A History of Irritated Material at Raven Row

A History of Irritated Material is an exhibition that highlights art's relationship with politics and the archive over the past few decades.  Including projects by Group Material, Lygia Clark and Suely Rolnik, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, Ad Reinhart and a numbers of others, it features more than enough material to keep visitors busy for a good while.

The works or projects reference political conflicts since WWII; examining how the artist's response produces "irritable" forms of critique that situate the work between an aesthetic of cultural resistance and a criticism of its own status as an art object.

The curator Lars Bang Larson contemporizes the artists' work in the context of art and culture's present habitation of the individualist experience drawn from a "globalised world".  In reading Larson's response (in his introductory essay to the exhibition's accompanying document) I began to consider the work I had seen in relation to an aspect of my own practice which is concerned with art's scepticism of the political.

It is important to acknowledge the ruptures that political art practice instigates in terms of aestheticising forms of socio-political criticism.  But in the interest of moving forward and actively re-engaging with contemporary politics, it is important that art does not function as a mirror for the political situation, or even as a critique of conflict.  It must be its own conflict and its own critique in order to be able to respond to politics not through scepticism, but through engagement.

There is a breadth of work in this show that illustrates and plays with frictious social and political ideologies.  None more so than Disobedience, An Ongoing Video Archive which is an optimally installed video compilation featuring Bernadette Corporation, Harun Farocki, Etcetera and Critical Art Ensemble among others.  The design (by Xabier Salaberria) of the construction is both barrier and an aid in viewing the many works on show but I found it particularly distracting, especially in deciding what to watch.  However, there is a consistent conversation here concerning "the political subject as the media object", offering numerous examples of cultural resistance and dissent in the production of video art as well as political activism.

The exhibition well deserves the time needed to soak in the material on view (particularly Lygia Clark, From Object to Event, produced by Suely Rolnik) and I recommend reading the show's accompanying document which sheds some light on the choices made in curating this exhibition, as might the event Guy Brett and Lars Bang Larson in conversation, 7pm on 31st March 2010 at Raven Row.

A History of Irritated Material is on at Raven Row until 2nd May 2010.