(access to Banner Repeater is free - please ask at the barriers, if they are manned, to be let through to visit) TWO TEXTS   Terry Atkinson   Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock   BLACK VANITIES Friday 15 February 6 – 9 PM   Launch of publication (subsequently available from Banner Repeater.)   16pp, 16 b + w images, 299mm x 370mm(tabloid), ISBN 978-0-9560905-4-6   “In the case of judging art works, which works are surely included in the furniture comprising the world out there, our susceptibility to propaganda is raised in a particularly acute form. This since such objects/events are made by people, are made by us and are not of the order of natural events such as the smell of a rose or the view of a sunset. Such objects/events are part of the stream of our ongoing cultural production. The evidence pointing to the fact that it is part of our species nature to produce culture seems incontrovertible. Whether or not beauty resides in these objects/events, or in us, or is subjective in the sense that it is ideologically produced, concerning culture in general it seems we do not have a choice as a species as to whether or not we produce culture, we simply produce it. In this sense even the refusal to accept we as a species necessarily produce culture produces culture – a culture of refusing to accept we produce culture. And the argument concerning the character and status of the concept of beauty is itself a cultural production. Thus a claim to universality that does seem to be sustainable is the claim stating that all societies, without exception, produce culture. And according to this condition, there is no culture that I know of that does not make a claim there is such a thing as beauty. This seems to be an altogether more secure claim than those discussed earlier in these remarks concerning beauty. In fact culture making seems to be a definition of society, given that everybody can agree on what culture is. Having admitted this much, the argument then is about the kind of culture we produce. This is the argument that JCHP’s work attempts to explicitly address. The particular quest (and the puzzle) being, under what conditions, first, can one, and second, should one contribute to the culture? But given the preceding remarks something a bit tricky starts to emerge here. The latter part of the question ‘should we’, is superfluous in the sense that if we make culture compulsively then we do not have the choice as to whether we should or should not contribute – we simply do it. Anything we do will be some kind of a contribution to culture. There is nothing that will not be a contribution. For example, giving up practice altogether will be a contribution to the culture. If JCHP have at some earlier time considered giving up practice, and I have no idea whether or not this is the case, they have obviously rejected this possibility. Moreover it is clear from their present writing that one of the aims of continuing the practice should be an inquiry not a celebration of art world alleged triumphs, not that the two are logically exclusive, just, at this present juncture of practice, highly unlikely. It is not the matter then of the quest that concerns them (that one should conduct such a quest is taken as a given in JCHP’s practice) but the matter of the specific conditions under which art practice is produced and maintained.” (Terry Atkinson, 2013)   Terry Atkinson (Thurnscoe, South Yorkshire, UK, 1939) founded Art & Language in 1968 with David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell   Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock is the sole collective practice of Dave Smith (Derby, Derbyshire, UK, 1972) and Thom Winterburn (Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK, 1970)