Commissioned artists
Two artists - Anna Best and Jason Bowman - have been commissioned to make work that engages with and critiques the content and structure of the symposia.
Anna Best: free lunch
In response to this commission for Interrupt I have chosen to instigate a parallel series of very small scale lunch meetings. People will be invited to spend several hours eating and drinking together and talking about issues important to them. The lunchers will include artists involved in 'socially engaged' practice, not necessarily with a connection to art and education, but rather those with a range of individually made connections to the (un-art) world.
All the lunches will be different. The nature of each lunch event is open and will be formed through dialogue between myself and the lunchers. I will not necessarily be present at each event. Some will be like blind dates and others will be people inviting whoever they wish. Lunchers are not expected to discuss the agendas of the Interrupt symposia, but rather to bring their own concerns and experiences into this debate. There will be a website - http://www.free-lunch.org/ - which serves to archive and distribute material from the lunch conversations as they evolve and functions as a working sketchbook throughout the process.
I hope this project will nourish and record the invisible conversations and networks that thread together the more shiny ingredients of art works, not to mention gallery programmes and funding policies.
Jason Bowman
As a practising artist invited to contribute artworks to the Interrupt symposia dealing with the notion of social engagement and its relationship to art I sought to develop a project that might traverse illustration whilst recognising the value in the aesthetics of demonstration, exhibition and interruption.
By diverting to: the jaws of town criers; the thrown voices of ventriloquists; the business of ethical capitalism; negotiating discussion formats designed by political arbitrators; the objects by the court artist which document the celebrity and infamy of the accused subject to the en-scripting of a lesson plan for the creation of a dunce-cap - I hope to merge with my conscription and profile the dilettantism of the engaged.