neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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PARADE: public modes of assembly and forms of address

I contribute to Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, researchers and academics hosted by Chelsea College of Art and Design, a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. We have a longstanding interest in art, public goods, spaces, services and knowledge, and a track record of producing original, participatory events.

Chelsea College of Art and Design has a large contemporary courtyard at its heart: the beautiful Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground. We collaborated with Polish curator Kuba Szreder to develop a programme of events that explore the diverse, contested and vital conceptions of being in public.

In a bespoke, temporary structure designed by award-winning Polish architects Ola Wasilkowska and Michał Piasecki - assembled in public - we produced a landmark event in an amazing location with a host of international contributors.

Parade challenged the lazy, institutionalised model of knowledge transfer - in which amplified 'experts' speak at a passive audience. Our modes of assembly, our forms of address and the knowledge we share are intimately bound.

See the full programme or images of the amazing events

the educational turn

I will take part in a three day event FL∆G: re-turning the educational turn at Chelsea College of Art and Design

Education is increasingly a key concern for contemporary art practice and its exhibitionary institutions; recent events include PARADE, Documenta 12 and United Nations Plaza, or Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education at MOMA, and events covened by the Serpentine and Hayward Gallery like de-schooling society, could all be defined as art turning educational.

On the one hand, claiming pedagogic practices as a form of art for exhibition could be seen as a way of idealising art education, or as an attempt to aestheticise education for exhibition. On the other hand, it could be seen as a form of engaged, dematerialised and participatory art practice. Regardless of the hand we choose, the proliferation of interest in the educational turn, demonstrates a new and widespread interest within exhibitionary institutions, art practice itself and sites of art education for self-reflexion.

modes of assembly

I contrbute to Critical Practice, here is an invitation to an event we are working on.

Dear ******

We are writing to inform you of Parade, an upcoming event facilitated by Critical Practice.

Critical Practice is a cluster of artists, researchers and academics hosted by Chelsea College of Art and Design, a constituent

college of the University of the Arts London. We have a longstanding interest in public goods, spaces, services and knowledge, and a track record of producing original participatory events. For instance, in 2004 we organized Open Congress at Tate.

Chelsea College is opposite Tate Britain on Millbank, and has a large contemporary courtyard at its heart, the beautiful Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground. We have worked with our Polish partners over the last year to develop a program of events that will explore different, contested and vital conceptions of being in public. These events will unfold over Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd of May 2010. We will investigate the history of public space and the public sphere, along with differing cultural perceptions of 'being in public', the politics of public assembly, the socialization implicit in 'publicness', the architecture of public knowledge, and much more besides.

Hinterland

I will be participating in the Hinterland Symposium at Broadway in Nottingham. This one day event will question the responsibilities of artists when creating work in the public realm. I will be in conversation with Emily Wilczek and Ian Nesbitt from Annexinema and will present the Social Cinema project.

Other speakers include John Newling, Jonathan Griffin, Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Canepa Luna), S Mark Gubb, Joy Sleeman, Richard Grayson, Wallace Heim and Rebecca Beinart.

Broadway 14 - 18 Broad Street Nottingham NG1 3AL

bookings: Tel. 0115 952 6611 or online www.broadway.org.uk

tickets: £12.50, conc £7 .

download: programme

Public Body

I will be participating in a Public Body Barcamp.

On Saturday 17th October at 14:00 at the Nowy Wspanialy Świat, Ul. Nowy Świat 63, Warsaw, Poland.

Jointly facilitated by Critical Practice - a cluster of artists, researchers, academics and others hosted by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London - and Free/Slow University Warsaw - a nomadic centre of interdisciplinary studies, critical reflection, and independent thinking about art and society - the Public Body Barcamp is an extension of Publicamp. The assembly will be concerned with notions of being-in-public, and aims to explore ideas about the public body.

The Public Body Barcamp aims to examine the relationships among singular and assembled bodies, what infrastructures are necessary to facilitate a public body, public knowledge, art, social practice and fields of action in public space.

Markets and Morals

Political philosopher Professor Michael Sandel delivered the first of the BBC's 2009 Reith Lectures.

A New Citizenship builds on a lifetime’s work exploring issues around democracy, ethics and ‘politics of the common good’. Many of the themes we are developing within Critical Practice, especially for publicness

The first lecture called for a new politics of the common good.

I wrote into the lecture as I listened, and then ammended those notes

First Sandel suggested we have to recognise the limits, the moral limits of the idea of a competitive market. Clearly, markets are not the best technology for achieving a public good. So, to enable markets to contribute - to a public good, we need to reconnect them to different structures of evaluation; moral, ethical, environmental, etc. And to drives for social justice. Collective integrity and shared values have to triumph over individual greed. But how?

For Sandel, self interest is a personal need; like self respect, self-worth, and self love. And like greed or profit, these drives animate markets. Markets are connected to welbeing, therefore we need markets. They are also very good at distributing resources, but we have to recognise thay are a limited technology. There are some things that money, at work in markets cannot buy - like friendship, and some things money should not buy - like a child.

Publicness

I contribute to Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, researchers, academics and others, supported by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London.

We are collaborating with Kuba Szreder, a freelance curator from Warsaw, on an international conference exploring the contested, and increasingly relevant to topic of ‘publicness’ or 'being-in-public'. We are working towards Parade (working title) a conference and series of events in the beautiful Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground at Chelsea, opposite Tate Britain in central London – 4 minutes from the Houses of Parliament. Parade is scheduled for May 2010.

We intend to explore different conceptions of publicness - historical, cultural, architectural and digital, as represented in Eastern and Western Europe through the contrasting experiences of Poland and Britain.