So we seem to have returned to the old, tired familiar notion of artist as moral relativist, removed from the rest of the world, at liberty to make and say and do without the necessity for explanation or intellectual framework. This role does have social-political implications, and however weary these graduates of Goldsmiths may be, many others are passionately involved in these post structuralist debates. To choose not to join the messy debates over the language of experience, the themes of difference and otherness is to adopt a political and intellectual position. It seems that it is not an inevitable result of 18 years of Tory rule that artists become individualistic and self-referentially ironic. At the same time a similar phenomenon is current in packaging young white British pop bands.
Imagination is both a site for activity and the invitation for response from the viewer.
It creates a space, or the possibility of engagement. What I understand by 'the space of the imagination' is the ability to produce a place in one's work for the possibility of change. The space of the imagination is both about an openness in the way that the work is made and, crucially, the intention in which it is to be read. The place of the imagination is central in connection with my concerns for the development of an ethically aware arts practice. One assumes that all aesthetic work involves use of the imagination.