Doug Ashford

Good artists, like good criminals, know that the retrieval of autonomy from the increasingly regulated arena of public life mandates a sophisticated understanding of the forces that produce and manage that control. This may mean bypassing twentieth-century models of centrally organised collective actions for the possibilities of subjective rebellion, or poetics, that inspired the formulation of such rebellion the first place. The aggression and reconciliation between friends, the memories of lost intimacies, the chance alignment of personal affect onto public desire – all could provide cultural forms that avoid simple sociological reduction. New potential lies in artists as citizen-loiterers refusing to accept what is already scripted for their interactions by the commercial designation of space and language. This implies a kind of laziness in the face of efficient social categories of both progress and civic responsibility. Stealing and altering the spaces and signs that make up the modern city for their own uses, artists can model the act of claiming space and time as an abstract form – something that other inhabitants can then use in a context of their own invention.