Reclaiming the Rural

Christopher Collier
 

I Landscape and modernity

'There is, in truth, nothing essentially backward-looking, conservative or traditional in rural culture. There are too many innovators in too many fields, who have belonged to the country or used it as a source material for that to be a defensible position' – Francois Matarasso 1)

Whilst it is not possible to agree with this assertion in its entirety, the fundamental premise is correct. The urbancentric nature of the majority of cultural discourse often fails to account for the contributions that rurally situated cultural practice affords. The term ‘rural’ encodes a weight of urbancentric prejudice within dominant cultural discourse that is critically tied up with ideas of eurocentricity and logocentricity. Thus the rural has been dismissed as regressive within the binary oppositions of Modernity which instead construe the urban as the exclusive domain of the radical. Such an attitude is essentially the hangover of certain conceptions of homogeneous, centralised, progressive Modernity.

Bourriaud utilises the locomotive as a metaphor for the metanarrative of 20th century Modernism within his Altermodern essay2), surging forward as it did upon a strictly delineated path, racing onwards at speed towards the metropolis. He critiques the 'myth of progress' (pg.7) inherent in Modernism and the 'fetishistic obsession with contemporaneity' (pg. 5). He demonstrates that such metanarratives are inherently authoritarian and quickly give rise to colonialism and imperialism. Whilst he has the global situation in mind, in which western cultural conceptions of Modernity have colonised the globe, the analysis could equally apply to the 20th century expansionist colonisation of rural culture by urban artistic and cultural output, and the transformation of the rural into what Heidegger termed 'Bestand' or 'Standing Reserve'. (Standing reserve is related to the idea of instrumentality, whereby technology's instrumental orientation to the world transforms the world into "standing reserve." We might say that for technology, nothing in the world is "good" in and of itself, but only "good for" something.)

Thus when man, investigating or observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of Standing-Reserve3).

The development of global capitalism in 19th century across Western Europe and the US saw firstly the binary delineation of the rural as the negative other of the urban, and then the transformation of this rural space into both standing reserve and spectacle. The spectacle of the landscape was touched upon by Benjamin in his references to the proto-cinematic landscape panoramas of the Paris arcades, and it is a definition consistent with Debord's concept of the spectacle and his assertion that 'the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images'4). The images of the rural that permeated 19th Century dominant cultural discourse were, although ostensibly Romantic, in fact the manifestation of this spectacle. The original Romantic conception of the rural in its sublimity, though appearing spectacular had in fact largely been the result of rurally situated practice. It is this difference that is exposed by Debord's Heideggerian definition. The landscape painting is the urban bourgeois transformation of rural space into Standing Reserve, a spectacular accumulation of capital.

Where Bourriaud's concept of the Altermodern is interesting in this context is not necessarily within its widely accepted understanding of Modernism and Modernity, rather it is in its dismissal of the postmodern as a melancholic hangover of the modern, and the identification of a new prominence within contemporary culture, particularly contemporary art, of the heterochronic and heterotopic. The object, in light of Deleuzian metaphysics is no longer conceived of as singular in itself, rather constantly undergoing a singularization, a becoming. This is what Bourriaud touches upon when he identifies the artwork as a 'trajectory'. Form has become trajectory in this era that he terms the altermodern, and in light of his previous work the social and relational has become the aesthetic.

The idea that something is no longer singular but constantly undergoing singularisation, differentiation, at first seems at odds with a conception of the rural as a site of embeddedness and tradition. However, when we loosen our conceptions of singularity and with them fixed notions of signification, via a process of deconstruction, we can break down the binarism between urban and rural that constitutes rural in the negative, as the inferior aspect of such an opposition. Through such a deconstructive approach the apparent static, embedded and monolithic notion of tradition breaks down and we can perceive tradition as a constantly fluid process of becoming within the social and relational body. Those aspects of rural culture characterised as provincial, peripheral, amateurish, unengaged and overly traditional by a dominant, urban capitalist discourse are deconstructed one by one by such an approach. When form is perceived as trajectory and social relations as aesthetics then the traditional, the realm of folklore, becomes the site of radical artistic contestation.

As Bourriaud states in Altermodern, the conception of centre and periphery is no longer valid: this being a deconstructive topographical approach that has been widely accepted in the postmodern era. Such a view has only been strengthened by the widespread proliferation of mass communication and the internet across the globe, re-evaluating the local in the context of the global, whilst Modernity's conceptions of centralised States and urbancentricity are undermined within a neo-medieval new feudalism. Umberto Eco has commented on the postmodern condition being akin to a new middle ages (without necessarily negative connotations)5). The rural was always mistrusted by the urban bourgeoisie and radical theory alike as the site and locale of the feudal. In the neo-feudal alignment of contemporary culture, in a situation where semi-autonomous networks of 'city states' and provinces present their offerings at the Venice Biennale every two years, the rural is once more well placed to offer its culture on an equal billing to the urban within the frameworks of the dominant cultural discourse.
 

II Rural microcultures
With the innovations of the postmodern period, a rurally-situated criticality was liberated that allows many artists, including myself, to work in the ways in which we do today. Robert Smithson's seminal Spiral Jetty appeared in 1970, at the dawn of a new artistic paradigm in which Conceptual, Process-Based, Performance and Land Art began to take off and leave older, urban commodity based art forms of painting, print and sculpture behind. This seismic break in art history (albeit informed by earlier innovations) was probably as significant as the innovations in oil painting and perspective in the Renaissance that gave art the illusion of reality, or the invention of photography in the 19th Century that emancipated it from that illusion. This is art for the third millennium and it is perfectly suited to allow the rural context to flourish.

I began thinking about the problems surrounding rurally situated contemporary art in response to a paper entitled 'Country Living' by Rosemary Shirley6). I saw her present her ideas at a conference in Wales in late 2008 and began to realise that there was a multitude of artists self-identified as rural operating beneath the surface of the mainstream media and critical discourse. These were often artists, who whilst not united by any common medium or technique, or necessarily even by approach, were operating with some similar concerns to those which I had myself been developing within my own artistic practice. As Shirley stated, if one is to collect together the myriad different practices that are occurring under the umbrella of their common ‘rurality’, this genre is essentially 'an underestimated, undervalued and often invisible form of practice'7). I came to believe that this is what artists self-consciously working within such a field were well placed to alter, given the wider cultural shifts at play in their favour.

I grew up in the countryside, surrounded by working farms, where everyday struggle and practical down-to-earth realities went hand in hand with the sublime and romantic view of the land as something marvelous, even transcendent. It is, and has been for sometime, the critical fashion to draw stark separation between the mundane, often harsh realities of the countryside and what has been seen as the urbanised perspective of the rural environment as a panoramic spectacle for bourgeois enjoyment: the landscape construed as a stage set for excursions and a backdrop for adventures, a vista within which to repose. Indeed the term landscape itself has been criticised for its connotations, for turning the rural into an idealised commodity: a conveniently packaged entity for the enjoyment of the bourgeois gaze.

To me, personally, this idea does not necessarily hold true. As a child in the country I was as happy and as thrilled as any young Wordsworth to clamber through thickets and dash across hillsides beneath epic skies very much aware of the landscape as a venue for adventure, as a glorious succession of exquisite imagery, as a sublime companion. I did not idealise my environment, it was just as it appeared to me, within my own phenomenological position as a child growing up within a vast arena that might be at any time given over to play. When I photographed or sketched my surroundings for idle enjoyment I did not make a commodity the land, the farmers were busy doing that all around me, that was their business and the everyday business of the countryside. Instead I merely took the rural at face value and for me it seemed more than enough to light the touch paper on a million mental adventures and an entirely reasonable basis for my burgeoning creativity.

Then came Art College and the steady realisation that I was not creating work that others considered quite as natural or acceptable an output as I had, up until that point, considered. I was fighting a constant war with my tutor who considered my output too romantic and by no means 'edgy' or 'gritty' enough. I for my part thought much of what he considered edgy to be tired and largely devoid of anything that affected me in any meaningful way. Vacuous replays of old urban concerns, glamorised by association with fashionable galleries, colleges and of course the urban metropolis were not always the work that I considered most important. All I would hear was how the urban was the location in which culturally and critically valuable art occurred, but much of this was work that did not affect me in any significant way or speak to me of any vestige of my experience of the world.

The urban centre is full of people, that much is obvious, and where there are people there follows there is a market for art. As artists must survive they must exchange their creativity and their skills or output for money: therefore, goes the argument, make art for the market in the metropolis. But this art meant little to me, it was another symptom of the alienation I felt in the face of mass culture. What I did not understand at that time were the potential political, economic and theoretical reasons for my visceral reaction.
I started to think about what sort of art would speak to my experience and to the people I knew from the countryside where I grew up, for if there was no market for this work then things would develop down very different avenues. Ideas and expressions became more strongly wedded to specific spaces but also more aware of time and the processes of change. They became, in a word, situational. The work, liberated from the market requirements of commodity value became more ephemeral and transient, a phenomenological experience that worked in conjunction with that experience as evoked by the landscape context within which the work was situated. The work became a trajectory, a process that might create a momentary or transient shock experience that would, through drawing attention to its incongruity within the situational context momentarily cut through the banality of capitalist experience and jolt the participant back to life.

The work became an experience of singularisation, by situating itself within the grammar of a specific historical or environmental context or chain of signification and then disrupting and détourning that signification to deflect and divert its meanings in new directions, cutting through the accumulated layers of association and conditioning and jarring participants into new understandings.

I came to the conclusion that such work was not only valid but fundamentally necessary. It was work that was necessary not just for rural artists and communities but for society at large. Paradoxically in light of this, it was work that was not in itself confined only to the rural situation but was rather a genre of working derived from the peculiarities of the rural that had a wider position and implications for the cultural discourse in all spatio-temporal situations.

In the critical discourse that surrounds contemporary art today vast amounts of attention are directed towards what is often perceived as the sole site of the innovative or radical in the form of urban, globalised, metropolitan culture. Whilst such macroculture no doubt has much to offer, I have come to believe that such discourse should not and must not overlook the quietly stifled, local microcultures that cling on, mostly in rural contexts, giving a sense of grounding and depth in our increasingly transitory world – such rural microcultures give roots to the rhizome of history. Intimately linked with the land; with folklore, linguistic diversity, biodiversity and tradition; they are regularly overlooked by those discourses that create, commission and define culture. An attention-grabbing, metropolitan, showpiece media event that draws the crowds to the mechanising shop can often be an empty shell, both alienating and shallow. That is not of course to adopt the simplistic position that all urban art is bad, all rural good – it is patently not and such a position is one that I would passionately refute. However art and cultural investigation should naturally be permitted to exist in rural areas beyond a censoring discourse, arising from their own particular strengths: a sense of relations, sociality, community, the land, folklore, language and traditions.

By applying the frameworks of deconstruction and the prevalent cultural models of the postmodern, traditions can become methodologies of singularisation, folklore a contestation, sociality a site of innovation, just as stark, if not more so in the countryside. All that is required is for critical discourse to make the leap and to acknowledge new frameworks that do not necessarily rely on commodity value or huge, impersonal, and often alienated audiences of passive, consuming spectators. The country, the rural, needs a voice within contemporary culture, precisely as what it has to offer is an alternity and a site of contestation of the hegemony of urbancentric models of semiocapitalist, global cultural colonisation.

When one does not see one’s own experiences and values represented and reflected back then one start to question their validity. Human beings cannot exist in isolation - one man on his own does not have a culture. With mass culture and media, as the main manifestations of the dominant cultural discourse, overlooking rural concerns and value systems such systems potentially become undermined and eventually wither.

III Farming

Joseph Beuys once claimed, in a phrase borrowed from Novalis, that 'every human being is an artist'8) but following on from such a statement should we perhaps ask the question: ‘is everyone a farmer?’ Everyone would surely have to agree that they are not, however if a man plants some vegetables in his garden then he is as much a farmer as the man on the street is an artist.

I am misrepresenting Beuys' position deliberately. He intended to suggest, I believe, that every person has an innate creativity and a need to contribute that creativity, as a process of singularisation, within the creation of the collaborative artwork that is society. Given this we must acknowledge the responsibility of those that define themselves as an artist for a given period (however problematic that is within the contexts of the division of labour etc.) for nurturing that innate creativity latent within society. Should we not then consider the artist and the farmer more closely akin than we might previously imagined? Should we consider the responsibility that both artists and farmers have to a wider society that demands their existence and has done so as two of the earliest and most fundamental settled human activities? Whilst urbanism is the reciprocity of farming (no cities and no civilisation without agriculture), art is the reciprocity of culture, of signification.

Despite the apparent democratisation of culture facilitated in recent years with the internet handing over the potential means of production to the masses within a semiotic economy and the attendant growth in leisure time, the fact that everyone now has the opportunity to 'do it themselves', to create and be creative, does not mean that everyone is any more an artist than everyone is a farmer.

As farmers must create, nurture, struggle, depend on the whims of the market and public subsidy to survive, as they are often overlooked and undervalued by society, still they must create, sustain and conserve. It is often not a purely commercial decision, rather an inherent will that defies capitalist logic. A decision that is traditional rather than modern and that sets apart those that make it from the society that demands them. Farmer or Artist, they are custodians of a culture, for farmers too play a vital role in underpinning rural culture and to an extent culture at large. Without the farmer or the artist culture would diffuse into a formless soup of mass-market and media-'democracy'. Rather than rural communities withering to a vacant state of non-culture, agriculture provides a glue, a web, a network that links and locks together the isolated hubs and pockets of rural microculture into an interconnecting, living rhizomatic rural condition. In turn the survival of this rural culture gives society at large a living, tangible link with its traditions and the roots of its mythologies, its unconscious.

This is an unconscious that must not be structured in a logocentric fashion as somehow negative, other or inferior, rather it is integral as a site of alternity and contestation in a manner recognised by Surrealism. In a similar, if not identical fashion, in wider society it falls to artists and imaginers to clamber and dangle like spiders about the social super-structure weaving the mirrored veil that reflects the worker ants as they go about the construction of their colony. Without them we would be living in an age of 'mediocracy' with a deprivation of imagination leaving all potential alternatives barren and potentially fertile ideas futile as ideological wastelands. As farmers, so artists operating in rural situations have a responsibility to keep going and to keep a way of life going, they must continue to make work that reflects a 'rural' situation and not simply be drawn down the path of the market place towards urbancentric commodity formulas.

To draw out the comparison still further, rural networks often still operate on a different set of social rules than those of wider, urbancentric discourse. Artists, operating freely, also offer an alternative to the oligarch media information machine that spoon feeds culture down the throats of passive citizen-subjects. Within the rural network word-of-mouth is valued. In perceptions of the countryside, often mobility, change and transience are considered mistrusted symptoms of urban living. Whilst I would argue that this is essentially not the case for many of the reasons I have explored, it is valid to suggest that within rural areas perhaps some static, grounded or embedded things are more valued and trusted. There are the multiple anecdotes that state that you are a new-comer unless you have lived in the village at least twenty years. Whatever the truth of this, and if it were entirely true it would of course in many ways be stale and negative, what such a general attitude does do however is that it serves to entrench cultures and communities against the vicious winds of global capitalism that would not blink to shred the leaves from their cultural tree. It is a long practised defence mechanism and though it offends our urbancentric ideas of what is healthy and what a good society should be, it serves to temper the flood of propaganda from the media machine with a hefty dose of mistrust.

Artists can foster this mistrust both in urban and rural contexts, and in the world at large. They can bemuse and confound, subvert and disrupt, jam the dog-whistle signals with the beautiful and terrible. They can pull the altar cloth away from under the structures of control by opening up participants to a sublime reality that they can discover for themselves all around them by processes of singularisation and not at the bottom of their wallets. Such artists can undertake an activity that employs the disruptive shock tactics as championed by Benjamin, drawn ultimately from Brecht. They can employ the disruptions of Dada, the détournement of the Situationists or the reinscriptions of deconstruction in order to undermine and disrupt the usual channels of social control, jogging the art participant from their hypnagogic state.

If rural concerns can become a valid issue for contemporary artists, no longer shunned for the bright lights of dystopia, then it becomes a viable possibility that artists can use their practice to highlight the predicament of threatened rural microcultures and an alliance between artist and farmer can be struck. Perhaps then the comparison of artist and farmer can be extended and developed into a collaboration. Within a UK context, rural microcultures with their attendant small scale farms, particularly hill farms in remote and difficult areas such as Cumbria and much of upland Wales, are essential to maintain the viability of human life (as opposed to the tourist simulation of life) the countryside, along with the landscape, folk traditions and in the Welsh case, language. Without such a maintenance communities collapse, a way of life ends and the rich vein of alternative spatial encoding that rural culture embodies becomes stagnant and withers away. These farms are vital to the very existence of accumulated millennia of agrarian heritage, hill farming is the custodian not just of local, rural economies, not just of food security, or landscape but of our now very tenuous link to the land, to the earth, that sustains us.

IV The rural as a privileged site of critique
Just as society has grown alienated from natural systems and the land, so too we have become disconnected from our own subconscious minds and instincts, via the all-encompassing virtual reality of media, computers and instant, constant distraction and gratification. Childhood is closed in upon by elaborate play-machines stripping us from the beginning of our most valuable asset – imagination. Whilst infancy is under siege, adults are regressed into the cotton wool cocoon of intimate and authoritarian State control and removed from even the perception of agency by the false choices of consumerism, like rats in a lab addicted to the self-stimulation button. Occluded from ourselves, only the psychic shock of the marvellous can jar us back to life. As Breton famously said: Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful9). It is through this encounter with the marvellous, and hence the sublime that the rural context possesses in abundance, that we can make our only free choice, that of refusal; the refusal to capitulate, refusal to submit, refusal to serve, refusal to spend, refusal to die.

As contemporary artists can we lend this powerful and terrible weapon, the weapon of the marvellous and the beautiful, to the cause of the marginalised microcultures that are threatened in rural areas? Is it not our place not merely to critique, but to guard and conserve those very sites of critique? It is an issue of fundamental importance. For when failed neoliberal States can conveniently overlook their very neoliberalism in order to redistribute billions from the populous to the oligarchy in a move of staggering audacity and criminality, one might consistently expect them not to brief their urbancentric media mouthpieces against ‘whinging farmers’ and the ‘conceptual bullshit’ of contemporary art. These are the very people who sustain the land on which we live and the space in which we think, and they should not be allowed to fall to the free market in an age of austerity caused singularly by the decision to redistribute assets from the poor to the rich. The same UK government that underwrote the colossal losses of individuals who produced nothing but the circulation of signs were the same government constantly seeking to renegotiate cuts in European agricultural subsidies.

With art the situation is more complex. How can an artist be critical when they must operate under the patronage of the State? The Arts Council is the answer that the system arrives at, but this merely defers the problems. Only artists that conform to the accepted discourse may be considered. Hence the potentially publicly funded alternative to the urbancentric model of art as marketable commodity is a far from a perfect system. Indeed it is one that constantly requires us to scour for alternative models and other radically differing means of production: means that we can truly control for ourselves.

As independent artists are often forced to compromise their practice in order to conform to required models, or else regress their work to the commodity formats of the metropolitan marketplace, so too are small, independent farms frequently threatened with annihilation. If left to the neoliberal solution of market forces small farms may be forced into dissolution, forced to amalgamate, or be taken over by large scale agribusiness in order to compete on the liberalised global stage. Such farms will naturally lose their local connections and without that continuity of tradition the rural microcultures that they sustain are under extreme threat. Can those that question and reflect the social processes that they find around them, those artists and imaginers, simply leave aside the countryside and follow off after fashion and find their sole concerns located, somewhere close to their fictional fortune, in the mass marketplace of the Big Smoke? Are we living through a market led version of the Highland Clearances as small farms are forced out of business and artists like the young life blood of the countryside transfuse to swell the cities and oil the cogs of the culture machine? Perhaps, and yet artists can not be held responsible for the far greater socio-economic forces within which they find themselves caught up. Naturally they migrate to the cities, perhaps one day to return, perhaps not. What they can be held responsible for however is the concerns and content of the only real means of resistance they have, their work. In the contemporary situation as small farms fold and concentrate more and more vital resources in the hands of fewer and fewer and as artists must leave their communities in order to find a cultural space in which to work that is financially viable, so they run the risk of being absorbed into the urbanistic capitalist machine of low or unpaid work and exploitation in which the exile of their artistic concerns completes their real alienation.

Urbanism10) doesn’t exist; it is only an “ideology” in Marx’s sense of the word. Architecture does really exist, like Coca-Cola: though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising about Coca-Cola — pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece.
Attila Kotanyi, Raoul Vaneigem 11)

Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem, in their still relevant analysis of urbanism, stated that urbanism is the direct encoding and signification of ideology. Whilst they might have viewed it as an alienating spectacle, we must still hold its inherent architectural hailing in mistrust and understand the socially isolating and culturally withering influences that it embodies. Artists are fundamental to the disruption of this, either through a Situationist phenomeno-praxis, a methodological exploration of psychogeography or simply in the Bartelbyesque act of refusal. By making work that is self-consciously rural in its inception or outlook, or destination, in its trajectory or in that it is inflected by the concerns, unique methodologies and theoretical perspectives of the rural situation, the artist is refusing and resisting this urbanist controlled psychological and cultural space. This is where sustainable rural communities can play their part also. They can offer an alternative to what Kotanyi and Vaneigem described as 'spacious and brightly coloured kindergartens' 12). They can be alternative spaces less permeated by the forces of spatial and mental control and as such produce a more genuine critique of the existing situation of our politico-economic system and culture.

For the maintenance of such spaces action must be taken to ensure their survival. We must enact tactics to ensure the whole subsidies system is rebalanced to favour those local custodians of rural life and to prevent the entities of multinational capitalism from exploiting corrupt systems for their own gains. Simultaneously arts policy and artists' own agendas need to reflect a singularising will to constantly engage in a process of becoming, and differing from themselves, and utilise their creative and theoretical space in order to create their own critical and singular worldspace.

Existing potentially in the cities or the countryside, a practice that refuses the structural inferiority imposed upon the rural by such binarisms, must utilise the potential for deconstructive critique that the rural embodies in the production of critically coherent contemporary, rurally informed, rurally situated, art. It will take as the serious subject matter for contemporary art the preservation and reinvigoration of rural and socially relational folk culture in distinct opposition to urbancentric, metropolitan definitions of culture and identity.

The constant conceptual promotion of unitary macroculture at the expense of the rural potential of microculture is no longer valid. Artists can use their position to intervene, disrupt and jam the messages from the ‘bards of conditioning’13), to define a new psychogeography where the rural operates as a valid and indeed necessary condition of human consciousness, to produce a physical and virtual network of transient testaments to rural socio-folk microculture as a site of contestation. They can recapture and reinscribe traditional cultural landmarks both literally and ideologically, enacting a three-fold occupation of cultural-ideological space, physical space in the landscape and virtual space on the internet. Hand-in-hand with this preservation and reinvigoration of folk culture as a fluid and singularising social libertarian alternative to authoritarian power, goes the acknowledgement that rural space is critically important, indeed essential to presenting a true picture of contemporary global culture. It continues to remain capable of showing us that ‘still, sad music of humanity’14).

By regularly seeking to remove the cultural trajectories away from the traditional contexts of art, away from the potentially exploitative commercial hubs or authoritarian institutions of urban centres, such a practice engages with the institutional critiques made by non-commodity art forms. As comfortable in situating itself out in the remote hills, woods and shores of the rural as within the forgotten corners of the city, this practice is situation specific and yet performative in the philosophical and linguistic sense.

I am suggesting that rural artists begin to carve out their own agenda, beating out their own paths into the future. I am calling upon artists both rurally-based and urban-based to acknowledge that where we come from and indeed where we operate is growing increasingly less important, what remains important is where we are going and how we get there. It is important therefore to not just acknowledge but indeed to champion the potential contained within the situation of the rural to create and enact successful, critical, affecting and necessary art. I call upon such artists to reinscribe the multiple significations of the dominant mass cultural discourse that operates as the actual physical manifestation of capitalism and to therefore transform it into the practical and theoretical tool of its own critique. I call on them to reject the binary structures that occlude us from ourselves and I call upon them to not cease from exploring. The artist’s primary role must be to foster mistrust in reality.

As farmers trudge onwards towards the future in a daily struggle to keep the countryside breathing, let us make our art a metonymic monument to this struggle. Without locally-run farms forming the network that keeps rural microcultures and communities together, communities will die and with them these cultures, this alternative sociality and this potential site of resistance and critique will become subsumed into the essentially homogeneous conformity of mass neoliberal culture. It is a cultural struggle that is in full swing as we speak and it is a choice that one can make as an artist who values the virtuality that the rural represents, to follow the commodity specialisation of the art market or to make work that remembers both where its values came from and more importantly why.

It is a choice that I too have to make. Do I commit to my principals in the only way I know how, through making art? Don’t get me wrong, you have to live, I have to live, but a life where everything you love is dead is no life at all. Art at the very least can be a flag for a certain conception of life that does not bow down at the altar of urbanistic homogeneity: a flag which rallies, which embodies, gives visibility and a physical essence, a flag that the marginalised can display to the world as a site of resistance. As disingenuous politicians used to say in Wales in an attempt to stifle the nation's democratic self-determination ‘you can’t eat the flag’. But it's more than flags; flags are symbols, symbols of ideas, of cultures, of ways of life, and ultimately of people. Well you can’t eat money either and if you don’t plant things, if you don’t grow things, then nobody eats and nobody lives.