Brigid McLeer

This artistic research project proposes to conceive the space between art and politics as a recuperated and reinvented ‘space of appearance’. To do so, it re-turns (to) a vital overturning of Platonic contemplation (‘vita contemplativa’) with human action (‘vita activa’) that is at the heart of political theorist Hannah Arendt’s proposal for a public-political ‘space of appearance’. By placing images in which political subjectivities are 'withheld' (as ‘those who are no longer or not yet present’) into Arendt’s space of speech and action, the project revises her rhetorical gesture of overturning with its own, and revivifies contemplation as a form of action in which ‘we’ can be encountered as radically opaque, inchoate and incommensurable. Utilising what I call 'the gesture of equants', the research project produces elliptical encounters that refigure the ‘space of appearance’ in ‘non-contemporary’ and cosmopolitical ways to include the (non)presence of those who are dead, disappeared and displaced.

Responding to and incorporating images that include Paul Fusco’s 1968 photographic series RFK Funeral Train, Gustave Courbet’s 1850 painting The Burial at Ornans, and mid-nineteenth century British Workers’ Association or Trade Union emblems, the work brings civic, ethical and spectral imaginaries to bear on certain figures of the demos. By remobilising these images through visual montage, live performance, sculpture, and writing in accompanying scripts, essays and visual text, the research activates ‘political’ participation (with others both present and not) as an aesthetic as well as a social and ethical encounter.

In doing so, the research stages and realises contemporary forms of heterogenous, multicentred and relational ‘spaces of appearance’ in both the thesis/written component and two key visual projects: The Regent’s Street and N scale (along with a supporting work, The Triumph of Crowds). Extending beyond the practices and discourses of 'representation', in which art remains separate from politics, or 'instrumentality', in which art disappears into politics, it aims instead to hold open the space between both through 'figuring' and 'partaking' in order that another mode of ‘praxis’ might appear; one situated in transversal ways across and between art, activism, social and public engagement and various forms of writing and publishing.