Alexandr Petrovsky
It Takes a Nation of Liberals to Hold Us Under the Conditions of Late Capitalism
Flat01 Glasgow 14th April 2007 7:00pm-
“"The 'Right to Art' is enshrined in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But what does such propaganda mean in the contemporary world under the conditions of late capitalism? Tayto et Tayto value culture for three reasons: it allows us to be appreciated and enjoyed; it allow us to control social policy, and because cultural organisations such as Tayto et Tayto improve our society under the conditions of late capitalism. Our regular appeals for funding address all three of these points since we don’t share a convincing language to discuss the value of culture from the perspective of artists and audiences. Therefore we tend to justify our existence in terms related to our political concerns with uneven economic development and social exclusion under the conditions of late capitalism. Tayto et Tayto work with funding organisations globally, albeit under the conditions of late capitalism, to help them to articulate and evaluate the contribution we make to society. We are creating a framework to improve the way that politicians, professionals and the public engage with directly with us." - Tayto et Tatyo
In an attempt to enshrine the UN’s commitment to universal access to our cultural (net)work(s), part of the central EU organization team of Tayto et Tayto have commissioned Alexandr Petrovsky to franchise Flat01 - an ongoing private spatial hub – wherein he has hosted a 60-day discursive event under the conditions of late capitalism. It Takes a Nation of Liberals to Hold Us Under the Conditions of Late Capitalism will represent the culmination of seven years of research into attempts to visualise a framework to improve the visualisation of direct engagement between artists and politicians. The results of this research will form the basis of The Fun Couple, the first Pyongyang - Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste Triennial. This will be the first ever major attempt to illustrate the dialogical kind of exchange that might exist between artists-in-residence who might be held among the many ordinary people arbitrarily detained and tortured in non-peripheral centres for contemporary containment in both states.
Discussions facilitated by Petrovsky have been examining how we might show sympathy with the leadership of the stricken Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and solidarity with them in their fight to destroy the lives of comrades across the entire Asia Pacific region. One planned intervention will encourage the East Timor islanders to engage in and indulge a Eurocentric prelapsarian fantasy, allowing them the unique opportunity to temporarily reject the drive towards industrialisation and capitalist growth and instead to love difference. The Timorese will be able to consider the widespread death and destruction that arises from economic mismanagement and the lack of an international arts infrastructure at first hand and think very seriously indeed about possibilities for more international workshops on methodologies and creative processes developed through even more artistic projects in alliance with the Democratic Korean People– encouraging them to create their own microtopias for social transformation.
Petrovsky has also encouraged participants to join him in a badger game with curators at the International Friendship Museum, extorting them to facilitate Danegeld (Campaign Against Living). Participants in the dialogual residency have been interfacing with the curators to reanimate a workforce of 1,000 women and children from the North Hamgyŏng Province to the capital and force them to immediately uproot every one of the city’s willow trees. The trees will be used to build over 12,000 provisional platforms of discussion using the skilled labour of this refugee population under the conditions of late capitalism. This will enable them to actualise their potentiality, participate in the global economy and draw the brutal Communist regime into the 21st century. The dialogical furniture will be transported to Europe and America where it will be sold to the guilty middle-class cultural workers, the biggest part of the benefit going directly to the homeowner loans and credit cards that are liberally providing the support to establish the Triennial under the conditions of late capitalism.
For the culmination of this project, Flat01 will be open to the public as a meeting point for just a couple of hours, to allow you to browse the research outcomes, to just have a drink of water from the tap, or simply to ‘hang out’ under the conditions of late capitalism.
