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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 image-

making in an age of saturation and instant commodication 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 lmmaker.

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 thenew 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 reection 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 Commodied 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-frst-century city. London: Penguin

Leslie, Esther. (2002) zeros, dots and dashes: drawing and the eu-

ropean 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

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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 ght back, and designers wieldthe 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 toexplain 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 eld of culture-jamming. Each holds a seed of inspiration and

hope for those pondering what is to be done.

Neoliberalisms ideology of individualism is reected 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.

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Power and representation

And yet all this masks the fact that never has there been such inter-

connectedness 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 co-

operation 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 eld,

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 par t 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 specic

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

signiers and signied somehow outside of human beings use of

them and bracketed off from the material world or the free-oating

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 r ight 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&d=657

accessed 16. October 2011

Originally published in Eye magazine, issue 66, winter 2007

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

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QUESTIONS: