THE POSTERS OF THE WHITE PUBE BY ARSENAL
or Les Affiches de la Toison Blanche d'Arsenal

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “My hatred of privilege and authority was boundless. At times I may have been guilty, in my indignation, of confusing persons and things. Now I can only despise and complain: to stop hating, it was necessary for me to understand.”

Ma haine du privilège et de l’autorité de l'homme fut sans mesure; peut-être eus-je quelquefois le tort de confondre dans mon indignation les personnes et les choses; à présent, je ne sais plus que mépriser et plaindre; pour cesser de haïr, il m'a suffi de connaître.

¹

The White Pube (hereafter TWP) do not want us to separate our artworks from our social problems. The work of art is not considered to be something distinct from problems associated with the institution: inequality, racism, colonialism, engagement, privilege and appropriation of capitalist conventions.²  The work of art is not thought of in some form of autonomous esteem, as being simply - above all that. For TWP the artwork is something to do - that wants you to do something back. The artwork is not something that is done to you, keeping you at arm’s length as a passive bystander assenting to its razzmatazz. {0:49}

But problematically the work of art as bureaucratic prop, in the only self-describing system available to it, just isn’t up to TWP’s proposition. The artwork nowadays merely constitutes a single example of an internal proliferation to be maintained, subsumed and annihilated (exchanged) accordingly. What can you do with metaphorical formalism and bootless referentials? How do we respond productively to a work of art that's merit is only identifiable by its association with a specific font used by a mid-level gallery (or publication); one that employs the right assistants capable of adopting the necessary demeanour of artificial solitude without becoming exhausted?³ {01:37}

A neater separation between artworks and the social problems that regularly condition the institution is easier for the institution to subsume. The institution promotes issues such as inequality and racism when functioning merely as subject matter of artworks that are ‘about’ politics and social problems. Here it can deftly categorize (neutralise) the work as being by a ‘political artist’, as belonging to an institution sanctioned faux movement or type. Politics is objectified to the point of being alienated. It is less interested in, because it is less capable of subsuming, work that ‘is’ politics. This is an apposite quote from Brecht⁴ paraphrasing Marx⁵, stating that the function of cultural-critical output is “not merely to interpret the world but to alter it.” {02:33}

Does this hold water?: the artist creates themselves through their working practice; in the hierarchy of the art system the artist is alienated from the essential purpose of maintaining their own practical relations of production; the artist’s alienation is determined by inequality, privilege, the capitalist mode of production etc.; the artist is subsequently estranged from their work and simultaneously their own practical production (in other words who they are) as a result of internalising the institution; the relations of production and consumption the artist has been subsumed by, in turn exclude the artist, and exert the institution’s authority over the artist and controls them with a power the artist themself engaged and legitimised. The logic of this, in terms of emancipatory solutions, is that the emancipation of artists must be accomplished by artists themselves; artists need to critically expose themselves, take themselves apart. Start again. {03:42}

The TWP are better at opposing the conditions described above than Eddie Peake but they could unwittingly reproduce marginalised playing-at-problematizing subject matter, that internalises the institution, turning themselves into administered functionaries; reproducing diversified but existing authoritative administrative relations of production. This process is as ever underway. ‘Ideas for a new art world’ as real poster or reproduced jpeg is susceptible to being subsumed by the institution, whereas TWP’s practice of associative discourse is potentially far more resistant. Frédéric Gée⁶: “As soon as something is named, coded in some way, encrypted, from there, it is recoverable, and can be exchanged in value terms.”⁷ {04:38}

The overarching problem for artists of whatever social-cultural background is the power of bureaucratic institutions to reduce to nothing, or at least to one homogenous mass, pretty much all cultural output and to render it politically impotent. No one becomes an artist for the singular purpose of monetizing their output but, rather to reproduce the relations of their production, possibly through a common ownership of the chief instrument of production: their creativity.⁸ It was the institution that encouraged the artists to go further to focus on their own individual creativity and view their work in terms of value generated by relations of distribution; the longer the list of exhibitions, the higher the value of output. The institution subsequently controlled the artist’s production through the mirage of supporting artists by supplying relations of distribution that the individual artist apparently relies on to survive. If the blatant inequalities and offensiveness that ‘Ideas for a new art world’ calls to be righted, were righted, what would those previously underrepresented groups be getting equitable representation and power in? Would a less white, male, middle-life middle-higher level institution be good? Yes. But conspicuously it would be good for some individuals that would be operative in and proliferate essentially the same system. There is no reason to think institutions would be any less adept at creating conditions fine tuned to engender bureaucrats to pull the ladder up behind them. {06:16}

The system of art creates conditions that maintains artists as administered functionaries of its own bureaucratic relations predominantly in the form of: professionalism (Simon Starling), published criticism (oxymoron), academicism, bastardised education (bastardised by business models, professional practice modules and, Goldsmiths and CSM), careerism etc. If the resultant output is produced by old white middle-life, towards near death men; or young black working-class women - or whoever, the output is still that of the institution’s superstructure⁹. “Did you see Ryan Hito -Tyson’s installation at the Institute of Arts Council Serpentine of Contemporary Art Cafe Wing?” TWP’s ‘Ideas for a new art world’ doesn’t deal with the inviolable and impervious nature of the institution of art. If TWP’s “truths” cannot deal with this inviolability and are subsumed by it, everything is. {07:23}

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The institution draws a distinction between successful and failed art by way of its grading and selecting. It subsumes successful art and failed art, as well as work that constitutes criticism of the institution, which, applying the institution’s covert criterion is also unsuccessful, which is institutionally, as good as not being art. ‘Failing art’ is subsumed and alienated by the institution without it ever engaging with it. The distinction between failed and successful work is marked by artists themselves operating as administered functionaries, accepting or tolerating both the institution and their own failure. Managing the artwork as a special, distinct type of object that is worth celebrating by default, as opposed to criticising it, determines the proliferation of bureaucratic art, and assures arthood’s redundancy. {08:23}

The institution’s primary function is the elevation and maintenance of the artwork (whatever that is) as a special type of thing. This is the basis on which its administrative functionaries operate. It is also the basis on which it exerts its control over the reproduction of the middle-level functionaries: artists, galleries, critics, curators, tutors etc., that help perpetuate and disseminate the higher level’s control by the administration of its drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures, dominating the middle-lower-levels. {09:00}

Through its commitment to the elevation of the selected artwork as the justification of the institution’s existence, it perpetuates and reinforces this self-described cultural purpose wholesale; it renders not only the spectator, but the participants of the entire art system, as passive spectators, as consumers categorized alongside the holiday-makers literally passing through the institution. This is how the institution exerts its control over the art system. Its management coheres with an administrative professionalism that is suffocatingly imposed on all, upon its own property as well as upon responses to its own property, such as TWP’s "ideas for a new art world". {09:46}

As the institution exerts its control over the entire relations of distribution, anything entering those relations is immediately subsumed¹¹, and there is no possibility of an alternative form of practice. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but one that we are all implicated in. Any attempt to dismantle the institution will require us dismantling ourselves, as artists in the process. For TWP that involves artists declaring their social advantages. Fair enough but can we draw a line at artists declaring their own working class credentials. Cloth Cap criticality is even harder to endure than incomparable privilege. In terms of what we can do in our collective marginalised state, whether it’s done in celebrating the institution, or calling it into question, we’re equally engaged in reproducing its relations. If we believe that the producers of art once maintained some form of power, and that artists still, even now, have the potential to reclaim some of it back; the fact that Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson and Eddie Peake come out of a sphere of cultural and social privilege and D.H. Lawrence doesn’t, is of secondary relevance. As is evident from the preceding list, questions of merit (criticism’s rudiment) are not dealt with in terms of privilege, or lack of. {11:13}

‘ideas for a new art world’ 001 unwittingly affirms the target it was intended to criticise, as does much stupidly named ‘institutional critique’, as it implies that what is required is relatively minor change, as opposed to complete preclusion. The proclamation implies that if the Tate removed its racist paintings it (as opposed to merely the reactive gesture) will be fixed. TWP’s 005 is a bigger ask. If an institution withdrew from replicating capitalist structures and initiated enfranchised conditions for some form of working class, unrepresented, underprivileged artist organised anarcho-syndicalist formation, it would indeed be worth celebrating. {12:05}

The sentiments contained in ‘ideas for a new art world’ are reasonable, problematically they are too reasonable. If the changes they call for were initiated not much would be solved, just a slight administrative adjustment within the exact same structures, and probably a slightly more bolstered bureaucratic hegemony, neatly administered and promoted by the subsequent public relations exercise. {12:31}

There is no productive reciprocity between the institution and the passive low-level spectator, such as unsuccessful artists. You engage with the institution by assenting to its authority; reduced to a consumer; as the image of the middle-level-artist-as-administrative-functionary. {12:51}

The problem with the institution is not that it just “replicates other institution’s capitalist structures” but that it perpetuates an art system where our engagement with its output, such as with "ideas for a new art world" is reduced to that of passive consumers, as opposed to some alternative form of active participant. The commodification itself is actively one-way; discharged from a privileged minority to an alienated majority; a majority that is, by the way, relatively satisfied in its hope-baited failure. {13:29}

The language of lower-level artists replicates the institution's language of bureaucratic neutrality, therefore assisting in stabilising the institution. This might have been determined in the excessive roll-out of ‘professional practice’ modules and business modelled curriculums. Producing art within the imposition of this culture comes down to a choice between passive maintenance; or an equally passive imitation of modes of opposition that were once effective prior to the domination of the current conditions. Unfortunately ‘ideas for a new art world’ (as well as all of our own output, incidentally) constitutes the latter. Both possibilities contribute to the institution’s ongoing inculturation of artistic activity into its administrative and bureaucratic model of culture. In this sense TWP’s other language dependent output is less likely to be assimilated and assailed by the institution, as it consists, prior to a retrospective assessment, of exchanges within a potentially ‘alternative’ community. ‘Alternative’ culture is also subsumed by the institution but it may merely constitute an apotheosis of the best we can do; it is simply less manageable, from the point of view of the institution, to assess using its own covert standards of success. {14:56}

Ramsden (1975): “This kind of “culture” cannot be separated from our language, our dialogue, our “communicating” and transformed into something which amounts to power over others. It doesn’t exist apart from our talking together or our consideration, our specific social learning needs.” {15:17}

The bureaucracy of the institution is activated throughout the middle-level of the art system, forcing the alienation of the lower level by its drip-down of contingent opportunity structures. This manifests itself as artists as administrative functionaries; critics as price-fixers; tutors as entrepreneurs; curators as marketeers, ad agencies as critics, studios towards galleries, art historians as publicists, teachers as converting priests, curators retarded to connossieurs. {15:56}

The middle-level operatives are perhaps not conscious of reproducing the institution’s ideologies. The institution (and its attendant functionaries) is formulated on the basis that it operates exclusively within a specific, restricted framework that is rarely scrutinised beyond the level of its own internal administrative procedures; it is in fact reinforced as authoritative and positivistic. The institution’s notion of exhibitionism for example is an immovable convention. The bureaucratic art world’s focus is concerned “with solving technical problems in the interest of whoever sets those problems and determines what are the right solutions.” (that was a quote, Chomsky, 1974) The administrators of the art system may believe their ongoing job of artistic maintenance is not ideological, that they operate in neutrality and do not in fact participate in, perpetuate or even celebrate a hegemony of bureaucratic privilege. Chomsky (1974): “The belief that they are just neutrally solving problems is, of course, nonsense, when you realize who places the conditions on an acceptable solution, who defines the problems, who is going to be able to make use of the solutions that you come up with, who will reject the ones he doesn’t like and so on.” The type of intramural, exhibitionist, adventuristic artist the institution propagates throughout its middle/higher levels are producing neutral, superficially ‘complex’ work¹². These artists are transparently functionaries of the prevailing bureaucratic climate. (the following is a quote, Ramsden, 1975): “...it’s always ideologically and practically conservative, and it will continue to be so as long as that ideology/practice remains unexamined.” {17:59}

Directly regarding ‘ideas for a new art world’ the reproducible, ephemeral, dispersed ‘critical’ artwork, as opposed to a stable, autonomous ‘critical’ artwork inside the institution or situated within a sanctioned outside space, appears to be distinct from bureaucratic control. The ‘critical’ artwork in the institution is named and coded in some way. What about when both are named and coded (jpeg’d), JAY PEGGED, [did that scan?] in some way?... {18:33}

The ‘critical’ artwork dispersed in the community, outside the institution allows itself to be subsumed by the institution, by the very fact of being literally external to the institution. (Does this mean an alternative non-bureaucratic institution would be required to negate the bureaucratic institution? - something like TWP’s alternative communal practice) The ‘critical’ external artwork in the form of a poster in its ephemeral, reproducible, dispersed state makes itself suited to the jpeg and easy categorization (as what?... ‘street-art’, ‘agitprop’, ‘artists’ ephemera’...), and not much is diluted in terms of the message, as in its words, sentences etc.; but mediated by modelling the institution - the object internalising the institution. The institution administers and alienates the object whether it selects it or rejects it. {19:36}

The ‘critical’ external artwork, in the form of a poster, when it is objectified (jpeg’d) allows it to be administered as a form of ‘critical statement’. The institution’s automatic response to controversy or nasty criticism is to offer the audience support (it assumes the audience is collectively internalised), to edify the audience towards a suitable understanding usually by offering some form of contextualisation, something the collective audience is evidently incapable of achieving itself; bringing the audience into the institution which engages the artist or critic as administered functionary, enough to reproduce the institution internally. The ‘critical’ external artwork is subsumed and can be exchanged in value terms. It functions now like an internal memo, as an item not to slip the administrative mind; to be placed on the agenda of the PR department’s next brain-storming session, to be deleted, appropriated, sanitised etc. {20:43}

To reiterate: the institution exerts its control over artists by precluding criticism. This determines )arthood(. Criticism is replaced by the institution with market assessment and neutrality. The institution then proclaims itself as neutral and free of ideology. It claims it exerts no control but is rather responsive to artists’ needs. Generally, artists subserviently adhere, allowing the galleries to open their doors on time. {21:18}

¹

[Image 1] Image Description: A jpeg of a row of six of the same TWP’s ‘ideas for a new art world’ posters 002: Universal Basic Income and affordable housing so that everyone, including artists, can make a living. The posters are situated within a tunnel by Arsenal’s Emirates stadium upon an advertising hoarding bearing the imprint BUILDHOLLYWOOD. Evidence of roosting pigeons can be seen below the hoarding, the mainline to Leeds runs above. Paving foregrounded, intersected by cycle lane, a woman in red Gazelles and red handbag is seen to be framing a photograph of icicles hanging from the arches opening. The last poster in the row has been defaced in marker pen with the words ‘ COVID SCAM?’

²

The White Pube ‘ideas for a new art world’
001: if I were the Tate, I would simply remove my racist paintings x
002: Universal Basic Income and affordable housing so that everyone, including artists, can make a living
003: curators should ask the public what they want to see and what they think galleries and museums should be used for
004: people across the creative industries need to declare if they have rich parents who helped them get where they are today
005: the art world should not replicate the capitalist structures of other industries and instead should set a better example with a horizontal approach to decision-making and pay 006: Dear museums, give back all stolen objects

³

“le comportement nécessaire de la solitude artificielle sans s'épuiser.” Sound file from Google Translate.

⁴

“Oil, inflation, war, social struggles, the family, religion, wheat, the meat market, all became subjects for theatrical representation. Choruses enlightened the spectator about facts unknown to him. Film clips showed a montage of events from all over the world. Projections added statistical material. And as the ‘background’ came to the front of the stage so people’s activity was subjected to criticism. Right and wrong courses of action were shown. People were shown who knew what they were doing and others who did not. The theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only for such philosophers as wished not just to explain the world, but also to change it.”
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht On Theatre [1964] - Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction, p. 64 p.71
Unpublished in his lifetime but thought to be written in ‘about 1936.’
Das Öl, die Inflation, der Krieg, die sozialen Kämpfe, die Familie, die Religion, der Weizen, der Schlachtviehhandel wurden Gegenstände theatralischer Darstellung. Chöre klärten den Zuschauer über ihm unbekannte Sachverhalte auf. Filme zeigten montiert Vorgänge in aller Welt. Projektionen brachten statistisches Material. Indem die »Hintergründe« nach vorn traten, wurde das Handeln der Menschen der Kritik ausgesetzt. Es zeigte sich falsches und richtiges Handeln. Es zeigten sich Menschen, die wußten, was sie taten, und Menschen, die das nicht Wußten. Das Theater wurde eine Angelegenheit für Philosophen, allerdings solcher Philosophen, die die Welt nicht nur zu erklären, sondern auch zu ändern wünschten.
Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater [1957] - Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater?

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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Written by Marx in Brussels in the spring of 1845, under the title “1) ad Feuerbach”; Marx’s original text was first published in 1924, in German and in Russian translation, by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow. The English translation was first published in the Lawrence and Wishart edition of The German Ideology in 1938. The most widely known version of the Theses is that based on Engels’ edited version, published as an appendix to his Ludwig Feuerbach in 1888, where he gave it the title Theses on Feuerbach;

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Image Description: Frédéric Gée in Avaitor glasses, white shirt et un pull noir.

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Image Description: Film of a French man (Frédéric Gée?) sitting between curtain and table, talking directly to the camera. A dado rail intersects the image roughly halfway down, a thin black frame [no image contained] hovers in the top right corner. He gestures constantly, emphasizing and air-forming each word whilst smoking a Gitane Mais. The .mov file is labelled ‘Fred Gee: The Pox and the Accursed Share’, which we [JCHP] take to be erroneously titled.

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Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892

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Ian Burn (1975): “This is clearly reflected in the desperation of more and more artists to escape their political impotence, in their attempts to reconcile the paradoxicality of their lives wrought by being hopefully “radical” in politics but necessarily “conservative” in art. [...] This point obviously is revealing of the contradictions apparent in looking at art produced by the feminists, by black artists, and other underprivileged groups: while their social thinking is radical, fertile and engaging, what we see of the art they produce is as embarrassingly dull and uniform and bureaucratic as everyone else’s. [...] But even then it may not be a question of how much we might accomplish, since it might take something as catastrophic as a collapse in the economic structure of this society to have any substantial effect on the careening superstructure of modern [...] art.”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DtNJ3HwrL9u15kz2_c4zSdkxC9Sq92-fEr1UN-xx9KM/edit?usp=sharing

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Image Description of Intermission:
I Can’t Look Proper.
A three minute, forty five second clip.
Fred Gee enters centreshot. Holding a rolled up newspaper he enters from the private residential space behind the public bar, “Evening” Fred says,” Aye, Evening” responds a man counting coins into his palm. Fred turns to serve another customer. The man begins to nudge overdramatically an unrelated woman,  {Vera} next to him...She responds with “Give over… what’s with {inaudible} nudging…” Vera imperceptibly drops her jaw to her simultaneous comprehension of reason for the nudging and its required object of Fred Gee. This discrete and underplayed response is important. See image 6a.This silence acknowledgement is contrapunctually marked by Fred snapping the newspaper open to read. “Cor Blimey” says Vera, a line she takes with aplomb considering she comes from Halton Moor. Fred Scene English pub, people playing darts in the background . Label to VHS tape reads Fred Feast [?]

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The process of being subsumed into the very target of TWP’s criticism is pervasive. The Art Newspaper (open bracket. blog. close bracket) 28th January 2021, 13:17, just after lunch, by Louisa Buck for an example: The headline of the blog focuses on ‘ideas for a new art world’ 001, it being now acceptable for the institution to call out racism. “for more than five years the [TWP] [...] has been the scourge of the art world.” The focus on the past tense, as ever adroitly neutralises (renders universal) the last five years work. TWP “fly in the face of staid art criticism” Also the use of “alternative”, a vacuous adjective when deployed by the institution to categorize a practice’s output as merely a universal object of contemplation. There is also a conspicuously benign description of TWP’s “proposals as to how matters might be improved socially, economically and ethically for museums, galleries, artists and artworkers.” Does Buck consider herself to be an artworker? One that is or isn’t heavily complicit? Presumably her acknowledgment of improvements also acknowledges that there are problems. She doesn’t go into it much, but then there’s a fine line between honesty and successfully sustaining the middle level bureaucratic life-style. Art world bureaucrats perhaps even believe themselves to be neutral administrators of the art system and consider themselves to be professionally impervious to ideology. It is an ongoing task of the administered art system to talk about “improvement” ad infinitum. The blog treats TWP and its output as something to be apprehended, not as something to actually do in terms of engaging and carrying something out. The blog is merely one of innumerable impositions deployed within middle level arthood. The above quotes betray the language of assessment, an attempt to produce neutral universal comment, and drag the potentially incendiary object to that level. The bland neutrality is pervasively ideological. Five of the six of TWP’s posters are most conspicuous in the blog (reproduced or directly quoted), less conspicuous is 005. The statement that the critic herself is most integrated within and dependent upon, yet the blog reads like the comments of a disinterested observer.

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See anything by anyone on the roster at Herald St, for example, excepting Scott King?