»EASTInternational«, an annual summer exhibition at the Norwich School of Art and Design that has been taking place since 1991, defines itself as unique: an international exhibition with an open entry system and transparent structures that positions itself deliberately in the local environment of Norwich. The selected artists come to the »EASTdiscourse« a few months prior to the exhibition to get to know the local surroundings, and many works are created specifically for Norwich. One artist and one curator – with occasional exceptions – are invited to make the selection each year. This year, they were Jeremy Deller and Dirk Snauwert. Although the exhibition is open to international entries and participants, the selection is concentrated on Great Britain – twenty of the 25 artists chosen live in Great Britain. Most of them are already established, like Chris Evans, who is also taking part in the »British Art Show 6«, and associated in some way with the curators, such as Jarrett Mitchell, whom Deller already chose for a project in 2005. As has already been remarked upon in British press reviews, the character of the works shown at EAST reflect the interests of Jeremy Deller, and probably also those of the less-mentioned Snauwaert: narrative, often political content, documentary forms, references to pop culture. Above all, the chosen artists share Deller’s »privileging of personal history over the institutional or mediated reality«.1
Theresa Navigian’s videos, for example, contrast momentous events with stories from everyday life, as in her closing credits containing facts on 9/11, »46 missed manicures«, which adopts a survey format. Jarrett Mitchell, who shared the 5,000-pound East Award with Ruth Ewan, shows a history of historical changes based around personal experiences, conversations and a comparison with the attitude of the Peyote peoples to the white-tailed deer, »The Dawn of The Birth of The Battle of The Right To Life vs The Law of Death«, which for him represents an analogy to the human battle for survival. In many of the works, representations of everyday history are combined with pop music. Ruth Ewan, for example, works on forms of propaganda and protest, and in her work for Norwich – as she says - creates awareness for the history of ordinary people. In memory of a rebellion in the year 1549, Ewan commissioned a pop-music company to write a song on the events so that they enter pop culture. In the way they make demands on the public – for example, with regard to the distribution of Ewan’s song –, the works also centre on the possibilities of (social) change and the borders and definitions of community.
The state exploitation of community arts in this way is sarcastically highlighted by Roman Vasseur in »Murder Considered As Fine Art (The Ritualised Death of the International Mural Artist)«. Using catchwords like »consultation« and »spontaneous resident participation, he describes a fictitious scenario, based on a community mural in the artist’s «Gemeindebau«, in which the author of the mural and the other people responsible for it are executed, to the edification of the residents, for the symbolic power of the mural. Vasseur also uses religious terms like »sacrificial lamb« and refers to historical executions that have served the wrath of the people. A clear parallel to the critique of the assessment of participatory art, as Claire Bishop put it in Artforum: »The discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christian ›good soul‹. In this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant: The artist should renounce authorial presence in favour of allowing participants to speak through him or her«.2
In a similar vein, »Artists cannot bring integrity to your project unless they provide a full and candid critique of everything you do« is written on a poster by Free, the collaboration by Andy Hewitt, Mel Jordan and Dave Beech. In Norwich, Free also again set up a poster wall from their series »Sloganneering«: »The Economic Function of Public Art is to Increase the Value of Private Property.« The slogan reduces rather complex issues – such as what public art is or can be – to the language of a warning sign. The claim by Free to make people aware of backgrounds is less plausible as a motive than a caricature of such reductive interpretations that addresses people who are laughing already anyway. In contrast to the rhetoric of shock, the works are all media-aware and situated on an objective, ironic level. Chris Evan’s projects thus transfer the working method of community art to hegemonic institutions and elites. In EAST, he continues »Coptalks«, recruitment lectures by the executive at art academies. Evans says, speaking very much in the style of the creative industries, that these serve to show the students alternative careers, and how their training can enrich »the creativity, thought production, quality and value within the sectors of service, commerce and government«. Evans says his works play out ideological conflicts that do not allow the viewers to take up a clear ethical position.3
EAST is permeated by contradictions that call on people to take up a personal position, but at the same time make this difficult. »10 fibs I told as a child«, an installation in the gallery and an audio CD by Vaas Colson that is available in bars and pubs in the town, is, from this point of view, almost a kind of motto for the exhibition: in a indifferent tone of voice, Colson counts lies that he (he says) told as a child, and questions his motives. The discrepancy between idea and reality in language also provides the material for Rory Macbeth’s recordings of songs with utopian themes, like »Imagine«, in styles that are older than the original songs. In another work, »No Place (spiral)«, Macbeth painted over an empty building with a passage from Thomas More’s »Utopia«. Rebecca Birch highlights ambivalence and everyday uncertainty in a more direct fashion, speaking with people whose houses have been affected by the rapid erosion on England’s east coast and conveying their inability to conceive of what is happening. There are more depictions of violence and menace in everyday life in Britain in the glass sculptures of atomic power plants by John Lloyd and Kate Williams.
On the whole, the works thus focus, in many and varied ways, on the individual discovery of truth in the social context – above all in the sense of a truth above external circumstances. The ambition articulated on the EAST website – to define »the arrival of a new generation of artists with new attitudes towards making art«, and the cited guideline of a return to the »idea of the artist as a moral force«, in which democratic values are expressed simply and directly,4 is a goal that the artists obviously refused to accept in this form. If the positions shown at EAST can be summarised under the heading of morality, it is shown in the way the individual is called upon to take up a position in society that is based on independent thought and recognises ambivalence, doubt and confusion.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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