David Beech On Some Techniques of the Freee Art Collective

This talk by David Beech introduces how Freee Art Collective forms community through declaring agreement and disagreement, with the use of manifesto, spoken choir, bodily endorsement of slogan and kiosk.

The Freee Art Collective are not activists but experiment with platforms of politicisation. Political art is not politics nor a branch of politics. Art is not the publicity machine for radical politics. It is understandable that politicised artists end up turning to real politics as the content and the rationale of their work. However, this always requires a depoliticisation of art itself. Freee politicise art by engaging in activities that call on participants to declare a position in relation to current issues. Freee use kiosks to introduce assembled groups of people around ideas that are published on badges, T-shirts, signage, billboard prints and scarves. Freee conceive of publics through techniques that derive from montage: cutting, pasting, rearranging, splitting and joining. Individuals and groups are temporarily cut out of the community and pasted into new configurations, rearranged through discursive processes of splitting and joining (disagreeing and agreeing) and then reassembled in a new totality through acts of collective publishing.