviews um one was for um talk radio europe which was really really odd um kind of almost banal

14:30um and um but there's a couple of others that i'm looking forward to there's one in london in a couple of weeks time at conway hall and um then there's one in belfast as far as you know with one of the book festivals um so that that's in that's interesting that they it looks like they're going to be really kind of interesting events i'm really looking forward to next friday next friday um doing a book event at tpab which may be one of your bookmarks and that's why that's of interest to me

15:08is we're going to kind of use the book the conversation is going to open up conversations about next steps for the useful art space etc which i'm kind of i'm sure we'll we'll touch on but that's going to be nice because it feels like activating things because because i wrote the book as something to be kind of you know contested and fought over and used and questioned for sure there's no question about that what about beyond the uk at this point and god willing the states right

15:38oh yeah beyond the uk at the moment um i'm looking for it i'll probably be doing a talk in the not too distant future uh at zkm and carlsra uh i'm looking to where's that that's in that's in germany and carlsra was zkm's um kind of a big um media arts um gallery museum and uh which is now

16:09now now directed by alistair hudson who also may be one of your bookmarks so that that's that that's for that one for sure um probably i'm looking at doing something in um end of an aber museum in the netherlands and i'm also looking at hopefully doing an online talk as well um probably with ruben grouper right it'd be nice it'd be nice to travel over to that uh no invites to the to the

International Events and Talks

16:40states yet but um that'd be proper game for that that'd be good yeah for sure and in fact we will come back around to the states and uh the art world uh vis-a-vis useful art versus europe for example i i feel like we need to dive in and and the the place yeah the the place that i feel like we should use as a um starting point or a contextualizer is this the neoliberal occupation so i'm just going to

17:13read i'm going to read periodically from your book maybe at certain points you will read from your book if you have it there but or from the uh document that i shared with you that has uh now 13 pages of excerpts um but let me just read from towards the very beginning of the book uh you're talking about the architecture group assemble which won the turner prize in 2015 and you wrote my key argument in this section is that we now live within the condition of a globalized neoliberal occupation and

17:46that the abiding logic of this occupation the financialization of all activities both work and leisure into measurable and interchangeable exchangeable commodities is the condition that we must resist and subvert so the the sort of premise or the conceit of all of your arguments all of your um descriptions of the the art world such as it is and and um where we could and should and

18:19have gone with useful art in many cases over the more recent years is against this backdrop of the yeah neoliberal occupation can you with maybe uh commercial art world minded uh westerners in mind maybe give us a little bit of a more um vernacular description of that scenario yeah i once um one of the reasons um one of the reasons i i kind of map out the condition of neoliberal occupation as

18:57a as i call it at length in the book is because the book's intended to be something that can as we kind of mentioned in passing there's something that's intended to be used and something that's aimed at a broader audience uh initially uh the premise of the book was a much more theoretical and an academic one but one of the things that i've noticed in teaching and i hope this will help to encapsulate um your question really quickly is that a lot of my students you know in their early

19:2820s etc have as we all have a kind of um you know they they're born within this condition so we all we all have a cultural amnesia where we start to click into the fact that you know it's always been this way etc but i'd argue that neoliberal occupations very very historically specific probably stretching back 50 years or so to the 1970s and it's something that's really started

Useful Art vs Social Engagement

19:57to have a real deep impact on every level of our culture and our working lives i think you know it's um i'm not the only one to make those arguments that the culture industries have have kind of captured what were once the languages of the avant-garde you know the idea of artistic freedom etc and use them as kind of covers for um propping up notions of precarity and precarious labor um and forms of alienation are

20:29often passed off as you know one being able to do flexible work and and being creative about one's portfolio portfolio um but i thought in my experience i i noticed um after the collapse of the soviet bloc and with the explosion of biennials you know liverpool is one of the many um ex um monopoly capital economies that started to reboot itself through through through culture via biennial culture

21:05and that we started to get a kind of a sort of a contemporary art esperanto that was that was expanding across the world there's good things as well as bad things to that and everything has it everything has its nuances of course um but it started to strike me that that this contemporary art world was was was moving dangerously more hand in glove with the with the financialization of everything

21:35um uh you know condition of neoliberal occupation that we live in and we live in under and i also noticed that that concomitant with that was uh a set of ideas which tended to say that um actually you know neoliberalism and money etc is a really you know terrible terrible thing but the art world gives you a kind of a way beyond that and um the more i saw the commercial art world develop and expand and the more i

22:08i saw friends and colleagues of mine in who had positions in institutions being subject to the pressures of having to prop up their institutions financially um the more i began to think that actually you know

22:24that's becoming quite a dangerous conceit it you know to you know one of those delicious fictions which could actually underpin the great strengths of of culture and particularly art as as as as a toolkit for dissent and pointing out what could be what could be alternative

22:45among many other things that you said i do want to go back to almost probably the beginning just for a second which is that you describe the book as being a little bit more accessible to wider audiences yeah which i think is a really interesting distinction because as much as that's the case i mean it is very uh legible uh comprehensible as opposed to really you know academic or even more so hardcore academic

23:16language which is very dense and challenging and whatnot it still is presenting a lot of new if not complicated ideas to the reader right but i guess the question is and i i don't want to take too long on this because it's not that important to all the things we have to talk about but is there a version of the useful art academic dialogue i think you kind of taught you've kind of quote you quote a bunch of people in the book but is there is has that dialogue amongst the academics who've been talking

23:47about it been going on and continuing to go on in such a way that it's written about in a more opaque and uh academic sort of way not so much i think most of the people who have been involved in it um by default of of being kind of makers and curators and doers and that you know they've literally not had the the time to take pause to write that in in an academic way um i'm gonna probably myself switch to

24:18that and there's some ideas around to kind of put together a useful art reader which would encapsulate some of those more um in-depth and academic discussions and debates um but yeah it was it was just a choice we made when i started to work with manchester university press to to try and do something that that had a had a broader reach rather than um something that used all of the kind of levers and pulleys of the more sophisticated academic arsenal that that that one would usually

24:55reach out to and certainly certainly normally i would as well so it was quite an adventure for myself

Aesthetic Value vs Use Value

25:01yeah yeah i'm gonna quote quite a bit from your book in a second but i think i want to set it up by mentioning a couple of projects you probably talk about 10 at least 10 if not more projects that are examples of

25:24useful art home baked is is a bakery in liverpool correct yeah you talk about at the beginning um you talk about the group assemble this architecture group that won the turner prize we'll get into other examples but one of the i think most obvious questions for anybody reading this book and or hearing about use this phenomenon or this uh this school of useful art again for lack of a better word of what how to describe useful art as a thing is isn't that just social engagement or even more

26:02isn't this just engaging with the world using art as the label but just really doing a thing you know opening a bakery um offering uh building supplies to the community with assemble etc so that is kind of like i think one of the big questions around this and we'll obviously get into it but yeah before we do i just wanted to mention that i do want to start to give listeners more context as we go yeah and this is again from early on in the book you quote the writer boris groys who's 2009 article self

26:41design and aesthetic responsibility yeah roy suggests the contemporary art world seems to be in an almost bipolar state of flux oscillating back and forth between hopes to intervene in the world beyond art and disappointment even despair due to the impossibility of achieving such a goal yeah faced with this dilemma groys argues that the contemporary artist is forced to choose between two options either compete head-on with celebrity culture freeze week just happened in los angeles so for people who don't

27:16know exactly know exactly what celebrity culture is it's not necessarily just celebrities and celebrity culture it can be seen simply through something like freeze the art fair or miami you know basel etc um so groys argues the contemporary artist is forced to choose between two options either compete head-on with celebrity culture or the artist or the image of the artist becomes at least if not more important than the art they actually make or on the other to opt for an alternative where the

27:49artist attempts to quote socially engage unquote with communities by co-producing artworks with them going on a little bit more more specifically the second of these approaches which has been a curatorial staple for museums and biennials alike since the last decade of the 20th century became contentious for its alleged complicity with the financially driven political logic of neoliberalism this concern tends to manifest in the accusation that forms of useful art and by proxy the idea of useful art and the

28:23useful museum are more public workshop than aesthetic display utilitarian at best and dangerously apolitical at worst so to me that sounds like one of the many arguments that have been made against this idea of useful art or socially engaged art or what have you um but before i let you dive into that is an yet another contextual reference i want to go back to what you've done so far with the book because

28:58you've had at least one hopefully more now people who have pushed back so would you like to share with us a moment in which you presented your book and you got a particular reaction yeah um when i've presented the book one of the first questions that kind of comes up um is is do you think that there's a future for museums and galleries i think one of the things that i found really interesting and quite appealing

29:29about kind of working within the idea of useful artists is the whole concept tends to to elicit pushback and largely from within the art world it's quite easy to to to tread on sensitive toes even if you're not really really trying to and i think you know one of the pushbacks that you usually get is which i know we'll get into in the conversation so i'm not going to go off on on too much of a

30:01tangents of it now is the idea that there's there's something very very special and sacred about art art with a capital a and um any any attempt to destabilize the kind of sedimented orthodoxy of what art with a capital a might mean um especially in this very polarized environment tends to cast you as some kind of impish non-believer and actually did you say impish impish non-believer

30:36where did you get impish from

30:40because i quite i quite like teasing people quite right right right sort of yeah i quite like you know the aristotelian notion of kind of being the gnat on the back of the donkey okay yeah quite quite quite like doing that yeah whenever to find a donkey right well you let me let me just interject for a second because i want you to get to you you're you're getting there but i want you to get to the guy that you told me about last time and i don't know if there have any been more guys but just like can you like take us to that moment i want to know what the temperature of the room was like you know

31:14what i mean oh which one was that well you just mentioned a guy who who last time we spoke who got pretty upset i it was the gist of it does that ring a bell yeah no yeah no that that's happened that's happened quite quite quite often i think one of the things i mentioned to you last time i don't know if it's the right example is is is is way back when we had um a discussion in in liverpool it was actually part of liverpool biennial in in um 2006 i kind of helped to i co-authored the conference for

31:48that biennial and stephen wright started to talk about useful art and the whole atmosphere in the room was was just kind of dropped it was really really venomous uh i was really shocked that that amongst very liberal intellectuals from the art world you could still upset people that easily um by just challenging some kind of cherished notions of i just thought people would be a

32:19little bit more kind of self-reflexive and and and and nimble yeah um but it there was a very very kind of powerful pushback which i was appealing to me because i kind of i was sort of you know like most people my age was was brought up through punk so anything that kind of elicited elicited there's a strong reaction kind of maybe there's maybe there's something there but more to it than that i kind of started to draw a line in my own kind of thinking between those strong reactions and um

32:57and people wanting to maintain power absolutely yeah i'm so glad you said that can i let me just hold that thought if you have another one because i do want to jump in because you are making me think that one for lack of a better analogy to the reactions that you were getting is when and so this was something that came up around uh this journalist bianca bosker did this book get

33:28the picture where she sort of immersed herself in the in the new york art world and one of the themes or uh sort of things phenomena again to use that word that was coming up is that people were protective of their art world secrets right yeah so that's a good the same way that the gatekeepers the dealers of the collectors particularly the dealers are gatekeepers of art world protocol um uh secret

33:59backdoors is the same way maybe that the people who were in that room that you so beautifully described were feeling their careers threatened yeah that's for sure absolutely i think um you know there's there's there's there's there's lots of layers going going on there you know a lot of the people who are so easily upset have literally put their lives into these things and spent a long time getting themselves into positions of of power um which on you know if it's used well i've got no problem with

34:34um and uh there are kind of some ideas that they have that they feel are worthwhile and worth protecting and are of of help to other people that i've got no problem with that either it's when that spins into an orthodoxy that can't be challenged um especially in the art world especially in a world that that ironically prides itself on being a the critical crucible where you can pull everything

35:05apart in a way that you you can't in in in you know i'm using the term ironically which you call in the commons um and that's instantly foreclosed because it it's it's just beyond the pale um kind of pointed to me that there's something going on in the in the peripheral vision of the art world and also that to my surprise that that peripheral vision wasn't very far away it was quite you know there was quite there

35:36was some quite tunnel vision focus going on you know that the overton window of the contemporary art world despite the despite the kind of ideologies that many of the people were getting upset had about themselves about being kind of more liberal than everybody else or more kind of argumentative than anybody else easy to able to take on both sides of an argument being a practice of cultures etc um there's this sort of self-gained um idea of how they operate in the world could be punctured so

36:09was so brittle and could be punctured so easily kind of made me think that maybe that's actually not quite the case maybe that brittleness is due to an inability or to to want to really think things through well if we take that thread a little bit further and get into to whatever extent we can the heads of some of these people what i mean let's just take two examples a dealer and a curator at a museum

Tanya Bruguera's Work

36:41right yeah i think with the dealer it's a non-starter right because the capitalist art world the neo liberal art world the art world of celebrity and um and objects the fancier and the you know more expensive the better that's how they make a living yeah absolutely um the curator on the other hand it's a little obviously a little more complicated because they don't depend necessarily on the

37:13fancy objects uh the you know the high high priced objects however on second thought they maybe they do depending on the museum especially one of the more commercial museums whether it's tate liverpool in your backyard or you know any of the museums here the hammer museum where i just was at made in la yesterday museum of contemporary art los angeles la county museum of art one way or another however much money they need for maintenance for in the case of the la county

37:48museum this massive new architectural building you know that would that's going to be open to the public next month i believe um we're talking about benefactors right and so if we get into the mind of the collector vis-a-vis benefactors to what extent does taking such a radical approach to art um alienate them from their benefactors yeah i think i think they're they're great points michael and i think one of the one of the

38:25things that i tried to tease out in the book and you were quite sort of like deathly starting to scratch your way out in the in the introduction in this line of flight is you you can approach this as a kind of a bifurcation uh you know useful art or or useless art the useless art being contemporary art which is ironically useful because it's useless and useful art useful art that's something that's that's that's just that's just commercial that's kind of tainted with money etc and and the the the

38:58kind of the naivety of that that very ready to hand um oversimplification um if not pointing towards a solution certainly points towards that a problem i wanted to kind of scratch away at because you know for that that that can seek to even have any run in time kind of means that a lot of people are prepared to use that as a shortcut and then you know just not not engage and you're right you know the um you

39:31know the the stereotypical um dealer who goes to basil deals in commodities there's something that that they need to to buy and sell to people whether it's individuals with a lot of money um you know from kind of you know wealthy benefactors to oligarchs to kind of major collections um you know we know how these these these these net these networks work of placing things in major galleries and other people buying them and secondary kind of sales etc i mean we all know that it's um yeah and and ironically i

40:05have got that much of a problem with that as long as people just honest about it uh does depend on the the protocols of a historical art world with a capital a and if you start to get outside of those protocols it starts to collapse a little bit because people are saying well what am i giving you my money for you know you know i want to own something by an artist with a capital a you know it's you know the um so so you're right that's that's the kind of quite quite simple one and the curator can kind of play a game in between those two and and you know and there are some absolutely fabulous curators

40:41um and and that's that's that becomes quite interesting as well and i think that was the thing that boris groyce was so helpfully pointing towards was you can begin to co-opt forms of radical social engagement back into the overton window of the art world by saying they do certain things that still make them art you know there's an identifiable artist there's kind of an idea that's an idea that's an artwork many people can take part in they can even still go on afterwards

41:17etc but there's some recognizable coordinates that land them within this trajectory of of art as we as i say as we as we know it or knew it to be and one of the things that i like doing with my students and we discussed you know pre this podcast as well and it's similar to the idea of looking at the history of neoliberal occupation it ain't that old uh is that the art world with a that that encapsulates the cultural value of art with a capital a is only like 250 years old as well

41:51you know it's been historically palpably different and kind of most of us know that but most of us want to forget it so so rather than saying the art that i'm interested in is social engagement or a social work by another name it's a kind of a what if it's a kind of what if we actually allowed all of the good things about art to continue developing what would it become and what would we need to rethink in order to

42:23let that happen and isn't it a good idea to start thinking about that right now because if we don't neoliberal capture will turn everything into a commodity and that opportunity and that chance will be lost all of the amazing values that we hold on to so so so firmly about about art with a capital a as we knew it or knew it to be will will begin to just become a financial proxy right and i don't

42:55want to let that moment past yeah do you think this is uh coming at what some of what you were talking about from just a slightly different angle but it goes back to uh something that emerged from my conversations from both reading max haven's book art after money money after art and also our subsequent conversations which is just simply put the idea that in order to take on the neoliberal world to or in

43:32order to take on capitalism in order to take on the powers that be whatever even just local things that doing it via art as a vehicle somehow is more effective than let's say just organizing activism etc right because it as if for lack of a better example you have this sort of um protective layer or like in the case of the yes men among other examples you have you have a um a shield you have a proxy

44:07you have a um something that people can um i don't know identify uh i don't know i'm having a hard time articulating it but i i know you know where i'm going um is uh useful art you know and and all the things that you just talked about as far as making change before everything is completely completely consumed and commodified is that angle where you're using the sort of uh vehicle of art because it has

44:42you know the things that it has that just regular old activism and organizing doesn't have is that an important part of the equation i think it's an important part of the equation uh for sure it's like um um this is a really complex territory that we're in now and one of the really interesting next steps about about useful art which is why without jumping too far ahead which is why i became interested in thinking about use value as opposed to aesthetic value would be to think of like how to evaluate useful

45:16art because because because dressing up any kind of kind of sort of social placebo as art which is something that i agree with claire claire bishop with i just don't agree with the outcomes of her book um is is something to guard against you know to sort of to to stage good as art is something that can be um quite quite pernicious but i think it's a different texture of activity to say

45:49what is it about art that we value in terms of being able to affect change being able to get us to think differently getting us to imagine beyond ourselves but for it to be more than simply representational for it to be um a toolkit that's operationally used in the world to affect these changes on a local level and that the next step for me as well would be rethinking then well how do we define what art

46:23is and who artists can be yeah so so it's a way of for me of evolving um all of the good that we've

Ruben Grupera's Project

46:35developed within the paradigm of art as we know or knew it to be and and and allowing that to allowing that to have traction in the world and to have an effect in a way that it's now it's now it's now not being protected by a museum and art gallery system that's that's that's that's taking culture and saying let's keep the flame alive because of the capture of neoliberal economy um it's it's

47:07about saying well actually there is no other space what we've got to do is is act now to enforce these changes and as you're saying um art allows us a very different set of protocols and ways of thinking and doing things that kind of activism on its own may not be able to do yeah you know there's there's that imagination of what if we really did this differently what if we did this otherwise you know it's that it's that it's that it's that difference between um decentralized but yeah we'll

47:41get into this later as well it's that kind of subtle difference between like deregulation and decentralization where deregulation says yeah you can have a false form of autonomy as long as you follow the same rules as us usually financially and deregulation which is yeah knock yourself out do it differently i'm going to read more i'm going to go way ahead in your book because you use the term use value versus aesthetic value and and you mentioned that several places in the book but i wanted to

48:12jump ahead well into the book you quote the writer george udis is that how you pronounce his last name good for udis art is no longer only in museum and galleries but has migrated to other areas media fashion social action investment funds i'd have to hear about what that looks like urban revitalization new technology security recovery programs for at-risk youth etc for this reason he suggests that

48:42activist artists should begin looking for their collaborations beyond the established borders of recognizable and institutionalized silos of expertise towards other diverse communities particularly those that are removed from hegemonic western cosmology quote unquote whether we encounter home baked this is the bakery uh useful art project that you talk about at the beginning of the book which you can talk more about if it comes up or the farmer's arms another uk based

49:12useful art project whether we encounter them as observers users or both or whether we encounter them on site online or as re-presentations in a museum or gallery we have an opportunity to approach them in terms of their potential as use value rather than aesthetic value to put it another way as instances of operational possibility and impact on the real world as opposed to observational or propositional

49:42representations of that world so that's a big distinction that you make and and the thing that most immediately comes to mind which i feel like you sort of implied in what in your last comments was or is even though you're making this distinction use value versus aesthetic value in describing what art can do versus activism you know in making that distinction isn't

50:13there always an implied opportunity for aesthetic value even if it's a different way of perceiving or making aesthetic value maybe and the short answer to that yeah of course um but what i wanted to do and what i was at pains to point out is is again i think there's a difficulty with that that i've encountered um we are so programmed to associate art with the capital a with aesthetic value whatever that

50:47is and a lot of people have a very loose notion of what what aesthetics actually are it's one of those words isn't it that you know common words that we all use um you know um like like the avant-garde people don't tend to use that term as much but you know 20 years ago people avant-garde this avant-garde that and it was joyful to say what do you actually mean by the avant-garde well you know it's the avant-garde yeah um yeah um yeah yeah but yeah but what is the avant-garde and you know that's then they start to

51:21look around for help um you know and and um so that that whole idea of uh you know i think you know a great again there's another really really interesting etymology that that we know that that's worth briefly reviewing when can talks about the aesthetic he's talking about something that can be a sunset as much of a painting you know and points to a political affiliation yet to be you know it's and anything that gives you that experience you know it's a kind of a it's a political it's it points

51:54to a political becoming in which we can be better humans um by dint of you know a couple of steps to happen through in the uk through fry and bell and then you know with greenberg in modernism etc it gets reduced to this idea that the aesthetic is only something that you can have as an experience in front of art which makes you special as a viewer because you can have the aesthetic experience uh the artwork special because it can give you that aesthetic experience and you excavate the you know the the aesthetic value that the artist has imported into this world and you extract that but you know

52:29that's a very you know that's that's that's a very reductive notion of the aesthetic and um i think that um what i'm scratching away at is trying to open up and make more porous our conversations of what art now is or could become that might if not escape the gravity of the aesthetic would would force us into a radical rethink of what the aesthetic is or could become as well and that it's not simply the opposite of

53:01use value of use value you know um we can get into the other conversations about you know my my leanings into um mark's talking about the um qualities of nature of of the you know use value and labor later on in the conversations but but to reduce art to a simple equation um which we're in danger of doing that makes it endlessly commodifiable and um to use a weakened and generalized notion of the aesthetic

53:38which is kind of more often than not to do with appearance now is to run the risk of losing both the value of art the value of the aesthetic and i think to supplement that or or even in the short term to replace that by proposing what what's the use value of this what what is it about useful art that does make it palpably different from forms of of of straightforward activism what is it about that

54:09creative process that more of us can tap in besides artists with a capital a um and effect real world change before it's too late is is worth thinking about capturing activating moving forward with and learning how to rethink and recognize and you know to round off that's really what george was was trying to do because you know i the the conversation we were having about people getting hot under the collar back in in in 2006 the keynote of that was georgia decently just written his book the expediency of

54:44culture which which i still think is is a brilliant book and he'd noticed um because he was a professor of of spanish that he was starting to get asked to become parts you know to to uh become members of boards etc for all kinds of artistic programs that were happening in you know cities all around the world and he'd noticed that culture was changing because it was now often produced by conglomerations of of

55:14very different kinds of stakeholders who not long ago would have been at odds who wanted to you know who who came together to make culture not happen and he was interested in that um not because he thought it was some you know necessarily something that was it was it was just an observation of what what the new chapter of culture and especially especially biennial culture for us in the visual arts was was becoming and how it was operating so he was interested in kind of thinking that through and and what you could do with that and he

55:47was you know literally just pointing to the fact that there's some really interesting stuff that's going on but it's it's it's it's becoming beyond the overton window of the art world as we know it or knew it to be and and and and that art world can't recognize the next steps now you know what's the overton did did you mention oh it's it's the yes the overton window it's just a a phrase a phrase um um that was was probably being banded around a lot about about a decade ago the idea of the overton

56:23window is that that that when you work with a a group of language users you will eventually um have a a kind of a framework within which you can recognize what's what's going on very very easy that's where those shortcuts like the avant-garde and the aesthetic start to take place um but it can then become hard to shift that overton window you know and in order for to to understand the specificities of the art world you have to leave lots of kind of things out the overton window is like just a concept that applies to anything lots of things not just the

56:57art world right but that that if you um but you know you need to be continually critically checking you know you need it in order to be specific but there's a point where you get so specific that you start to miss all kind of possibilities yeah yeah you mentioned a number of projects particularly later in the book but certainly throughout and i'm going to read another little bit here but before i do just say that generally the artists that you or and the groups that you

57:37mentioned are going to be unfamiliar to most readers certainly outside of europe but even maybe within europe but a couple of names among others that are familiar one is suzanne lacy yeah who's in the states the performance artist who was able to do some sort of socially engaged uh useful artworks in the uk if i remember right and then the other big name that people will be familiar with if not more familiar

58:08even than suzanne lacy is tanya bergera who amazingly maybe because she's representing cuba you know which is um has an art community that is certainly diverse but is kind of limited in its in its stars maybe because of her being from there that's why uh and her work has been so critical uh and challenging of politics in cuba maybe that's why her name but and in any case she's she's somebody that you mentioned

58:39kind of throughout um um so i'm just gonna read a couple of things bergera began to ask a series of questions around what useful art might be and the challenges that useful art might present to artists audiences and museums alike how does an artist straddle the dichotomy between doing political art and acting politically how does an audience see or experience useful art when it might not be object-based or even played out in a museum or gallery space how is our experience as well as

59:10our understanding of art affected when there is no longer an audience in the traditional sense of the word when a work of useful art plays out at one-to-one scale in real time and in the real world in the light of this bergera also began to open up further lines of inquiry into how useful art might no longer need to be aesthetic object-based or even legal but instead would be intended to provide workable solutions to real world problems and social issues so this goes back to what i was asking about

59:42as far as how is it that art is a more effective way of doing things that help the world than you know just community engagement uh you know activism etc tanya bergera has done these has sort of been answering those questions with some of her work particularly one that comes to mind that you write about is where she gave uh visitors to an exhibition a megaphone where they could mention their problem their issues

1:00:15or something of that effect yeah tattle is whisper right right exactly um so i'm in that in lieu of uh another question out of that i want to i'm going to mention another project just to give this is give give listeners more of a scope uh of useful art so rolling jubilee um yes is that out of uh the uk or is it sort of decentralized as a project i think it's decentralized as a project i'd say okay

1:00:47okay so this is from kind of the middle of the book rolling jubilee immediately cancels purchase debt as a means to directly help members of the 99 while highlighting the business of debt as an issue for open political discussion as well as having raised 557 451 dollars at the time of the opening of the museum of arte util which we can talk about in a bit uh in december 2013 and having abolished 11 million plus of debt as a result strike debt which i guess is a sub section of rolling jubilee also

1:01:21published a debt resisters operation manual which helps citizens with a device on resisting debt as well as offering an opportunity to join the movement so strike debt i'm glad you know um i'm really it's great that you mentioned them they they actually came up in uh max haven's book uh art after money money after art as well here's a perfect example of useful art and i i if i remember right i feel like strike debt is one of the many projects that came out of occupy wall street i could be wrong

1:01:53about that okay yeah i think it has its roots that yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't necessarily have a question here but i guess i would you know maybe since you have so much experience in this area what is another useful art project that you think we should talk about before we run out of time not that we're about out of time but you know but that we should really get to right now yeah i mean they're gonna i'm gonna sound like sort of the the stock and trade answer there's so many michael um there are but but

1:02:27but there are and they all they all have have have their values at illustrating something yeah there are there are just so many examples aren't there as we said um but i think one that encapsulates a lot of what we've been talking about can help us begin to draw some lines of flight together before maybe we could continue to to have more conversations would be ruben grouper's role um as the collective curators of documenta 15 um and what i was going to say as well for me there's a kind of a line of flight which will

1:03:05hopefully help the listeners as well and they kind of seem on the surface so different but there's a similarity there's a um a homology structural similarity between strike debt and then rolling jubilee uh in that you know what what rolling jubilee was was was a use of perfectly accessible but hardly ever talked about or hardly ever used legal mechanisms by which major companies buy our debt continually

1:03:37and then resell it you know so part of you know there's two parts a it strikes people's debt but reminds us that this you know our debt especially via credit card is is circulated constantly for profit so so rolling jubilee just buy wow debt at the going rate which is a fraction of the cost

1:04:01and then strike it off rather than waiting for it to be paid back with interest so and one of one of the things i think ruben grouper did exceptionally well was to illustrate another possible art world right one that i like to call a useful art world that encapsulates several of the things that we've been been talking about um it's from a different one they're one of those projects that

1:04:33that comes from a different cosmology um there was a lack of fit and deliberately so between the usual protocols of filling museums and gallery spaces for 100 days and what went on before and what went after uh a kind of different set of ways of thinking that emerge from the conditions under which ruben grouper came into being and also choices that the the artists within ruben grouper had made as well

1:05:05to to opt out of that commercial star art world that you were talking about earlier on that we all know so well a couple of clarifying questions about them that you may not have gotten in to in the book but i you certainly implied at the very least if not actually got to but one that we should just say for listeners that they were the artist group that was selected by documenta to curate yeah or to do

1:05:37what they would with documenta 15 which was in 2000 what 23 4 2 23 i think 23 yeah that sounds right they're from indonesia yeah correct the other thing that i think is really important to underscore about them that you did have in the book is that they the members of ruined grupa and maybe you can talk about how many roughly that is they didn't have museums or galleries ever really as part of their art world

1:06:12there is their community so they were coming to art from a very non-commercial non-westernized even way right and that maybe is fundamental in the way they think about art and were able to approach documenta i mean maybe they also were getting doing a lot of consuming through books and magazines and and online and what have you but how do you want to describe how they came to the table i think they

1:06:44it was very interesting i think how you know how they came to the table but in the the the the director of of documenta is one of those um moments that very good curators um get offered i've heard it described in the past as as you know the curatorial everest you know once you've done that what else can you do because it's such a big deal so i thought it was very brave of documenta frankly in the first

1:07:17place to go against that grain of of the individual and to give it to a group and and but let me just interject for a second was that curator was it did it come down to the one curator of documenta to make that call uh no it was a group decision no the um documenta um decided that the curator for documenta 15 would be ruined grouper the group right and and but when you say documenta how many

1:07:51people are we talking about who made that decision do you think um i'm genuinely not sure of the the dynamics of the selection committee but there's the there is okay so there you go uh to hear the full our 47 48 minute conversation it is on patreon for patreon supporters by going to patreon.com the conversation pod for again as little as a dollar a month ideally let's say five dollars a month you can support the show and get all the bonus content um and big thanks to contributor

1:08:29berkeley young for all the work she's been doing including on youtube videos as well as this made in la video slash slideshow that is up on patreon right now so thank you very much for listening i hope you're doing well feel free to reach out for this that and the other uh and of course you can check us out on instagram at artist podcast me at michael shaw studio until then or until our next episode 386

1:08:59be well survive and thrive and ciao for now