Planning for Paradise is one of the latest exhibitions to be curated by the Oxford collective Launch Collaborative. For the pop-up show, which lasted only three days, James Sutton, Louis-Jack, Peter Shenai and Thomas Watson, four final year students from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, collaborated to produce a body of work which, in their own words, questioned: “What are the aesthetic trends of protest and social activism today?”

Upon arrival I’m pleasantly surprised by The Project Room, situated on the top floor of the Jericho Community Centre, which is more contemporary than one might expect. The works within this compact exhibition space are static and considered - quite the opposite to the highly antagonistic scenes associated with social activism that are saturating the media.

With the entire Globe in financial crisis, and major cuts seriously affecting both the arts and education, the artists have certainly picked topical subject matter. That said, it is the apparent focus on the aesthetic distinctions associated with protest rather than the cause at the heart of the matter that stops me from assuming the subject an obvious choice.

The first exhibit consists of three Untitled canvases. These seemingly abstract monochrome images sit unassumingly in line on the right hand wall as you enter the room. Those of you who are tech savvy would recognise them instantly as QR (Quick Response) codes, to those who don't know (as I confess I did not) these are two dimensional barcodes which can be deciphered using a smart phone. If you run the appropriate app, each image transforms into an on-screen quote. The most poignant of which being ;“Silence is an argument carried out by other means”. Ironically this unexpected interactive element to the show is somewhat exclusive - available only to those up to date with the latest technology. I cannot help but think that this goes against the grain of participatory art practice in general – a model which has its origins in opposing the elite. I wonder if this is a deliberate derision intended to challenge preconceptions or simply a prediction for the future.

Opposite these modernistic offerings, the slogan AbolishAlienationTM occupies the left wall. Aside from the slogan being slyly contradicted by the previous work it also boasts the familiar monogram of a registered trademark. Written in CamelCase (a name assigned due to the “humps” which appear in the text where it is capitalized) Security mimics a form of marketing which we freely associate with various consumer commodities, notably iPod and McDonalds. By appropriating a graphic that is so frequently used in advertising the artists appear to be drawing parallels between the marketing strategies adopted by big business and those which can be applied to activist campaigning, particularly in relation to globalisation and the rise of social media. In context this idealist statement, so clearly unobtainable, emphasises an uncomfortable reality that many political proclamations are little but empty promises, utopian in nature.

In Rhetorical Signs (1-10) the artists have digitally altered existing posters, removing all text and presenting us with picket signs displaying nothing but a series of abstract shapes and blocks of colour. Instead of appropriating pre-existing aesthetic elements in order to give them a new political meaning, as the Situationists so famously did, here the artists seem to have applied a process of anti-détournement, systematically disseminating and de-politicizing the original until it has nothing left to say. The signs, which were originally posters advertising club nights, lean redundantly against the walls. Out of context and functionless they reek of corporate design acting as yet another reminder that behind any campaign is a design and marketing team.

“Here installation itself functions as a mute form; once politicized in its early heydays, it politely occupies the space, waiting to expire.” Indeed for a show which takes political unrest as its point of departure Planning for Paradise is defiantly aphasiac. The show sits provocatively on the fence - refusing to take a position and in doing so paradoxically prompting the viewer to rethink theirs.

Planning for Paradise
Project Room, Oxford
5-7 May

Daisy Teage

Daisy Teage is a Fine Art graduate based in Oxford

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