Cry Me Cats and Dogs

How indeed do you hang on to any political energy whatsoever, if, as Gómez-Pena asserted, 'the master discourses of hope are bankrupt'? Trapped in a political system devoid of the mechanics for real change, what possibilities for decision-making are left to the individual other than making the vacuous choices offered by consumerism? Indeed, a market-driven culture takes over everything, art included, as JJ Charlesworth argued in the pages of Art Monthly in 2003. In the process, art is drained of any political potency and reduced to little more than visual diversion as a politically neutral attribute of the leisure industry.³ Art works and artists become objects and people to like or not like according to the vagaries of subjective taste, with the logic of fashion dictating what becomes visible and who rises to prominence. In such a culture, says Charlesworth, if we all like the same art at the same time, then it must be good. Value judgments are 'so yesterday'.⁴ Material aspiration takes the place of political hope.

In this climate, how can artists take on heady and heavy political issues at all? And if they dare to do so, what further pitfalls await them? Take the much-reviled (and, dare I say it? fashionably much reviled) issue of globalisation. If the consciousness behind the anti-globalisation movement is itself a globalised consciousness, as writer Julian Stallabrass believes it to be, then it is produced by those same forces to which many of us are objecting.⁵ In the face of these obstacles, contradictions and paradoxes, where can artists position themselves and how is it possible for their work to retain a subversive, critical edge?

It certainly did, and what a richly diverse, inventive (and occasionally infuriating) set of sightings they were. Energy, inventiveness, wit and intermittent touches of bonkers-ness made for a joyful day, which was an interesting paradox, given the deeply serious issues underpinning so much of it. Tramway was a spacious, comfortable, and accommodating venue, and its feel of a site of production from its former days as a tram depot and factory felt entirely appropriate.

As Heathfield predicted, and in line with a culture where political change and resistance can only be conceived, if at all, in the detail and in the personal, it was a day characterised by a focus on the micro, rather than the macro-processes at work; on the individual, on the particular and on the idiosyncratic. Drawn into the personal and the quirky, as well as the occasionally more overtly issues-based performance, I find myself returning to dusty and little used words to describe the experience; words such as 'authentic', 'vulnerable', 'genuine' and 'real'. The didactic was a strategy mercifully, for the most part, avoided. In the main, you were left joining up the dots for yourself as far as what it all meant was concerned. As viewers and at times participants, you had work to do; any ethical closure was your own.

Take, for example, Grace Ndiritu's short, painterly filmed works. These remain respectful both of the traumas they pay homage to and to the viewer's imaginative ability to fill in the spaces that they open. Darfur(2006-2007), is a close and lingering study of a still, brown, human foot on a lush, chocolaty surface. It is only the occasional movement of drops of moisture on the skin that remind you this is a time-based piece and not a photograph. Set to the voice of Mexican singer Lila Downs, Darfur is almost a still-life – with the emphasis on 'life'. In contemplating this particular foot and its presumably alive and intact owner, your mind wanders, by implication, to the many who are not so fortunate. Nothing happens, no message, no listing of statistics or facts; just a portrait of a foot, and the title Darfur. This is work that opens the way for critical thought. The affective and cognitive domains work together; there are no easy answers that would short-circuit viewers coming to their own ethical conclusions.

In Margareta Kern's presentation entitled 'A Short Hi-story of My Family', she showed video film of her grandmother's recollections about living in Germany as a Guest Worker, recollections that focused on the wall-hanging embroideries she worked on in her free time to keep her homesickness in check. Kern overlaid these experiences of migration with tales of her own flight from the former Yugoslavia to the UK to escape the civil war in 1992, two years after her grandmother returned there. 'I feel guilty and proud,' she said, 'of the luxury of being able to stand here and speak – and to be heard and (mis)understood.'⁶

Being mis-understood as a luxury? This was, you could say, another theme for the day. If we are ever fully understood, might we not become transparent? What would then be left of 'us'? In such a situation, our 'otherness', our 'irreducible singularity' (to use the words of the Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant 7) would disappear. Measuring, assessing, judging, labelling, classifying, understanding – these are all masculinist, post-Enlightenment projects that are ultimately about controlling and reducing the objects of our gaze. Performing Rights Glasgow was, in contrast, a day of opacity; nothing was clear, neither the boundaries between the personal and the political nor the boundary (if there is one) – perhaps better, the interconnectivity – between politics and art. Nor indeed was there clear definition of the nature of art. What, for example, was Yara El-Sherbini's jolly pub quiz in the bar on Sunday evening ('name one Hollywood movie in which an Arab was not shown as a bomber, or a belly-dancer, or a billionaire')? How did its performance at an arts festival by an artist change its nature from pub quiz, pure and simple, to pub quiz, live art?

Same questions too for Richard DeDomenici's J'accuse! A 'heated yet informal debate on the ethics of the live art industry', this was held outside in the Tramway gardens: that would be heated as in 'there's a hot tub.' Situational, relational and interactive, at the very least, it clearly met Adrian Heathfield's definition of a 'performance.'

Same questions again for James Marriott's Exit Strategy, a diatribe against the oil industry's role in releasing carbon into the atmosphere. This made the performance more a lecture with a right-on political meaning rather than art, and I was left wondering how it helped my understanding of the way that art can act politically. There were too many answers here. Less open-ended than other performances, it felt perhaps as though Marriott was doing our thinking for us.

It is of course impossible to do justice here to all the artists present on the day. For example, Ori Gersht's powerfully meditative and beautiful film documenting the felling of ancient trees in Ukraine in The Forest; Leibniz's Book of Blood where audiences donate a drop of blood which is used to write a letter from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a leather-bound book; deaf live-artist Jenny Sealey's glorious invective on behalf of disabled performers, and to so many more.

Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué's wittily melancholic ruminations about his life as an artist in Beirut in Make me stop smoking: a presentation of ideas under study closed the day. Sitting at a small table in front of us in the theatre, it felt as though Mroué was in intimate conversation with each one of us, helped by a few power-point images on the screen behind. Since 1986, he told us, he has been unable to stop himself collecting random objects, newspaper cuttings, photos, and now he feels weighed down by this personal archive. The compulsion has been fuelled by a desire to collect material from the past for a future artwork in which he will talk about the present. How do I speak about 'now', he wondered, when it's already gone? How long does a moment in the present keep on going as a moment in the present? How can suicide bombers speak the words 'I am a martyr' to the video camera whenthey are not dead yet, although they know that when they are watched on screen, they will, indeed be dead? Tracing a dark shadow zone between personal eccentricity and broader philosophical and political concerns, Mroué's images jumped from collages of newspaper cuttings detailing people 'lost' in Beirut, to photos he had taken of failed projects: the lamppost outside his house, dead cats and dogs run over by cars on the city streets. As an artist, he told us, he found himself spending as much time searching for the perfect title to each piece of work, as he did on the work itself.