articles

Lower, Less Barren Plateaus

By Stefan Szczelkun, 24 July 2012
Image: Image: Françoise Dupré’s floor installation, Brixton Art Gallery for the Brixton Festival, 1983, made with carpet rolls left behind by previous business

Can the rarefied writing of '80s art theorists offer anything to a reconsideration of the theory-shunning Brixton Artists Gallery of the same era? Stefan Szczelkun weighs the potential obscurity of non-textual praxis against canonising 'architextures'

 

In 1981 a popular uprising made the Brixton area in South London a no-go zone for police for about 3 days. I lived behind the prison at 140 Lyham Road and it was wonderful to walk down Acre Lane and to feel it was in the hands of the people, at least for a short while.i

 

The Brixton Art Gallery formed in 1983 and was from the start run by open democratic meetings once a month. Exhibitions in the three large spacious arches under the railway station lasted three weeks, the following week being used to demount the last show and set up the new one. The first 50 exhibitions showed nearly 1000 artists and space was big enough to exhibit large groups of 50 or more artists. The gallery was open daily, with the artists who were showing as the main invigilators. It was adjacent to the famous street market so it didn't have any problem in attracting the local population, who would drop in while shopping. ii

 

The whole collective way of operating had some obvious advantages – many people working in concert can obviously achieve more than a few. There was also the pleasure of camaraderie. But the really big advantage was when showing work. The artists in any Brixton show were connected to diverse networks and each artist could be closely connected to another 10 to 30 people outside of the collective. So the distribution of publicity could occur in an organic way: both low-cost and effective. In this way a collective of 50 effectively expanded to a network of 500 to 1000 or more. It was these people who supplied the crowd at opening events.

 

Working collectively is time consuming rather than money consuming. Attending meetings is directly related to a person's influence. The meetings themselves can be quite enervating emotionally, as an open collective inevitably attracts random attention seekers and a few drunks (especially in the early days).iii These sorts of things make up much of the quality and the power of a large collective. But there were other aspects to the significance of this phenomenon that were not about organisational structure and are not often discussed.

 

Image: Ellen Kuzwayo at the opening of Soweto the Patchwork of Our Lives, 1986

 

When I joined the collective as a founder member in 1983, theory critical of modernist art wasn't of great interest to me. My theory reading from books had been limited to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaniegem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, but that was about it. I had tried reading a slim volume of Hegel's Aesthetics... but generally I found writing on aesthetics a complete turn-off. I would only come to understand the reason for this later as I got involved in studying the history of class and culture.iv

 

There were critiques of Art published in the '80s but they never seemed relevant to Brixton Art Gallery, which was all about praxis – incessant activity. This was probably because most of us had absorbed a critique of the art world from the way its exclusive practices had given us experiences of rejection that were 'already enough'. Anyway theory, for many of us, was 'above our heads', its abstract language all too easily felt a part of the same exclusionary rituals. Another reason might be that critical theory often focused on High Art rather than cultural formation as a whole, the basic impulse to make and show that the Brixton Art Gallery was engaging with.

 

However, visiting some friends in Shrewsbury in 2011 I saw a bright yellow paperback, 'Pollock and After: The Critical Debate' (1985), edited by Francis Frascina, on a bookshelf. Flicking through it I wondered if this parallel world of theoretical resistance to the edifice of ‘Modern Art’ that had been going on in the '80s could perhaps be put to use, even now, in helping me to think more clearly about the value of the art praxis that was Brixton Artists Collective? What follows is a summary of key points from Frascina's account of the discourse that criticised modern art, and then a closer look at the ex-Situationist T.J. Clark’s writing in the book that criticises Clement Greenberg's seminal texts. I then attempt to apply some of these ideas to elucidate the activity in Brixton.

 

The account begins as early modernism matures and becomes established. A totalising theory of modernism was put into global circulation by Alfred H. Barr in the 1930s. He assembled a mixture of academic materials to create a clear ontology of the movements that he argued came under the umbrella of Modern Art. He became director of New York’s new Museum of Modern Art in 1932 and was able to mount a series of influential exhibitions to put across a thoroughly modernist version of Théophile Gautier's idea of 'art for arts sake'. It was an idea of Modern Art that needed only to valorise itself in its own terms, i.e. without reference to the socio-political conditions from which it had arisen. This depoliticising strategy made a bold division of modernist work into two blocks: works were either abstract or surrealist. He also defined modernist works by their apparently 'non-representational' imagery. This was intended to achieve a clean break with the art traditions of19th century realism, Enlightenment literalism and Renaissance perspectival space. A break with European art history and a wish to step outside of it.

 

This established paradigm was extended into a left-field of theory in the late '30s by the polemical and literary verve of Clement Greenberg.v He said that modern art, rather than being subversive, in fact served to entrench art within the limitations of its media, but he didn’t see this as a problem. Even at the time Greenberg was establishing his orthodoxy, critiques were being made by people such as Merel Schapiro who objected to the way abstract modernism had been defined.vi He pointed out that every artwork arose from material conditions and particular situations: ‘All rendering of objects, no matter how exact they seem, even photographs, proceed from values, methods and viewpoints which somehow shape the image and often determine its contents’.vii But the left-wing critics of the '30s were unable to compete with Barr's powers of publicity and demonstration at MoMA, so Greenberg’s is the only ‘left’ voice that was heard.

 

The legitimation of particular modes of art requires a mixture of powerful presentation and publicity. Part of this is a literary justification by respected society writers which takes the official interpretation of an event beyond the community of people who witnessed the show. Brixton Art Gallery, however, existed in an oral realm, by which I mean its activity was little written about and rarely produced any publications other than slim photocopied catalogues. Its heady influence was limited to the people who had direct contact with the collective and the gallery. At that time it was not easy to persuade reviewers to come to Brixton, which was considered outside the official art circuit, as well as being somewhat rough. On top of this the gallery was hardly prestige architecture, in fact it was often bordering on shabby and inside it smelt of damp. The security shutters were decorated by a local graffiti crew – hardly the signifier of a white cube space.

 

From Frascina I read that after WW2, Karl Popper's book The Poverty of Historicism (1957, originally written in 1936) and Arnold Hauser's The Philosophy of Art History (1959) led to radical doubt about the subjectivity of art historians. Frascina summarises the point:

 

If no history is disinterested are the interpretations and evaluations of art history and critics not so much knowledge but ideological desiderata, wishes and ideals which the author would like to have realised.’viii

 

Which leads him to the question: ‘Are the evaluations of art history governed by ideology or logic?’ix The questions that then needed to be asked of contemporary art were: how and why were particular works of art produced? What were the codes and systems within which artists were working at any particular time and place? This suggested the need to investigate the social and ideological formations within which art gestates. Frascina's examples are the 'massive growth in entrepreneurial dealership' through the 20th century and the rising status of the main modern art museums and the important part they came to play in cold war diplomacy. These are prescient points and post-cold war, these two closely intertwined factors have been key in fine arts' further growth and globalisation. The discourse reported by Frascina also regarded criticism itself as an intellectual formation: ‘Intellectuals serve as a mediation between the social facts and the mass of the population, they create the ideological justifications for social practices.’x In other words, they tend to defend class interests.

 

Image: The Sponsor by Graham Tunnadine, installation during BAG's show 1984

 

A key weakness of Brixton Art Gallery was that it did not have any critical literary apparatus of its own. There was no way that it could extend its praxis beyond its locality if it did not publish an account of itself, never mind challenging the cultural hegemony. What needed articulating was the value of this praxis against that of the establishment Art rituals. Until Andrew Hurman made the monumental Brixton 50 [http://brixton50.co.uk] online archive in 2010, funded by his own savings, it existed only as a powerful memory in the hundreds of people who played an active part in it. In other words its historical effects were occurring through the dynamics of a depleted oral culture with almost no presence within literary art discourses. Because of the lack of contemporary, in-depth published studies, much of the 'intricacy' of the relations between works and their audiences has been lost to the wider 'art loving' public. In 2011 a project at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning called Brixton Calling! pulled some of the collective's archive materials together into a show and activate them with the participation of younger generations. However even this well-funded effort was barely reviewed and the colourful catalogue contained no sustained theoretical evaluation.xi To evaluate this sort of grassroots cultural activity and transmit it within the literary field would have required some kind of alternative critical apparatus – embedded intellectuals with well distributed media at their disposal. xii

 

In his contribution to Pollock and After, T.J. Clark introduces the crucial idea of canon formation, which was little examined in relation to art at the time.

 

We should not be trying to puncture holes in the modernist canon [...] but rather to have canon replaced by other, more intricate, more particular orders and relations. Naturally, new kinds of value judgements will result from this: certain works of art will come to be seen as more important, others less interesting than before, but above all the ground of valuation will shift.xiii

 

BAG may have had the energy of a shooting star but it had no strategy in place for challenging the terms on which canon formation took place. This indicates one of the most difficult tasks for a retrospective legitimation of Brixton Art Gallery within the literary idiom. At the centre of dominant art and its critical apparatus is still the idea of great works and their genius creators. When people discuss BAG there is little mention of great works and great artists. The talk is directed at groups and activity rather than individuals and works. If the question about the 'codes and systems' from which the work that appeared in the gallery was produced were asked, the answer would be a complex one. That was the point of Brixton Art Gallery. It showed up the diversity of the cultures that energised London in a very graphic way. Many of these 'codes and systems' were themselves very dynamic.

 

The Bigos: Artists of Polish Origin group was made up of such hybrid backgrounds as Jewish Poles, Lebanese Poles, Italian Poles, first and second generation Polish immigrants, lesbian and straight, young and old, women and men, etc. One of the forces of change that impinged on Anglo-Polish artists, as it does on all immigrants, was that of assimilation – the inevitable adaptation of people and their culture and language to a new environment with the profound losses and gains that this entails. Anglo-Polish artists reflected these forces in their work and each difference in identity would produce a variation in their visual statements. But there was little published on cultural assimilation and so there was no theoretical vocabulary with which to think about this. The ‘grounds of valuation’ may have shifted amongst audiences and participants on the gallery floor but it stopped there. There were no sustained discourse to raise these and many other issues to a point at which they could challenge the monopoly of the Artworld’s knowledge formation.

 

Another way in which the work produced seemed radically different from the mainstream of the time was in the politically themed shows, which found an easy acceptance in a way that would have been unlikely higher up the gallery hierarchy. I'm thinking of the show in support of the miners' strike, but many other shows were political: the 1984 show, a show objecting to the use of rubber bullets in Northern Ireland called art of imMEDIAcy (which I put on with Ian Sherman) and, the South African women's show, Soweto: The Patchwork of Our Lives. These arose, I believe, because of the background of the majority of the artists who took part in the collective was working class. There were several reasons for this - one was that showing in BAG was not a good career move as the shows were not 'selected' by validated curators, so that artists aware of the professional moves required to make a career as a professional artist would give it a swerve. It was notable how some artists who played a leading role in BAG shows dropped all mention of the gallery when moving on up the art ladder.

 

Image: An opening at Brixton Art Gallery

 

In 1982, T.J. Clark examined Greenberg's key early texts and this essay is included in the Frascina book. ‘Here is the crucial passage: "it is to the [ruling class] that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income."’xiv Brixton Art Gallery provided a social base and gave artists from many 'communities' in London an opportunity to show together, often for the first time. xv The gallery also provided an alternative, albeit a weak one, to stable income, in the form of the collectivised labour of enthusiasm along with the welfare system of the time, supported by cheap further education facilities like Morely College’s print room.

 

In his text, Clark saw modernist art as arising from a crisis of Bourgeois culture. 'From the later nineteenth century on [...] the bourgeoisie was obliged to dismantle its focused identity, as part of the price it paid for maintaining social control.' (p.53.) Clark claims that the imitation, or even adulation of, classical aristocratic/humanist cultural values became a liability after the class struggles of the 1870s. The results of this 'cultural decomposition' is what Greenberg had called kitsch, a massified pseudo-art and culture that the bourgeois nurtures in exchange for the capital benefits of mass consumer society. But this threatens the separate identity of the ruling class and their necessary claim to cultural superiority. Avant garde modernism comes to the rescue with a form of elite culture that makes a clear break with humanist neoclassicism. An added benefit is that it is presented as being insulated from the social conditions of its production and able to set itself resolutely above consumer culture kitsch and ‘vulgar’ working class pop culture.

 

Clark questions Greenberg's modernism in the following three ways:

1. Can art become an independent source of value as Greenberg asserts? Clark argues that 'The facts of art and the facts of capital were in active tension' - this is due to the realities of patronage and/or of artists' 'imaginings of their public'.

2. Can art refer only to itself? Clark questions Greenberg's central concept of 'flatness' and suggests that art surfaces, however abstracted, are always a carrier of meanings and metaphor. There is ‘no medium without it being the vehicle of a complex act of meaning’.

3. How can we challenge the received model of how art innovates? A rearrangement of avant garde ontology is proposed in order to focus more on practices of negation. By negation Clark means an emphasis that goes beyond innovation for its own sake. Greenberg had demoted such negation to noise. Clark emphasises art as an important site of estrangement, negation or absence. ‘The problem remains [...] whether art on its own has anything to offer but the spectacle of decomposition.’xvi Clark then quotes Mayakovsky's definition of modernist negation. ‘Down with your Love! Down with your Art! Down with your Social Order! Down with your Religion!'xvii

 

Taking these points in order: the art establishment continues to obfuscate the active tension between the liberty of art and the closed nature of capital. The second point seems to be no longer relevant. Art has moved beyond claims of flatness into a extraordinarily complex obsession with artistic innovation for its own sake, using anything and everything as its material and content. Finally, the concept of negation and noise still holds a theoretical potency against the power of refined art. Not least in understanding the activity of open democratic collectives. xviii

 

The avant garde was seen as 'rootless and isolated' by Greenberg, and Clark agreed. But in Brixton Art Gallery we see an art process that is neither rootless nor isolated even if it had yet to evolve coherent systems of taste. It comes out of struggle, a clear location and a multicultural urban social base. Was it part of an attempt at the dissolution of Art; at surpassing bourgeois art? Clark suggests some possible features of such a post-capitalist art: ‘Art wants to address someone, it wants something precise and extended to do; it wants resistance, it needs criteria; it will take risks in order to find them, including the risk of its own dissolution.’xix

 

To me this resonates with the oral discussions that buzzed around the crowded monthly exhibition openings. The art canonised by our establishment – entitled thanks to sugar and slavery – is, according to Clark, not lacking in taste, there is no doubting its 'refinement and ingenuity', but in 'cultural possibility'. This is where the Brixton Collective, which was of course not a showcase of masterpieces, came up trumps. It held the possibility of a wonderfully complex and multivalent grassroots cultural urban renaissance. The question is, how can we activate the material and memory of such collective archives to communicate something of these possibilities into the future, to people who were not there? How can we insist on their historical 'numinance'? xx

 

Free higher education and the expansion of art schools from the early '60s led to a mass of ordinary people going through the art school system in spite of there being little paid work for graduates. In the harsh winnowing that the commercial art world subsequently imposed, much value was deleted because the selection of the 'best' artists was, and is, directed by the interests of a particular managerial class rather than by the very diverse regional and ethnic 'communities' that lose their young artists to this system. Many of these artists, even when they are not chosen to 'serve the high-ups', will continue to address those around them at any opportunity. Brixton Gallery began to allow these artists to make their own choices on the basis of enthusiasm rather than aspirations to 'play the game' or ingratiate themselves into an Artworld system that veered between poles of good taste, ‘old boys’ networks, arbitrary claims on innovation, unique skills, ability to play the literary game of art historical reference and so on.

 

For all their achievements of leisure, working rights, conditions and wages, working class people have yet to struggle for cultural self-determination. That was a potential of the activity flowing through Brixton at that time. An inclusive culture in which art becomes a matter of fact, and an accepted part of our communication of who we are and what we want to become. Part of the ongoing evaluation of our conditions through all our sense media that is inherent to oral culture. Part of the process of political dissensus and the creation of the shapes of our (dis)agreement on signs and language.xxi

 

Language changes by new words cropping up that are sometimes adopted by smaller then, perhaps, larger groups. Old words go the other way, falling into disuse by common consent. The same happens in visual culture. Artists propose new relations with their more successful works. These are shown, viewed and considered. Some of these new relations are taken up, celebrated and become part of our landscapes of understanding. These landscapes of understanding underpin the values we hold in common and the polities that can arise from them. In this way culture becomes politics. Of course this happens most in a busy discursive field.

 

In the '90s Ricardo Blaug came up with the idea of the 'democratic breakout' to describe the moment when democracy becomes a 'very lively discursive field'. I think we could typify Brixton Art Gallery, 1983-1986 as a period of 'democratic breakout'.

 

What are the characteristics of this kind of democracy? The primary characteristic must be that of noise. All accounts note that speech becomes animated and debate heated. This sudden increase in discussion follows upon the discovery of a common preoccupation. Now people are keen to be heard, they listen to others with interest, a concern is expressed to elicit all views. Exclusionary tactics are directly challenged, as are attempts to distort the needs and interests of others. xxii

 

We shouldn't expect Brixton Art Gallery to display a mature form of cultural politics – it was a learning situation. Blaug quotes Wittgenstein’s famous: 'Don't think, but look!' He writes,

 

her learning to recognise becomes more important than learning to apply rules, and as participants improve their ability to make judgements, they would increase their perceptual ability without necessarily increasing their ability to theorise, or even to rationally account for, their judgements. xxiii

 

This certainly describes the situation in the collective that I remember – it was an experience of art opening up to new forms of grassroots expression from localised geographies. But the lack of published theorising was an inability to defend our gains within a more widespread dominant literary world with its legitimation rituals and academic knowledge. It could have led to a reformation of cultural ground which I think is necessary for a new non-financialised form of democracy.

 

I'm not trying to make a case for theory, written in glorious isolation, being the royal road to understanding as the humanist tradition would have us believe. Many insights are gained through focused oral communication both at moments of intense sharing such as riotous assembly and other situations of political defiance. Another kind is found in our mutual support through occasions of grief, but also in more mundane processes of focused working together. I remember how important the regular Bigos meetings felt. We showed artwork to each other and shared thinking, and eating. A previously private interiority became shared and in the process understood. It must have been similar for groups of artists who worked together at BAG consistently over long periods like the Women's Work group.xxiv

 

However the written form of language has, as Walter J. Ong pointed out in Orality and Literacy (1982), its advantages to offer human communication especially as a tool in the formation of widespread culture. Unfortunately these are not easily separated from the pervasive weight of the world of letters, which has been integral to the formation of the managerial class. Chantal Mouffe says:

 

Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. The frontier between the social and the political is essentially unstable and requires constant displacements and renegotiations between social agents. Things could always be otherwise and therefore every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities.

According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.’xxv

 

If democracy is to be powered from open public discourses then the evaluative processes of art have to be a part of this. Brixton Art Gallery was a place of Gramsci's organic intellectuals, or even Lipsky's street level bureaucrats. When the Tate institutes a 'collective' it is a joke, a laughing stock, a trendy label. Tate has better coffee than BAG had, but it has less interesting debates. It has less noise! Once the quality is siphoned off and pumped up to high, refined plateaus, it is also made barren.

 

In other words the bourgeois wannabees, those who still aspire to middle class values, that throng the processions through the Tate's galleries like to see their oppositional art, their parade of negation, safely caged. From there the canon is due for incorporation into the university knowledge machines and on to upmarket commodity packaging and the internal decor of the architextures of private and public power. Its value in the urgent process of evaluating our totality is greatly reduced in spite of its prestige housing.

 

Stefan Szczelkun <stefan AT ukart DOT com>is a Londoner, currently organising a performance of John Cage's 'Song Books' for 20th October at Toynbee Theatre

 

 

Footnotes

i Lyham Road around that time had long stretches of corrugated iron fencing that became plastered with National Front or NF posters, which I defaced or took down.

ii To browse an almost complete list of artists exhibited at BAG see http://brixton50.co.uk/artists/

or to read other artists memories, from a 2010 symposium I organised with Francoise Dupre, see http://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.co.uk/#!/2012/05/activating-brixton-art-gallery-1983-86.html

iii For a fuller discussion of collective dynamics based on participant observer research see my doctoral research on Exploding Cinema, http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/phd601.htm

ivSee Stefan Szczelkun, ‘The Conspiracy of Good Taste: William Morris, Cecil Sharp, Clough Williams-Ellis and the Repression of Working Class Culture in the 20th Century’, Working Press, 1993.

v 'Paradigm' was a term popularised by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

vi Meyer Schapiro, The Social Bases of Art (orig. 1937) reprinted in 'Modern Art, 19th & 20th Centuries', Chatto & Windus, 1978, p,126.

vii Ibid., p.195. Schapiro also wrote about how artists work in relation to each other when they respond to the world they find themselves in: 'It is in terms of changes in their immediate common world that individuals are impelled together to modify their no longer adequate conceptions'. Ibid ., p.118.

viii Francis Frascina, Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, Routledge, 1985, p.3.

ix Ibid., p.6.

x Noam Chomsky, 'Triumphs of Democracy', from: Language and Responsibility, Pantheon, 1977.

xii The gap that existed between Frascina and Clark and the rough art in Brixton is a puzzle that they may still have answers to.

xiii Ibid., p.85. Canon study is an attempt to put our view of history on a more objective footing. Recently there have been a couple of important new studies: James E. Cutting, Impressionism and its Canon, U.P. of America, 2005

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11439809/Impressionism-and-its-canons

and Anna Brzyski (Ed.), Partisan Canons, Duke UP 2007. From the back cover blurb of Brzyski's book:

Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance.

xiv Clark in Frascina, ibid., p.51.

xv List of communities represented in specific BAG shows 1983 - 86. (Number of shows in brackets): GLBT artists (3), Womens Work group (5), Black Women (2), Black artists (2), Afro-asian artists (Rasheed Araeen), Latin American, South African, Zamani Sisters from Soweto, Carribean Focus, Africa!, NUM support, Campaign against Plastic bullets, etc. (These are quite apart from shows on the basis of technique and material eg photography, textile, sculpture, copyart.]

xvi Clark in Frascina, ibid. p.55, p.83.

xvii From 'A Cloud in Trousers', Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1915.

xviii Noise hasn't been used much as a metaphor in relation to the visual arts. In the '80s a leading noise art group in London was Test Department which was formed in New Cross in 1981. 'Prior to 1984, Test Dept's music contained a strong but unfocused political edge. Tapes from radio broadcasts were mixed in, creating a sense of paranoia, an all too recognisable echo of Orwell. Test Dept knew where they stood: against state oppression and in favour of the do-it-yourself ethic. It took the Miners' Strike of 1984, and the accompanying manipulation and brutality to really force Test Dept's hand, to make them take a concrete political stand.' Brian Duguid ,1996. The result was the LP Shoulder to Shoulder. The parallels with Brixton Gallery are obvious. Further explorations in relation to sound can be found in Noise & Capitalism ed. Anthony Iles & Mattin, Arteleku, 2009

xix Clark in Frascina, ibid., p.60.

xx As this article goes to print the Brixton Calling! and Bigos archives are going through the process of acquisition by the Tate Archives. Whether they will be activated from within those portals remains to be seen.

xxi The Plotlands self-building of the '20s onwards gave rise to a potential new urban vernacular that could have challenged the mortgage system. The movement was castigated by influential in town planners and not defended in an organised way by the communities from which it arose. http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/taste/Chapter5-Clough%20Williams-E.html

xxii Ricardo Blaug, Democracy, Real and Ideal: discourse ethics and radical politics, SUNY Press, 1999, p.136.

xxiii Ibid., p.147. Compare this with Howard Slater's idea of auto-theorisation in his 'Post Media Operators: "Sovereign and Vague"', Datacide No.7, 2000, http://datacide.c8.com/post-media-operators-“sovereign-vague”/

xxiv ‘We did an open notice [...] they were queueing around the block! There were so [...] many people. There was an absolute need because Art was male dominated.’ Teri Bullen, Oral History of BAG, 2012, 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning. Now in Tate Archive with much other Women's Work group material.

xxv Chantal Mouffe, 'Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces', Art & Research paper, 2007

http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html