Live Blog @ The Stills (2): It's the Economy, Stupid

Some Live Blog, this: I am starting off in the basement (the staff at Stills are charming and are having a fascinating conversation that I am rudely listening to, taking notes to steal their ideas about objectivity). I have a coffee, I have an internet connection and I have the curator's introduction to read.

The scale of the exhibition is vast: they have some serious names on the walls and the screens, and the theme serious. I have decided that I need to start off by examining the approach of the curators. My usual approach, to just pile in and work out the intention later, is not going to work. I need to find a path, and I am willing to let the curators guide me.

"What is changing is our relationship to the economy as a necessary response to the economy’s own transformation. In the unforgettable vision of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, all that is solid melts into air – yet again. The end of the Cold War, symbolically represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, generated a number of ‘turns’ in the context of contemporary art: turns to collectivism, to the making of archives, to social bonds, relations and communities, to labour, to biopolitics and the document, to struggle. This restless quest for the right ‘tag’ has been one way of saying that contemporary art is, finally, becoming new as it focuses its efforts on the exploration of the material conditions that make reality what it is."

In other words, the art selected is not content to sit on the sidelines and enjoy itself with games of taste or style. It wants to examine how it fits into the world, what are the economic conditions that allow art to find itself on the walls of the gallery - or perhaps in the stylish bedroom and boardroom of those who can afford to buy it.

"Post-1989 art has developed new strategies to reveal capitalism’s new frontier: ourselves."

Back when capitalism had an ideology worth the battle, it was more concerned with conquering new territory. Winning nations for the market was the prize: then the USSR collapsed and communism no longer gave capitalism a good enough battle. So it turned on the consumers, trying to conquer their minds, shape their behaviour. 

Like the way that I have tried to turn myself into a brand. The VileArts is not Gareth K Vile, but a brand that people buy. Lucky it is so cheap.

The curators note that art from Eastern Europe is far more explicit in its interest in this internalised oppression - probably because the transition from communism to capitalism happened relatively recently, and was very abrupt. In the UK, capitalism has been knocking about for most of the past millennium in various forms. In Poland, it turned up less than three decades ago. 

They add that many of the artists are women, because the process of capitalism's advance are often gendered - based on ideas of male and female that are frequently static and even old fashioned.  

So, I am expecting the exhibition to reveal the human impact of economic decisions: not simply in the form of shocking images of exploited workers, but describing the most subtle effects of capitalism on personal identity.