Lana Locke

This practice-based research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice. In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres. Mother’s milk solidifies as plaste...

This practice-based research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object and installation based art practice that crosses different border spaces, from the gallery space to the public and community space, to the unauthorized object in contentious space. Through this exploration, the potential power of the feral in the social will also be examined.

The former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke’s comment that the August 2011 London riots were the doings of a feral underclass suggests an ideological and entirely pejorative definition of the feral that I reject, in an attempt to reclaim the feral as a political and critical concept. Whereas he suggested that the people who rioted and broke into shops were subhuman, I suggest that the feral is the inherently human: precarious, dependent, vulnerable.

In my objects and installations the feral is found in collected detritus that signals the presence of irrepressible nature within the urban environment, and in bodily traces of life as translated through materials, seeping out to disrupt the space in their entanglement in it.

Like the untamed masses of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the feral, on the borders of the real and metaphorical, possesses a violence that resists definition.

The paper explores what the work of a visual art practitioner can contribute to radical democracy, using sculpture and installation to generate agonism. As presented at the Fifth Annual Radical Democracy Conference at the New School for Social Research, New York, 10-11 April 2015.

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.