For & Against: Art, Politics and the Pamphlet

Invitation to host a market stall and participate in a public event

Saturday 27 May, 2017
Loughborough Town Centre
We invite you to respond to the idea, concept, format, aesthetic, function,
relevance, purpose or history of the political pamphlet and engage in a
public event.We are looking to host a series of market stalls in
Loughborough town centres Queens Park as part of a public event taking
place on Saturday 27 May, 2017. We very much like the idea that the artists,
designers, writers, printers, crafts people and other kinds of creatives would
form a kind of market, and as well as selling products that connect
someway with the themes above this space would also encourage active
participation with members of the public who attend the event.
For & Against: Art, Politics and the Pamphlet is a two-day research and
public festival event to be held in Loughborough May 2017. The project is
a response to research into the political pamphlet and will explore the
relevance of the pamphlet for contemporary art practice.
The programme will work across two days:

FRIDAY 26TH MAY

SYMPOSIUM - comprising presentations in response to a call out. The
presentations will be a mixture of academic papers responses to
histories of the political pamphlet and its relevance and/or
development in art practice and performative presentations in the
form of rants or manifestos. Our invitations encourage an
imaginative and provocative response.

SATURDAY 27TH MAY

PUBLIC EVENT - held across sites including Charnwood Museum,
Loughborough Library and Loughboroughs beautiful Queens Park, this
day-long event will include a range of public activity; live
performative elements by artists commissioned by Radar including
Patrick Goddard, Ferenc Grf, Ciara Phillips and Rory Pilgrim,
exhibitions displaying collections of historical and contemporary
pamphlets inside the library and museum and the market, a range
of interactive stalls encouraging public participation in the making of
a new pamphlet.

Please outline your response to this invitation including examples of the

products that you make and /or sell, any promotional information about you

and your work as well as explaining how you would respond to this
invitation.
Deadline for expressions of interest is Friday 16 December, 2016.
Please send FAO Kate Self, Radar Producer, k.self@lboro.ac.uk
Background to Art, Politics and the Pamphlet

This project develops from an exhibition and one-day symposium

Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer at the Peoples History Museum,
Manchester (June 2013).
An edited book Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer is to be
publishedas part of ourRadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa) book
series withBloomsbury.

The radical roots of the pamphlet and art

It is written because there is something that one wants to say now,
and one believes there is no other way of getting a
hearing.Pamphletsmay turn on points of ethics or theology but they
always have a clear political implication. A pamphlet may be written
eitherfororagainstsomebody or something, but in essence it is
always aprotest.
George Orwell inBritish Pamphleteers Volume 1, From the 16th
century to the French Revolution, London, 1948
For Orwell, the pamphlet is a polemical provocation. Protest and dissent, as
demonstrated in performative and/or visual polemical forms are typified by
the tradition of the pamphlet. The pamphlet thereby provides a means to
examine possibilities for advocacy, protest and prefiguration shared by
different disciplinary fields. The Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer Project
proposes that the format and traditions of the radical pamphlet may
provide an alternative platform for artistic intervention and provocation.
RadicalAestheticsRadicalArt (RaRa)
The RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa) project explores the meeting of
contemporary art practice and interpretations of radicality to promote
debate, confront convention and formulate alternative ways of thinking
about art practice. The project has examined the intersection of
philosophical ideas, art practices and aesthetics in particular, their
relationship to sensation, discourse, ethics, politics, activism, community,
participation and collaboration.
Radar
Radar is a programme of commissions and critical debate that invites
artists to engage with academic research and develop new work within the
context of the town. The work produced is performative, participatory,

process based and public. Some projects are longer-term engagements

with the town whereas others materialize themselves in the form of
intense weekends of activity.
For more information about the project theme please contact Jane Tormey,
jane.tormey@btinternet.com or Gill Whiteley, G.Whiteley@lboro.ac.uk/