Art Class: a performance lecture film

Fugitive Images holds workshops in community centres, DIY spaces, hostels, as well as academic, galleries and art spaces. Personally, this is a crucial part of working across intersections and audiences, which I have done with all my work, situated between art and cultural activism. So here, especially working with the themes of class, intersectionality, and class, we participated in Antiuniversity 2023. 'The Antiuniversity does not have a fixed constitution - it is shaped by everyone who takes part, as organiser, host or guest'. From 1-31 October LUX and Antiuniversity streamed (Free) Art Class (49minutes, 2020): a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The film tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances. As Fugitive Images, David Roberts and I held a workshop where we created a space for mutual support, care and solidarity to collectively write a manifesto on art and class. To debate, draft and declare our manifesto we took inspiration from intersectional activist, art and architecture manifestoes such as Combahee River Collective, Agnes Denes, Itsuko Hasegawa, Nyéléni, and VNX Matrix. Fugitive Images is a not-for-profit cultural collective, founded in 2009, and working across media and platforms in London, nationally and internationally. Fugitive Images emerged from grass roots community organising, in particular around social and spatial justice and equitable co-existence. We work collaboratively and in many different registers