For the month of August 2010 - two Variant pub-table discussions on issues arising out of two articles in the current issue:

The Doublet (upstairs bar)
74, Park Rd, Glasgow, G4 9JF
U - Kelvinbridge

5.30pm to 7.30pm, then other topics

Wednesday 4th August - with Gesa Helms

Doodley-doo? Doodley don't!
Life and Sabotage
Gesa Helms

"There are two lines of enquiry for this review (of an admittedly rather unimportant book, Claire Faÿ's The Doodle Notebook. How to Waste Time in the Office, that has already received far more than its fair share of coverage):
a. what kind of practices are proposed "to take on the daily grind"?
b. who can propose such practices and who can engage in them?
Following these two lines, I want to critically engage doodling in a debate over work-place agency, resistance and sabotage; to draw out the limitations constructed for creative office workers; and provide a couple of openings to raise implications for a politics on work, autonomy, subversion if we were to arm ourselves with a bit of stationery."

Full text here: http://www.variant.org.uk/37texts/7Doodley.html

Thursday 19th August - with Owen Logan

"Art Workers Won't Kiss Ass"
Owen Logan

Taking the Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services' "A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT ART LABOUR AND ECONOMICS" as his starting point, Logan "wonders if the last great avant-garde idea of collapsing art into life is not a double-edged sword, curtailing strategy and tactical thinking while advancing a more pleasurable politics of expression." This Logan informs with Understanding Social Welfare Movements - Annetts, Law, McNeish & Mooney's 'argumentative and lively' book - which "reading against the grain of some aspects of social movement discourse gives a good sense of a new Left-leaning social aesthetics that is gregarious but not necessarily collective in any substantial sense."

Full text here: http://www.variant.org.uk/37texts/8comment37.html

PLEASE NOTE:

These will be small, fairly informal sessions and, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, we'll have to squeeze everyone around a couple of tables, so please let us know if you are coming along (and to which one) by dropping us an email to <variantmag@btinternet.com> so we can get a sense of numbers. And I suspect folk will be hanging around for more informal chat afterwards if anyone just wants to pop their head in later in the evening.

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