ABSTRACT
Hal Foster takes off from Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’, an essay, as the title suggests, concerned primarily with literature but relevant nonetheless to the visual arts. Foster’s unpacking of what he terms ‘the artist as ethnographer paradigm’, however, gives us a useful set of guidelines for thinking about the location of the Free Form Project and its artists. Foster sees the paradigm itself as emerging out of ‘the capitalization of culture and privatization of society under Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and company’, just as Benjamin’s author-as-producer paradigm can be seen as a response ‘to the aestheticization of politics under fascism’. Svar Simpson was a student on Free Form’s first intensive training course for artists interested in working in the public realm. For an organization like Free Form, the policing of the audit culture meant that the long hours spent building up relationships of trust and exploring possibilities with a tenants association now had to be justified by clearly specified ‘outcomes’.
