Jack Tan

• 2010-11-19

  Protected Characteristics Exhibition (15-19 November 2010)

• 2010-11-15

  

  Roundtable on ‘Law and Policy: An Artist’s/Designer’s Perspective’
  15 November 2010 

  Transcribed Excerpts from discussion:

  I am always inviting people to listen differently to situations, particularly in Healthcare, the way you listen to something or somebody changes what you know about them.  It struck me that the way artists look at something changes what it is.

  Does the Law have a gaze?

  The Law is more like a lens. The person who is using the law has the gaze.

  Does it change according to who is using the lens?

  The equality act is the structure that we are using to look at a particular problem. So that’s the lens that we are looking through.

  So the question of ‘access’ changes according to who is looking through the lens?

  The lens is not value neutral. It could be a tinted lens. It could be a lens that makes everything look bigger or smaller. So what kind of lens is the Equalities Act? What kind of vision does it impart?

  I think one of the problems that I have experienced is that when people talk about equality; they talk about treating everybody the same. It has really come out in this show that I think that people have looked at ‘Protected Characteristics’ in very different, very individual ways.  Equality is about treating people as individuals, i.e. treating them differently not about treating everybody the same.  This is counter-common sense.

  Perhaps it is about taking a very creative approach to what is in front of you. There is no one-size-fits-all.  You have to assess the situation and ask yourself what are the equality issues here, and come up with a solution.  For me that sounds like what artists and designers do in their practice all the time.

  The notion of something being ‘protected’ requires a ‘protector’. Who is protecting who? 

  In my work as an artist, I feel there is a ‘positive approach’ [or upfront approach], where you are trying to say the right thing, but it never quite gets there. But what does work is to do the opposite. When we talk about the viewer, you kind of lure the viewer into a certain way of thinking, one that he can identify himself with … something that he will merge with during the process of engaging with the work.

  The huge difference between Art and Law is that Law is about stuff. The measure of law is if it changes stuff. Generally speaking, the best Art is not about stuff, and the measure of whether it is good or not, is not whether it changes anything. 

• 2010-11-09

  

• 2010-10-28

  

  A series of workshops running alongside the ‘Research RCA: New Knowledge’ exhibition.

  Wednesday 27 October 2010:

  Art Research - A contradiction?

  Jack Tan & Eszter Steierhoffer

  6pm
  Research Seminar Room, Stevens Building

  ‘Art practice’ implies an inquiry that develops knowledge based on intuition, improvisation, non-knowing and accident. It seeks to bring into presence or to call forth something beyond physical form or conceptual content.  On the other hand, research as we understand it traditionally, aims to develop methodology that explains, posits, proves or represents some evidentiary knowledge about the world.

  Why do we therefore try to bring together, in ‘art research’, the apparently contradictory practices of ‘presentation’ (art) and ‘representation’ (research).  Is it at all possible for there to be a research method for art, when it is the project of art to confound method? However, in spite of this, can art practice provide traditional research methods a new methodology of the arts?

• 2010-10-15

  Frieze Education 2010 presents The Age of Discovery

  

  14-17 October 2010, Frieze Art Fair

  ReachOutRCA at the Royal College of Art is delighted to announce the projects for Frieze Education 2010. This is the third year we have run the programme, in
  partnership with Frieze and Deutsche Bank. Encompassing workshops for schools, a weekend public programme, an activity guide for young visitors to Frieze Art Fair and an online resource, The Age of Discovery offers an accessible yet innovative experience of contemporary art, emboldening participants’ own role in learning and creativity.

  Two RCA Alumni, Jack Tan and Jesse Wine, will lead workshops using their own work as a starting point and that of artists featured in the Frame section of Frieze Art Fair, where galleries six years and under give a solo presentation of an artist. They will work with four schools from the Camden and Westminster boroughs: Pimlico Academy, Acland Burghley, The Grey Coat Hospital and Haverstock School.

  Students working with Jack Tan will discover how to create a strategy of politically viewing art. Before coming to the fair, Jack will help them explore their personal social, historical and political identities and understand how these frame their encounters with works of art, artists, writing on art, and the art world. Activities will include mapping timelines of social and art history, group discussion and creating podcasts, as well as explorations of the work and political strategies of four artists being presented in Frame: Ruth Ewan, Naeem Mohaiemen, Oliver Laric and Drew Heitzler. Students will leave with a newfound understanding of how to actively engage with art as a constructed experience.

• 2010-08-28

  English Defence League demonstration in Bradford City Centre.

• 2010-08-27

  Bradford Women for Peace

  The day before the English Defence League stages their protest in Bradford, a coalition of women activists and citizens hold a pre-demonstration where they turned Bradford green with flags and ribbons. Their aim was to calm the city down and to prevent a riot the next day and avoid a repeat of the northern riots of 2001.

• 2010-07-05

  Collective for Art and Social Engagement

  

  CASE is a collective of artists who have social engagement as core to their practice. CASE members come together to develop their work in socially engaged art practice in partnership with third sector organisations. As such, CASE aims to support and resource artists’ work and development in socially engaged practice, and develop NGO, Public and Third Sector organisations’ understanding of art practice.

  http://socialengagement.posterous.com/

• 2010-04-01

  Art Network Agency Launch

  

  1st of April, 5.30-7.15 pm at the Goshka Macuga round table, Whitechapel Gallery

   

  AGENDA:

  I.    Introductions

  II.   Introducing the work of ANA (Eszter Steierhoffer, ANA)

  III.  A word about networks (Jack Tan)
  

  IV.  Discussion

  
  

  Chaired by Jack Tan.

  PARTICIPANTS:  Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice Group, Chelsea), Sophie Hope (tbc), Will Holder (tbc), Rita Kálmán (ACAX), Catalina Lozano (gasworks), Jonathan Miles (RCA), Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield (TIANG), Magda Raczynska (Polish Cultural Institute), Eszter Steierhoffer (ANA), Ildikó Takács (director, HCC), Pieternel Vermoortel (FormContent), public works 
  

   

  Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain, contemporary Hungarian art still occupies an isolated position and is largely under-represented in the international landscape. ANA was established as a creative response to this situation, with the intention of promoting exchange and supporting and assisting the representation of artists from Hungary within the global network of London. Instead of occupying a fixed gallery space, ANA will take a flexible nomadic position and appear in multiple locations and contexts through a wide range of collaborative projects and events with different London-based institutions and galleries. Beyond building its own core network and tracing the contemporary art scene in London, ANA endeavors to fulfill the role of a specialised mediator operating in different micro-contexts, and providing space for discussion and reflection.

  Preceding the first public event of ANA – the launch of the IMPEX book “We Are Not Ducks on a Pond, but Ships at Sea”. – we invite you for an informal (non-public) salon discussion at the Goshka Macuga round table of the Whitechapel Gallery. We hope that this invitation can be the first step in the development of future partnerships and long-term collaborations as well as the start of a stimulating dialogue and discussion.

  We have chosen three inter-related points for the discussion, which are key in shaping and inspiring ANA:  the notion of ‘network’, ‘translation - mediation’ and ‘self-organisation’. As an appetizer to the main discussion we have chosen three quotes for you to consider and as starting points for the discussion on the day.

   

  NETWORK

  “Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described.”

   (Latour, B. (2005).  Reassembling the Social.  Oxford: Oxford University Press)

  “A shape, an object, is stable and singular if it is configured within a stable set of links with other entities. Within a stable grammar or syntax of those links. Hull, spars, sails, stays, stores, rudder, crew, water, winds, all of these entities (and many others) have to be held in place, so to speak functionally, if we are to be able to point to an object and call it a ship (7).

  Now notice this. A working ship is, yes, a continuous Cartesian object, a constant set of Cartesian co-ordinates … On the other hand, however, it is also a constant and continuous network object, a ‘network shape’.”

  (Law, J. (2000). Objects, Spaces and Others. Available: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Objects-Spaces-Others.pdf. Last accessed 29 March 2010.)

   

  TRANSLATION
   

  “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages of themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. … to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation.” 
   
  (p. 80 The Task of the Translator, pp. 70-82 Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, Pimlico, London, 1999, translated by Harry Zorn.)

   

  SELF-ORGANISATION 
  

  “I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. … The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance : the exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an “ecology,” a set of complex and changing inter-relations ; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger environment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work).”

  Holmes, B. (2006). Network, swarm, microstructure. Available: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure.html