Normative Divisions and New Exclusions: Aesthetic Territorialism in Contemporary Art

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This project seeks to produce a new single channel video artwork that explores how the ordering and regulation of communal space in contemporary western democracy is connected to a liberalist poltics of individuation. Through examining the historical conditions of philosophical theory, cultural literature and the architecture of social space that have priveleged 'a culture of critique', or 'a culture of difference', as a means to resist or comment on the problems of institutional power, the work aims to raise questions regarding if and how this politics of culture aids and abets structures of authority, or if it makes them less stable now. The artwork will be filmed on location in Los Angeles, completed on my return to London and exhibited in association with MOT International Gallery, London at the culmination of the project.The research takes as its primary context, Los Angeles, USA. The social and cultural geography of Los Angeles is the example, par excellence of how the liberalist principle of individuality orders social systems, evidenced in the boundary demarcation of social space and gated communities. Conducting research in Los Angeles I aim to examine the architecture and theory of a historic 'exile modernism', a term attributed to the post-war German community of writers and philosophers including Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno who settled in Los Angeles in the 1940's. I seek to test to what extent their philosophy of resistance and withdrawal from the culture of Los Angeles is coterminous with a politics of security and protection seen in Los Angeles planning, architecture and social housing today. The research will involve a 10 day exploratory visit to Los Angeles to conduct theoretical research and practical preparatory work including:a) Researching, visiting and documenting the architecture from and associated with 'exile modernism' / the houses of Brecht, Thomas Mann and Theodor Adornob) Confirm times and venues for future filmingc) Work on location and to arrange preparatory shots, lighting of interior/exteriors and day/night work and the developments of the style of the video.d) Study historical documentation and aesthetic representations of Los Angeles architecture by working with the Julius Shulman archive at the Getty Institute, Los Angelese) Confirm technical equipment available in Los Angeles for the shoote) Meet with researchers and gallerists to discuss the projectAfter this visit I will spend time developing the work in the UK and prepare for a return trip to Los Angeles to film the piece, following which the work will be edited, scored and completed.Central to this research is a questioning of how art participates in reconfiguring what is understood to be our 'commonality', how this squares with our conception of a critical art practice and how (and if) art is capable of producing new agreements that transform and dissent from those that are considered to be established and institutional. This project seeks to examine the possibilities for these claims, whilst recognising that they hold within them a problematic idealization of arts' political power. In order to do this, my research makes connections between the culture of difference as a norm through the work of exile modernists, how it is present now, within the artworld, and how it is also evidenced in this culture of boundaried communal space. Together they share the problem of creating private pseudo-democracies that limit their potential to reconfiguring what politics is and means to us. This research project seeks to explore how these private territories produce ideological narratives and how these mythologies are literally manifest in literature, social space and art objects within the public domain. In producing new work on this theme I ask if, and how, images of community seen in art, philosophy and social space are capable of establishing new territories in the political field.