RISK: Creative Action in Political Culture
Until May 14; CCA, Glasgow

On St Andrew’s Day in 1992, I walked into Westminster Abbey along with two other students, and chained myself to the Stone of Destiny.

The staff thought we might be terrorists, and swiftly ushered confused bands of tourists out of the building. The doors were closed for 90 minutes, as policemen cut through our chains and threatened us with handcuffs. We were eventually turfed out unscathed, and our pro-independence protest made it into the morning papers.

I dread to think how that kind of protest might turn out today, in a state which has the means to imprison potential terrorists without trial. With the G8 Summit booked for Gleneagles, it’s now inadvisable to do so much as think bad thoughts in the vicinity of Auchterarder.

Indeed, George Orwell’s concept of thought crime is creeping horribly close to reality. In May last year American artist Steven Kurtz was arrested by the FBI on charges of bioterrorism, because of scientific equipment found in his house. The art world was dumbfounded; Kurtz had been using the equipment for an art project, testing for genetic contamination in the global food trade.

Kurtz and his colleagues argue that they are being targeted for merely having the potential to carry out an illegal act. What started out as a relatively straightforward art project has now expanded in significance, thanks to the FBI, and The Joint Terrorism Task Force. Kurtz is facing up to 20 years in jail. His group, the Critical Art Ensemble, has contributed an essay to a CCA exhibition devoted to politically strident material.

RISK is as much about the mechanics of protest as it is about the reasons for protesting. The exhibition shows us ways of making a difference, as well as a pot-pourri of reasons for wanting to. What it doesn’t do is show an interest in party politics, with apathy on the rise and a General Election in the diary.

At least on the level of global politics, there is a new generation of artists who are not afraid to act in earnest. Some of their work is stridently intellectual, and some of it just plain puerile. The poster wall and DIY placards at the front door are a direct echo of Bob & Roberta Smith’s recent show at Baltic, except that Bob Smith was satirising notions of social inclusion and CCA is not.

Also in the juvenile camp is the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), which has set up a tongue-in-cheek strategic planning room at CCA, complete with a large table-top map of Gleneagles. A scrawl on the wall explains CIRCA’s strategy of ensuring that the eight world leaders don’t escape their “house arrest” within the confines of Gleneagles’s security enclosure. You are encouraged to transform little plastic soldiers with paint, glue and feathers, and to move them around the map.

CIRCA’s premise is mildly amusing, but no matter how you dress up the little toy soldiers, they’re still toting guns. I don’t feel empowered by adding another fighter to the map, even if there is a pink feather sticking out of his rifle.

Wargames are questioned in a much more fundamental way by Ruth Catlow in her project Rethinking Wargames. She has created a chess board with specially adapted rules, in which a third player controls the pawns in pursuit of conflict resolution. If no pieces are captured, everyone’s a winner. The game sits in the main exhibition space at CCA, which is set up more as a radical drop-in centre than a conventional gallery.

In fact as I wander around, a man approaches me, looking slightly baffled. “Is this an exhibition?” he asks. He’s not sure whether he’s come to the right place. It’s understandable; there aren’t many pictures on the wall. There are, however, newspapers, essays and books strewn around a coffee bar, and computer monitors and videos aplenty. The whole room is designed to encourage loitering, but it’s more like a library than a gallery, and he’s nervous about trespassing.

It is an exhibition, I assure him. Culture is a broad term which encompasses many things, including politics. That has been recognised by artists such as Joseph Beuys who coined the term “social sculpture” decades ago, and who stood as an election candidate for the German Green Party.

More recently the term “relational aesthetics” has been used to describe a new generation of artists, including Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, who make it their role to effect social change, however minutely. Like Beuys, they see fluid social structures as their medium, instead of clay or oil.

In that light, the coffee on sale in the exhibition isn’t any old brew, but a work of art. Kate Rich has devoted herself to “feral trade”, or the direct exchange of goods between diverse social networks. So, instead of travelling the usual invisible channels, your cuppa comes to you direct from El Salvador, with a quick stop-off in an arts co-op in Bristol. If you don’t believe it, Rich has the pictures to prove it.

Selling coffee might not seem like the riskiest business to be in, but it’s direct action all the same. Chaining yourself to a national monument is kids’ stuff, compared with subverting international trade routes. Every bit of art in RISK is doing its bit to change the world, and that’s a welcome change from the art celebrity navel gazing of the 1990s.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.04.05