Disrupting The Gaze. Part 1: Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery.

Disrupting The Gaze. Part 1: Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery.



The Goldsmiths Radical Media Forum is a lecture series.
Thursday, February 21, 2013, 5:30 (New Academic Building 102)

Marc Garrett will present the first section of his two part paper 'Disrupting The Gaze'. Part one 'Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery'.

https://sites.google.com/site/mcradicalmedia/

We live in a world riddled with contradictions and confusing signals. Our histories are assessed, judged and introduced as fact yet there are so many bits missing. We accept what is given through sound bite forms of mediation and end up using misinformation as our cultural foundations, and then we build on these ‘acquired’ assumptions as our ‘imagined’ guidelines. This critique studies how contemporary artists are challenging these defaults through their connected enactments and critical inquiries of the existing conditions. It highlights a continual dialogue involving a historical struggle between what is condoned as legitimate art and knowledge, and what is not. It looks at a complexity, embedded in our culture and its class divisions in Britain. And draws upon struggles going as far back as the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, colonialism and slavery, to present day concerns with neoliberalism and its dominance. The Tate gallery is used as a reference point and a site of focus for these various historical and contemporary, political and societal conflicts.

The artists’ and art groups featured, such as Graham Harwood, Platform, Liberate Tate, IOCOSE, Tamiko Thiel, and Mark Wallinger; has each delivered a particular (unofficial and official) mode of art intervention at the Tate Gallery. Whether these artistic activities concern economic, ecological, historical, political or hierarchical conditions, they all connect in different ways. They meet, not through style or as part of a field of practice, but as contemporary artistic practitioners exploring their own states of agency in a world where our ‘public’ interfaces are as much a necessary place of creative engagement, as is the already accepted physical ‘inner’ sanctum of the gallery space. However, their work has become equally significant (perhaps even more) than, the mainstream art establishment’s franchised celebrities.