Two editors from Locust Review, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl, will be speaking on art related topics in London at the annual Historical Materialism (HM) conference (November 7 - 10, 2019), sponsored by the Historical Materialism journal and book series. Turl has organized a panel with fellow artists Anupam Roy and David Mabb (more information below). Other LR editors will also be speaking on matters not directly related to art and aesthetics (but still awesome) and attending the conference as well. Holly Lewis will be speaking on two panels, presenting on “Queer Liberation and Marx’s Ecology” and acting as a discussant for the book launch of Ashley Bohrer’s Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism (2019). In addition, Adam Turl’s fellow editor at Red Wedge Magazine, Jordy Cummings, will be presenting, as part of the “Leftovers Live” series, on “Bruno Bauer, Class Reductionist: A Strategic reading of On the Jewish Question in 2019.” The theme of this year’s HM is “Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism, and How to Survive Tomorrow.” See below for more information on the art and aesthetics presentations (basically we copied and pasted the “abstracts.”) The exact schedule for the conference is forthcoming. Copies of Locust #1 will be available at the conference.
Alexander Billet
Adam Turl
David Mabb
Anupam Roy
Alex Billet speaking on a Red Wedge panel at Historical Materialism Montreal in 2018.
Alexander Billet will be speaking on “Subaltern Sounds: Music, Racism, and the Reclamation of the Commons,” asking,
“How do the exploited and oppressed grasp the tension between Being and Becoming? Is it possible, in the geographic confines of slowly unfolding apocalypse, to map a freer and more democratic future in urban space? What practical role, if any, is there for the arts in mediating this gap?
“This paper will build upon research and writing previously presented at Historical Materialism on the role of music in the reclamation of the commons, while focusing in particular on how colonialism, forced migration, and racial segregation have forged this role. Using the work of Mark Abel as a starting point, contemporary musical expression will be understood first as aestheticization of time and therefore as a product of the temporal experience specifically generated by industrial capitalism. The paper will interrogate Abel’s thesis, however, in asking how shifts in work and cultural production over the past forty years (casualization of employment, ‘do what you love,’ etc.) have further shaped the musical expression in the context of everyday struggles against dispossession.
“Focusing primarily on the height of the Movement for Black Lives in the United States, songs examined will include Run the Jewels’ ‘Early,’ Moor Mother’s ‘Creation Myth,’ ‘Alright’ by Kendrick Lamar, and ‘Knees On the Ground’ by experimental rap group clipping. Sources will include, in addition to Abel’s Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, Frances Stracey’s Constructed Situations and others.”
Adam Turl will be speaking on a panel he organized with artists David Mabb and Anupam Roy on “Salvaging Utopias in Contemporary Art.” Each artist will present on the aesthetic strategies of their own artwork.
Adam Turl and Tish Markley’s Born Again Labor Museum, detail, mixed-media installation, 2019.
Adam Turl will present on his ongoing collaboration with Tish Markley, Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) – “an evolving memorial/installation to current and past generations of working-class lives – oriented to a participatory working-class audience.”
“This installation, which will eventually become a semi-permanent sited ‘museum,’ will also serve as a space for community and cultural collaboration. In theology, apocatastasis refers to the reconstitution of the primordial; the salvation of past souls. Walter Benjamin transposed the concept to a cultural Marxist framework; arguing the messianic (revolutionary) generation enacted a materialist apocatastasis — the redemption of past generations of the exploited and oppressed. The working-title of this project, Born Again Labor Museum, inspired by Benjamin, mixes the classical Marxist schematic of living and dead labor (people and machines, etc.) with evangelical language. This project serves as an evolving memorial. In part, anthropomorphic art objects are based on creative or found texts about famous, unknown, historic, contemporary and fictional working-class subjects. These will conflate anachronistic populist and avant-garde gestures, borrowing tropes from folk/outsider art (paintings on tools, salvaged post-industrial materials), early zine/punk aesthetics, comics, Dada, surrealism, constructivism, arte povera, etc. The eventual ‘museum’ – and earlier iterations of the project – will be open to community groups and used in collaboration with other artists. Exhibits would include interactive elements in which materials are distributed to visitors, and where visitors are invited to alter and produce art works. This will include irrealist ‘Bible-tract’ like comics based on Marxist politics. A ‘museum website’ is being created along with memes that mix the analog and digital. This will also include manifestations of the ‘digital’ in analog space. For example, crafting three-dimensional ‘pixels’ in conflict with art objects.”
David Mabb, Transitional Monument, digital montage. Dimensions variable, 2004.
David Mabb’s Medium Size Luxury Products, “are made from samples of a Bauhaus wallpaper book cut into squares and pasted onto square painted canvases framed with fragments of William Morris fabrics.”
“The paintings’ squares exist in their composition midway between Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square, enabling the Luxury Products to engage with a broad tradition of modernist painting. The squares, cut out of Bauhaus wallpaper rather than painted directly onto the canvas with oil paint, amalgamate fine art and decoration. This merging is reinforced by the Morris fabric frames. Each frame is made from a stitched patchwork of a single Morris pattern in different colorways and scales, giving the Luxury Product a specific Morris context. There are 57 paintings in total, using all the different wallpaper samples from a Bauhaus wallpaper book. All the paintings are made using a simple breakdown of production, similar to craft production. They are all unique because of the juxtaposition of different materials, but they are made within the same format. The title and materials used in the work seeks to amplify the cross-over between painting and decoration/craft. Painting is now almost solely a decorative product for the wealthy, offering little of critical interest (challenging art is now more likely to be found in video and installation). However, that is not to say that it is totally without interest: it can be interesting in the same way that craft is interesting. In that sense the Luxury Products propose that art/craft should be considered together, acknowledging their economic position within a capitalist mode of production and distribution. This proposal would have certainly been understood by William Morris, who believed that quality craft production for all could only be achieved after the dismantling of capitalism. The Bauhaus quickly moved the other way, abandoning craft for design for capitalist mass production within the first couple of years of its’ existence (the painters kept their distance from these values by attempting to differentiate their work within metaphysical frameworks: Albers, Klee, Itten etc.). Some Bauhaus designers were able to produce quality products that reached large numbers of people, however this left the arts and crafts (Medium Size Luxury Products) for the wealthy few.”
Anupam Roy, from resistance land; Black pigment and distemper on paper (350gsm, acid free, hot-press) pasted on cotton cloth; 10ft x 16ft (approximate, paper size); 2018. Image courtesy- Prakash Rao
Anupam Roy will present on his work and the “Impossibility of Representation and the ‘Real Image’”
“We have to search for the real image. So, for example, I’ve used the Venus of Willendorf in my work. For me, that image is an historical image, holding in a way the history of women’s bodies. So, in my work, the Venus of Willendorf has a broken breast not to represent Nangeli (an Ezhava-lower caste woman, this is related to the Brahminical imposition on the Dalit community where the women were not supposed to cover their breasts. Nangeli covered her breasts. When the tax collector came she cut off her breast and paid her taxes with it). Rather, I try to capture the presence of this historical act. To understand the historical relevance of Nangeli or her particular subversive act, we have to understand that her individual assertion comes from the historical and collective consciousness. We are not going to use the same metaphors, the same kind of reality, which are used by the upper caste and the ruling class. We have to identify the real image – if we really are with the people, or on the people’s side, then we can visualize and realize our images, and we don’t have to bother about the superficial Brahmin-upper caste metaphors. Counter image, untimely image, true image can only come from the real people.”
Alexander Billet is a writer, founding editor of Locust Review, founding editor and former editor-in-chief at Red Wedge Magazine, and a member of Democratic Socialists of America. Adam Turl is a founding editor of Locust Review, art and design editor at Red Wedge Magazine, and an adjunct instructor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Anupam Roy is an artist and member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninism) Liberation. His work was featured in the 2018 New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage. David Mabb is an artist and Program Leader for MFA Fine Art (Studio Practice) at Goldsmiths University. Historical Materialism (HM) was founded in 1997 to assert that “Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analyzing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul.” HM regularly sponsors annual and semi-annual conferences in London, Montreal, New York, Toronto, Beirut, Melbourne, and elsewhere.