McLeer, B., 2018.

N scale

The starting point for N scale is a factory fire in Thailand that killed one-hundred and eighty-eight people in 1993. Put simply, the research project asks what is the form (of art practice) that can catalyse a 'space of appearance' for this forgotten and remote tragedy? As such the research is situated in relation to the contingencies, complicities and blind spots of global capitalism and asks specifically how memorialisation (in civic and collective form) can operate as a mode of 'active contemplation' through which the political subject of 'we, the workers' can be reimagined.
My artistic research aims to produce new forms of transversal art practice situated between visual art, performance, writing and activism that reimagine and reconstitute political theorist Hannah Arendt's mid-20thc ideas for a public-political 'space of appearance'. (Arendt, H. 1998). Arendt's 'space of appearance' is manifested through human speech and action and sits in opposition to transcendent, Platonic ideas of contemplation. However my research explores what role contemplation can have in the politics of action (and vice versa), by asking what role aesthetic experience and imagination has in socially engaged, participatory and political art practice. In doing this the research brings a new and critical perspective, focused around a recuperated idea of the 'viewer', to practices and debates on 'useful' art (for example see, Tania Bruguera, Alistair Hudson) in which art is instrumentalised socially and politically.
It does this through a particular mobilisation of durational and participatory 'viewing' - a kind of 'contemplative' slowness, withdrawal or suspension (of action) - into a temporary space of what Simon Critchley calls the 'metapolitical' (Critchley, S. 2007) in which 'we' can both appear and be encountered, ethically and critically. Innovatively, the research also uses a democratic and relational methodology (Rancière, J. 2010, Armstrong, I. 2016) in which objects, images, and people (living and dead) operate according to an axiomatic equality that both problematises and embraces community and representation.