Vacant Chairs (2018) is an audio-visual intervention into the artists’ film ‘Messy Democracy’ (2018), which documents the @.ac residency of the same name.

The title is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Vacant Chair’ (2002), which re-reads Kant’s (1798) work on the university, and Plato’s ideas of philosopher-kings ruling the Republic (381 BC). Kant argued that, whilst philosophy was traditionally considered to be the ‘lower faculty’ of the university, serving the ‘higher faculties’ of medicine, theology, and law, it actually operates as the highest faculty in many ways. As well as helping the ‘higher faculties’ to develop self-reflexive knowledge through critical interlocution, the philosophy department, answering to no professional body, has a degree of autonomy and relative independence compared to the the others, which are heteronomous and thus restricted by external forces, bureaucracies, politics, and regulations. Effectively, philosophy deconstructs the hierarchies of the university at the same time as it salvages an educational idea of the university from a more dismal, instrumental tendency towards purely vocational or skills based training. Reprising Plato, and realising Kant’s suggestion, Derrida argues that universities should be ultimately run by philosophers, but concedes that nobody is sufficiently accomplished, as philosopher or educator, to satisfactorily fulfil this role. Nevertheless, universities should always keep a vacant chair open, perhaps for the philosopher-to-come, or education-to-come.

Vacant Chairs (2018) consists of a series of found and digitally manipulated images of chairs, produced by students in the product design department of the Royal College of Art in 1968, the year of the ‘French May’ and a wave of political occupations of UK art schools. The Royal College of Art was the country’s first art school, opening in 1837 as the Government School of Design at Somerset House, London. This quickly became the art school model that would be rolled out to the provinces. The timeline of the Royal College of Art from 1837-1968 could therefore be forewarded as a tentative critical history of the UK art school, from its inception as a bourgeois utilitarian institution, designed primarily to produce and reproduce a semi-skilled workforce for industrial capitalism (2013), to its implosion in the 60s, where the weight of over a century’s worth of romantic discourses concerning individual emancipation and freedom caused the institution to collapse under its own weight.

In the eighteenth century, Kant correctly recognised that the university was an institution animated by conflictual dynamics both internal and external to it. This is as true today as it was then. In the case of the art school, this conflictual dynamic has been exacerbated by the art schools’ forced amalgamation with the polytechnics in the 60s, which created schizophrenic institutions with noticeably incompatible practices, ideologies, and epistemologies. Our interventions are attempts to highlight this essentially conflicted quality of the art school, and its aporetic potential for functioning as immanent critique. The images of vacant chairs interrupt the narrative of the documentary film violently and abruptly, whilst introducing alternative narratives via voiceovers written by academics and philosophers but read by participants from the general public, including children. These voiceovers bring the radical context of 1968 into alignment with the present crisis of the art school, whilst critiquing its maladies through the lens of contemporary theory. This gesture acts as a form of counter-authorship to the equally conflicted and rival narratives of ‘Messy Democracy’ written by its participants and documentary filmmakers. Simultaneously, the grandness or aggression of this bid for authorial control is held by moments of embarrassing bathos as the readers of the voiceovers, particularly the children, stumble over the technical terminology and philosophical jargon of academia. The empty chairs symbolise therefore symbolise the conflict within the university, and between the university and wider society. It also references the dialectical struggle between filmmaker, subject, and us, none of which have ultimate control over the works’ meaning.

This is an artists film, documenting the @.ac project ‘Messy Democracy.

Messy Democracy took place in Hanover Project from 9th–27th April 2018. Throughout this period the gallery was cladded in chipboard, transforming the space into an arena of live art production, curated by a democratically elected steering group of students. The exhibition then functioned as a space of student-led learning and making (conceived in the widest possible sense) that ran parallel to the Department of Fine Art. However, we also conceived of the form of the exhibition as a critique of the conventional group / degree show and as such, wanted it to prioritise ‘difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems’ (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 2003: xv).

We invited proposals from staff or students across the Faculty of Culture and the Creative Industries, for works to be created or exist within this space over the period of the exhibition. Some works were only displayed for a single day of the exhibition, and each work had to be installed in such a way that it co-existed with other works in an ethical relation. This ethical relationship was negotiated between relevant artists. Works were installed after previous artistic interventions into the space, traces of which still remained. Therefore, artists had to navigate the presence  of others within the space to realise their activity. The result was an interlinking of diverse activity and a dynamic of curatorial response between activities.

A free philosophy seminar, held outside the Elizabethan Gallery in Wakefield city centre, coinciding with Long Division Festival.

Fifty years ago, the streets of Paris were covered with posters created by art students to fuel the revolutionary protests of May-June,1968. As a prelude to their forthcoming artistic performance as part of the Long Division festival, the artist’s collective @.ac (www.attackdotorg.com) will be flyposting various sites across the city of Wakefield with images that attempt to bring Wakefield in 2018 and the Paris of 1968 into a radical dialogue, via the seductive power of Rock ‘n’ Roll. These posters will recirculate original images from the ‘French May’ around the streets and walls of Wakefield, posted in arrangements designed to evoke the activist art of the 1960s, particularly the work of the French artist Daniel Buren. At the same time, these poster-interventions are also designed to connote the aesthetic of the guerrilla marketing of rock ‘n’ roll gigs on the walls of music venues and city streets. Fragments of song lyrics from 1968 should be recognisable within these poster works, emphasising the continuing revolutionary potential of youth culture, particularly popular music. This is not which is not intended as a nostalgic lament for a lost revolutionary zeitgeist, but as a catalyst for a critical debate about politics and Wakefield today. In dedication to the recently published ‘Manifesto for a New Wakefield’ these poster works also are an homage to the long forgotten, but influential, local activist band, the Wakefield Revolutionary Force.

Fifty years ago, the streets of Paris were covered with posters created by art students to fuel the revolutionary protests of May-June,1968. As a prelude to their forthcoming artistic performance as part of the Long Division festival, the artist’s collective @.ac (www.attackdotorg.com) will be flyposting various sites across the city of Wakefield with images that attempt to bring Wakefield in 2018 and the Paris of 1968 into a radical dialogue, via the seductive power of Rock ‘n’ Roll. These posters will recirculate original images from the ‘French May’ around the streets and walls of Wakefield, posted in arrangements designed to evoke the activist art of the 1960s, particularly the work of the French artist Daniel Buren. At the same time, these poster-interventions are also designed to connote the aesthetic of the guerrilla marketing of rock ‘n’ roll gigs on the walls of music venues and city streets. Fragments of song lyrics from 1968 should be recognisable within these poster works, emphasising the continuing revolutionary potential of youth culture, particularly popular music. This is not which is not intended as a nostalgic lament for a lost revolutionary zeitgeist, but as a catalyst for a critical debate about politics and Wakefield today. In dedication to the recently published ‘Manifesto for a New Wakefield’ these poster works also are an homage to the long forgotten, but influential, local activist band, the Wakefield Revolutionary Force.

Fifty years ago, the streets of Paris were covered with posters created by art students to fuel the revolutionary protests of May-June,1968. As a prelude to their forthcoming artistic performance as part of the Long Division festival, the artist’s collective @.ac (www.attackdotorg.com) will be flyposting various sites across the city of Wakefield with images that attempt to bring Wakefield in 2018 and the Paris of 1968 into a radical dialogue, via the seductive power of Rock ‘n’ Roll. These posters will recirculate original images from the ‘French May’ around the streets and walls of Wakefield, posted in arrangements designed to evoke the activist art of the 1960s, particularly the work of the French artist Daniel Buren. At the same time, these poster-interventions are also designed to connote the aesthetic of the guerrilla marketing of rock ‘n’ roll gigs on the walls of music venues and city streets. Fragments of song lyrics from 1968 should be recognisable within these poster works, emphasising the continuing revolutionary potential of youth culture, particularly popular music. This is not which is not intended as a nostalgic lament for a lost revolutionary zeitgeist, but as a catalyst for a critical debate about politics and Wakefield today. In dedication to the recently published ‘Manifesto for a New Wakefield’ these poster works also are an homage to the long forgotten, but influential, local activist band, the Wakefield Revolutionary Force.

Our longstanding artistic ambition has been to contrast historic art school ideals with contemporary socio-political reality. This task necessitates separating the discourses of romantic individualism and emancipation, central to the history of art and education, from the critique of the university as ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ (Althusser 1977). The latter reading, despite powerfully and accurately narrating the contemporary ‘poverty of student life’ (UNEC Strasbourg 1966) and accompanying ‘pedagogy of debt’ (Williams 2009), can easily descend into a sociological pessimism which ignores the challenge of art (Beech 2014).

Neoliberal processes such as commodification, financialisation, and marketisation have made ‘isolation’, ‘debt’, and ‘competition’ the watchwords of art schools as much as ‘spontaneity’, ‘creativity’, or ‘poetry’. However, art schools remain fertile sites for the creation of counter-hegemonic subjectivities. Our work attempts to encapsulate the loneliness and instrumentalism of the contemporary art school in tandem with its dissensual dreams and politics.

This triptych of photographs documents chairs from the art studios of the University of Central Lancashire, used daily in the production of student work. Their cheap functionality and generic design echoes an early modernist ambition for high design to be universally available via mass production; a utopianism with parallels in the recent uncapped expansion of the HE system. At the same time, their production line manufacture also works as an allegory for the interchangeable anonymity of the students who pass through the art school / edu-factory each year. Despite institutional indifference, traces of these students are retained on these chairs following their use, which subsequently act as palimpsests indexing individual artistic ambitions and personal debts.

Referring to the temporality of modern life, and its incessant reproduction, the poet Baudelaire commented that we are all, in our own way, perpetually celebrating some sort of funeral. The art school, renewed afresh each year by a new cohort of dreamers, is simultaneously a space of loss and renewal. These chairs then represent melancholia, emptiness, and industrial alienation, at the same time as presence, humanity, and a resistant politics of becoming. Their precise arrangement connotes the impersonality of minimalist art and industrial manufacture, whilst the splatters of acrylic paint evoke gestural abstraction and a creative subject engaged in the ‘revolution of everyday life’ (Vaneigem 1967). The lonely funeral celebration suggested belongs to modernism as much as the art school.

REFERENCES

Althusser L (1977) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. 2nd edn, London: NLB.

Beech D (2014) ‘Book review: Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain, written by Malcolm Quinn’, Historical Materialism. Volume 22, Issue 2, pp. 237-56.

UNEC Strasbourg (1966) On the Poverty of Student Life. [internet] available <http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4> [Accessed 5/11/18].

Williams J (2009) ‘The Pedagogy of Debt’ in Edu-Factory Collective, Towards A Global Autonomous University. New York: Autonomedia.

Fifty years ago, the streets of Paris were covered with posters created by art students to fuel the revolutionary protests of May-June,1968. As a prelude to their forthcoming artistic performance as part of the Long Division festival, the artist’s collective @.ac (www.attackdotorg.com) will be flyposting various sites across the city of Wakefield with images that attempt to bring Wakefield in 2018 and the Paris of 1968 into a radical dialogue, via the seductive power of Rock ‘n’ Roll. These posters will recirculate original images from the ‘French May’ around the streets and walls of Wakefield, posted in arrangements designed to evoke the activist art of the 1960s, particularly the work of the French artist Daniel Buren. At the same time, these poster-interventions are also designed to connote the aesthetic of the guerrilla marketing of rock ‘n’ roll gigs on the walls of music venues and city streets. Fragments of song lyrics from 1968 should be recognisable within these poster works, emphasising the continuing revolutionary potential of youth culture, particularly popular music. This is not which is not intended as a nostalgic lament for a lost revolutionary zeitgeist, but as a catalyst for a critical debate about politics and Wakefield today. In dedication to the recently published ‘Manifesto for a New Wakefield’ these poster works also are an homage to the long forgotten, but influential, local activist band, the Wakefield Revolutionary Force.

Fifty years ago, during the occupation of Hornsey College of Art an anonymous postcard was delivered through the door of the college, addressed ‘To the Stupid Students’. It aggressively and contemptuously instructed the ‘useless’ students to stop bothering the decent citizens of the country and, presumably, sink back into a pattern of docility and conformity. The rhetoric of this postcard is not simply evidence of the self-regulatory power of what Foucault would call Disciplinary Society, but also a measure of the degree of societal alienation in modern capitalist society. That this degree of entrenched alienation causes the proletarian class seeks to draw battlelines between its own ranks, rather than the capitalist boss class is depressing and damning evidence of the latter’s hegemony. The most important aspect of the struggle of the students in ‘68 was to recognised as part of the proletariat, as intellectual and creative labourers. That this claim to equality fell on deaf ears was due largely to the a priori stratification of what the philosopher Jacques Rancière has called the ‘society of contempt’.

As a hauntology, but also as corrective, this artistic intervention seeks to rebalance the violence of the anonymous postcard delivered to Hornsey in 1968. A single postcard will be delivered to the gallery on each day of the exhibition. These postcards will be second hand images of Preston institutions founded by the Victorian philanthropist Edmund Robert Harris, including the Harris Institute, site of Preston’s first art school (1846-9), which until 2009 remained connected to art education, and the still extant Harris library, art gallery, and museum. Recently, the art school in Preston has been moved to more modern facilities at UCLAN, and the Harris Institute has fallen into the hands of private capital, and subsequently disuse and disrepair. This postcard intervention is therefore an attempt to reconnect the current students of UCLAN to their pedagogic and civic history, and also highlight the relationship between art education and the flows of capital. As second hand found objects, many of these postcards will have been sent through the mail previously, carrying convivialities and correspondences between the general public. No attempt will be made to disguise these previous traces of conviviality, which hopefully will help in some way to re-socialise the modern day students of UCLAN with the history, memory, and mythology of Preston. Text will be added to the found postcards from Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’; a text which inspired the soixante-huitards fifty years previously due to its emphasis on creative spontaneity and everyday non-compliance as revolutionary method. By recycling critical theory through the medium of cut-up and collage, this work shares a methodological affinity with two of @.ac’s previous works, ‘Cut-Up Curriculum’ (2017) and ‘Conjuring Art & Language’ (2017), and should be considered as an extension of that investigation.

In contradistinction to the postcard of Hornsey 1968, the messages of these postcards will emphasise solidarity, positivity, collectivity and the possibility of creating a ‘community of equals’ in the face of a ‘society of contempt’.

Messy Democracy took place in Hanover Project from 9th–27th April 2018. Throughout this period the gallery was cladded in chipboard, transforming the space into an arena of live art production, curated by a democratically elected steering group of students. The exhibition then functioned as a space of student-led learning and making (conceived in the widest possible sense) that ran parallel to the Department of Fine Art. However, we also conceived of the form of the exhibition as a critique of the conventional group / degree show and as such, wanted it to prioritise ‘difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems’ (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 2003: xv).

We invited proposals from staff or students across the Faculty of Culture and the Creative Industries, for works to be created or exist within this space over the period of the exhibition. Some works were only displayed for a single day of the exhibition, and each work had to be installed in such a way that it co-existed with other works in an ethical relation. This ethical relationship was negotiated between relevant artists. Works were installed after previous artistic interventions into the space, traces of which still remained. Therefore, artists had to navigate the presence  of others within the space to realise their activity. The result was an interlinking of diverse activity and a dynamic of curatorial response between activities.

A protest banner, made from comments authored by students during a workshop focusing on the failings of the higher education system. The banner was unfurled as part of the @.ac project ‘Messy Democracy (2018) to signify the ‘occupation of ‘Hanover Project’ gallery, Preston.

A banner drop at the NAFAE conference, Wolverhampton (2018) to coincide with a paper co-delivered with UCLan students about ‘Messy Democracy (2018)