Item talk:Q454

Use this kind of Sky publication invited artists, critical writers and curators to contribute their ideas and concerns, their critical observations and creative thinking. This coming together of similarities and differences, of points of connection and disconnection, of crossing and colliding trajectories will reveal an open agenda of contemporary views, positions and anxieties.

The publication online has a number of particular attributes that the familiar hard copy book doesn’t have and as such enables the underlying ideas behind ‘Use this kind of Sky’ to develop, it enables ‘the journey to continue without an itinerary’. The publication will in its virtual form be ‘book like’, it will have pages and sections were the work of invited artists, writers and curators can be seen however this work has the potential to take different forms, including the moving image, sound and establish links with other internet sources. This ‘activity’, also extends to the ability for the publication to be ‘in process’, it enables change and transformation to take place over a non specific time frame. This sense of a publication being open to movement both subtle and drastic and it not being confined to being a fixed commodity underpins the ideas behind the project as a whole.

John Rajchman ( 1) refers to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy as being ‘built up in a way such as there are different conceptual ‘bits’ each initially introduced in relation to a particular problem, then re-introduced into new contexts, and seen from new perspectives.’ Taken further this notion of ‘bits’ connecting and disconnecting, of relations being formed temporally only to disengage and reform with other ‘bits’ and so on offers away of establishing a resistance to the globalising forces of the hegemony of late capitalism. Deleuze’s notion of ‘delire’, of thinking outside the channel, beyond the canon, crossing over disciplines, boundaries and limits and as such continuously stepping out of the ‘furrow’ offers a further model for resistance. There is it seems a greater emphasis on the professionalisation and subsequent institutionalisation of our everyday activities, the promotion of a siege mentality in relation to Western democracies and the propaganda of the so-called ‘war on terror’ has resulted in an opportunity on the part of the State to tighten control on all aspects of our public and private activities. As is well known, the establishing of an institution, by its very coming into being, sets boundaries and agendas, it sets out the limits of its institutional remit the consequence of which is a lack of self criticism and the unwillingness to step outside its artificially created borders. Through its inception and its becoming institutional comes the corresponding promotion to power, but power translates also into stability, rigidity and immobility and the remorseless process of maintaining the status quo. This position is so perceptively laid out in Michel Foucault’s writings particularly in ‘Language Counter-Memory and Practice and also by Deleuze in his assessment of the politics of post 1968 in France, here he recognises the relations between the State and political groupings on both the left and the right and how their becoming institutionalised leads to the acting out of a kind state controlled game and its inevitable inability to effect serious change. In response he calls for a new kind of politics. We can attach to this assertion a more recent view from Jean Fisher , in her succinct essay for Dokumenta11 ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’ she questions the potential of an art under the banner of, ‘Political Art’ to have any power, suggesting that such work often operates as third rate journalism. Her reasoning is straightforward, privileged authority (her term) at what ever level local or global knows both how the game is played and by its being in power has determined the rules by which the game should be played. The processes by which protest is structured and acted out are governed consciously or unconsciously by the power of the privileged institution. Fisher goes onto suggest that effective resistance has to be oblique it has to recognise that it must skirt around the familiar paths, relinquish its historical structures and methods and seek new approaches and create unfamiliar tactics. Such a strategy raises the idea of the shapeshifter, the elusive, the awkward, the rude, the difficult, the antagonist, the one that continually disrupts that cannot be pinned down or channelled into a mainstream category, as De Certeau would describe as always being in the act of ‘escaping without leaving.