Having recently launched Artists’ Mutual Aid UK, I am reposting my article from this summer written for Freedom Press.
Please feel free to join Artists’ Mutual Aid UK here and start help shape what the movement might look like and what it could become.
Also, have a look at a recent talk I gave on mutual aid for artists and arts workers for the Bristol Artist-Led Forum here.
This is a guest blog by Martin Daws. Martin is a Spoken Word Poet and Community Artist. Full-time freelance since 1999. Young People’s Laureate for Wales 2013-2016. Check out his website and follow him on Twitter.
Martin came up with the idea of paying artists to work with communities instead of “investing” millions of pounds in “capital projects” such as arts centres. … READ MORE
I claim socially engaged art is DEAD. (Whether it ever lived or even existed beyond a category description is, of course, another question.) The Art World is DEAD. So, when the Art World subsumes the category description “socially engaged art” (and “social practice” and many more, for that matter) it must KILL the category description – the words.… READ MORE
THEY killed it.
Killed another word.
(Three words actually.)
Death by Art.
Slowly.
Slowly, THEY killed some words:
A slow process.
Drowning by “Culture”.
THEY killed socially engaged art.
Socially engaged art was
An EASY target.
Art is always an easy target.… READ MORE
This is my full paper given as a lecture at Northumbria University in Newcastle on Wednesday 27th April 2016. It is the beginnings of an attempt to free radical social practice and activist art interventions from the ragwort-like sprouting of institutionalised and depoliciticised “socially engaged art”. My research considers radical social practice: as praxis as theory and practice. … READ MORE
This is the abstract for my paper presentation at the Association of American Geographers Conference 2016 in San Francisco. I’ll be presenting it at a session on 29th March at which Ann Markusen (seminal proponent of creative placemaking) will be the discussant!
I’ll upload full paper and presentation after the conference. … READ MORE
