>------ Forwarded Message
>From: "Dave Beech" <dave.be...@clara.co.uk>
>Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 09:23:23 +0100
>To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
>Subject: call for contributions

>THERE IS ALWAYS AN ALTERNATIVE

>A call for submissions for a publication charting the emergence of
>alternatives within contemporary art in the 90s. The publication will
>consist of essays, anecdotes, statements, documents and works both from the
>period and in response to it. The publication is produced to accompany an
>exhibition, also called There Is Always an Alternative, which will be at
>temporarycontemporary gallery in London, in June, and travel to The
>International 3 gallery in Manchester, in September.

>There Is Always an Alternative will articulate an alternative history of art
>practice and a history of alternative art practices around the early 1990s
>based on a political understanding of the position of the artist. The title
>derives from an inversion of one of Margaret Thatcher's favourite
>ideological phrases, "there is no alternative". This is a phrase used by
>people attempting to undermine whatever alternative there is and in that
>sense is always false and falsifying. On the contrary, there is always an
>alternative.

>One of the techniques available to the status quo is to minimize or
>eliminate the sense of any alternative in the present or immediate future by
>obliterating the alternatives that existed in the past. The market is a very
>good mechanism for this sort of institutionalised selectivity. It is through
>recovering alternatives in the past, therefore, that we will inform and spur
>on alternatives in the future. There is Always an Alternative documents an
>under-represented array of radical practices from the early-90s in order to
>provide potential models of radical individual and collective art practice
>now and to come.

>Exploring models and possibilities for artistic practice that resist,
>undermine or otherwise oppose the closures, absences and exclusions in
>dominant art discourse and practice, There is Always an Alternative will
>raise awareness of an alternative history of art in the early 1990s and in
>so doing, provide a resource for all those practices seeking to confront the
>limitations, both arbitrary and ideological, upon what can be done now.

>Send submissions to dave.be...@clara.co.uk or post them to 108 Slade Lane,
>Levenhsulme, Manchester M19 2BA.

>Deadline for submissions 25/04/05