It's been a year or so since the big March march in London (named the 'March for the Alternative'), in which thousands of people people attempted to show the strength of support against the coalition government's impending programme of cuts and austerity. These people - along with many others elsewhere - were not convinced that the programme would give the promised 'growth,' the 'holy growth,' as it were, that we are told to pray for. And, just as some primitive civilisations would sacrifice humans after a natural disaster, our economic disaster (also deemed to be natural) would be saved by sacrificing the (loosely defined) working class and public ownership in general.
Media coverage was extensive and debates were had concerning reckless behaviour (although, not by politicians, but by protesters) (and not by police, but by protesters). The days pass and the media lose interest. The bills pass and one is left questioning why we bother marching. Protesting is, as is often said, one of the precious 'rights' that we have in this liberal democracy of ours. Such people who say this usually follow it up with 'but with these rights of freedom, come responsibility.' Responsibility to ensure that the actions we take don't actually go as far as to actually be threatening. It is indeed our right to protest, under certain conditions at certain times, through certain routes with certain clothes. 'This way, you can protest, we can ignore it, and everyone's happy.' Life goes on, and events like this become mere memories.
Some students from Goldsmiths College collected as many placards from the day as they could. This became the Save Our Placards projects, and plays with the physicality of these potentially political objects. The name itself is a slogan imitative of those that appear on placards. Perhaps it is an attempt to possess some kind of authority over the way we collectively remember these events, or to address some kind of problem concerning the conventional cataloguing of such memories in a supposedly neutral discourse.
The media tend to forget things once the initial rabble-rousing has sold enough papers, or gathered enough viewing figures. With this decline in their interest comes a sort of acknowledgement that the matter is now less important, that it doesn't need to be addressed. Thus, Syria matters; Bahrain less so. And a few days after the top flight of the Conservative party comes into question concerning its dealings with big ugly money, contextualising the recent budget, the agenda changes to focus on a more tasty story about pasties and the upper classes. Apparently even pasty scandals can't bring our government into disrepute. Our attentions and passions seem to be so carefully manipulated, and its the same with the legacies of things like protests - their significance, meaning, ownership.
The Placard Parade challenges this media tendency, but also works through it by producing a media-interest event, in producing a spectacle which is politically attractive to sympathetic publications (the Guardian) and is playfully provocative. It invites a slightly confused involvement. We set off in small groups - I was with two others - along the South Bank, over Blackfriars Bridge, along Victoria Embankment, back across the Hungerford Bridge. The small group was somehow remarkable, somehow amusing. It intermittently punctured the normative landscape, unsettling it with signs (in the literal and linguistic senses) that cause alarm: Politically-motivated individuals are upon us, they're dangerous and/or annoying! They should get off their high horses. So how would these hippies run the country? What gives them the right to tell me to 'wake up'? Why don't they get a job and get on with it? There will soon be riots. Where are the police? (Read the patronising reflection of last March's protest by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan for an example of this type of reaction).
But without the usual strength-in-numbers we were somewhat pathetic, apparently having lost our comrades, now outnumbered and swamped by tourists, families, people enjoying the sun, people running for trains... The publicity of a huge march gives people a clear-cut choice to either be in it or not, to be involved or detached, to be in the kettle or watching the news while the kettle boils. But these lines of division are today averted, we are amongst an unremarkable cross-section of society, not channelled down a prescribed route by the police. They find us confusing; we find us confusing. What is this - A protest? A homage? A vigil of sorts? Are we keeping the fight going or accepting defeat? 'What are the cuts'? 'What's happening to the NHS?' Indeed, perhaps nobody really knows.
We're invited to question the protest, the established modes of going about it which are tried, true, and harmless. The slogans we pick and their supposed force or arbitrariness - it seems we might as well chant whatever comes to mind. Is it our lack of conviction in an alternative or an inability to gain a distinctive voice within political discourse which makes our demands seem hollow?
On another level, something else is at stake. The placard parade's critique of the institutional recollection of events extends into a critique of the management of the events themselves. Save Our Placards seeks to situate the anti-cuts discourse into areas in which it sits uncomfortably. The parade presents itself as 'not quite a protest' but is yet not innocent. As such, a route was indeed agreed, along with a time and a warning by the police not to widely advertise the event.
Save Our Placards have also approached other institutions. At the Turner Contemporary, a commemorative exhibition was to be shown in the Nothing In the World But Youth. However, at the last minute the exhibition was cancelled. Having made the agreement with the gallery long before, one might understandably wonder why the plug was pulled and put down to a rather tedious health and safety excuse.
The project continues, and it's managed to get into a different exhibition in Cornwall. It serves to question the documentation of anti-government projects, the political and economic alliances between institutions and the tactics used by protesters themselves. Ultimately, I think it continues to invite us to imagine new methods of protest for an age in which the lines of division are more complex than was previously assumed.
Check out Save Our Placards: http://www.saveourplacards.blogspot.co.uk/
Adam this is a great piece and has opened up a number of new ways of looking at the project, in particular the parade. We will, no doubt, discuss more over coffee soon!
ReplyDeleteCertainly, the parade was confusing. Spread over six hours, small groups in amongst sun-occupied crowds, good friends together with complete strangers, there was no way to see or comprehend it all.
All I hope was that there was enough of a frame to make the work exist - the anniversary of the march, incorporating the Embankment where the march started, the temporal cohesion of the 'placard archive', many of the placards' creators reunited with their work a year on... But, yes, once the frame was established, confusion reigned.
I was asked to present on the project to a Goldsmiths/Science Po conference the other week. And I was pushed for certainty - is it art? activism? research?
If I had to choose then it is art, because in part due to the importance of the ambiguity over its purpose - the absence of clear demands and questionnaires/dictaphones make the other two problematic as primary drivers.
The piece (and its ambiguity) is guided a great deal by that Benjamin essay on storytelling, on the impact of ambiguity... which would certainly argue things are revealed and potentially minds changed by new experiences initiated through artistic interventions. Of course, at this point the venture tends back to being both research and activism. But let's not go there without a double espresso in hand.
The essay also suggests too much of our everyday experience reaches us already shot through with explanation. So, although tempting ;), rather than offer those explanations here, I'll just note a few moments from the day.
First, is Svein and the placard "How Do You Sleep At Night?" recalling the interview of David Cameron by Matt Baker on the One Show the week before the march. Baker's question clearly rocks Cameron in the interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do4yRf71oZM And even out of context the question is so direct that it caused a stir on the Embankment. People felt compelled to shout their answers to Svein. One man heckled "eight pints usually does the trick", a child answered on a more logistical level, "by getting into bed."
Reuniting people with their placards was more exciting than I'd expected. One group pretty much ran to their creations when they spotted them. There's something about a placard, especially in a large multi-voice march, that gives people their own space. It becomes crucial to them. Yet they were willing to give them away at the end of the day when it had fulfilled its job. Or rather hand it to us to look after, as I should say here that the 'deal' offered at the tree in Hyde Park was that we would find more audiences for the ephemera after the march had finished.
People who were choosing to carry other people's creations took their time to pick the one which best reflected their politics or how they felt that day. They knew this was likely to end up on a photograph. And that the placard would be taken to be the caption, or speech bubble.
I could go on. And will when we meet at Browns I'm sure.
One last thing, I think the documentation of live events like this, on forums like this, is important to capture what such interventions are so good at revealing, and yet so poor at making clear in any lasting way. Namely, they can take organisations and institutions ( whether it's a local authority or indeed the TUC) into places that they have never been, and the organisation of these events has an impact before the event even takes place. Stuart Hall's quip that sometimes it is useful to borrow other people's megaphones is relevant not only to the use of the megaphone, but in picking up the megaphone too.