Beyond Aboutness: Artist as Double Agent

Curated by Amanprit Sandhu and Andy Weir

Daniel Shanken on Art as AI

Gareth Bell-Jones (Flat Time House) on Art as Work

Joel Simpson & Amanprit Sandhu on Art as Law

Ain Bailey ​on Art as Science

Radha D’Souza & Jonas Staal’s Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes is described as an art installation, while it also stages public hearings to ‘function as’ a court. 

This claim for art to ‘function as’ something else (in this case, law) is interestingly at odds with traditions of contemporary art we have inherited historically and are written into Fine Art education. We tend toward investigating, enquiring, exploring...something, from a distance. Art becomes critical veneer on anything-whatever that slips into its net, is swallowed up, dissected and spat out. It is always about something rather than being something.

In this series we ask: 

• In what ways can the artist act as double agent - function as something else while also remaining art? 

• How does this change art and change the other discipline?

• Does law (or whatever) want or need artists and what does it want from them?

• How do we evaluate it as, say law, science or work, and as art?

• By going undercover, becoming something else, can art escape ‘aboutness’ and maybe, just maybe, actually do something? 

We explore these issues through sessions on ART as being eaten alive; ART as WORK; ART as more-than-human legal agency, and ART as SCIENCE:

SESSIONS:

1. Monday 6th February , 1- 3pm  -  Artist Daniel Shanken on hallucinatory feedback loops, zoned out doomscrolling and possibilities for art within generative AI.

2. Monday 23rd February, 1- 3pm - A conversation between Amanprit Sandhu and Joel Simpson on Amar Kanwar's Sovereign Forest asking - 

Can poetry act as evidence within legal trials concerned with the protection of forests?

3. Monday 2nd March, 1 - 3pm - Gareth Bell-Jones, curator at Flat Time House, on legacies of artist placements in work contexts.

4. Wed 11th March, 1-3pm  - Artist, composer and DJ Ain Bailey on working with physicists on the Cavendish Art Science Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, exploring identity through sound.

Daniel Shanken, The Pit, installation view