ASSEMBLISM: Blair has a friend

ASSEMBLISM purports to be 'a new movement in art and architecture' - http://www.assemblism.org/

ASSEMBLISM has a manifesto gathered together under the letter 'C'

COMPOSITION
COLOUR
COMPETENCE
COLLABORATION
CONSTRUCTION
CONTENT
CREATIVITY
COMMUNICATION
CONFIDENCE
CREDIBILITY

God only knows how Nelsonn and Co define these elements out of any historical context - but they do! Now, let's look at these key 'new' manifesto words again:-

COMPOSITION - Golden Proportion, Cezanne's optical eye, Cubism, post-post-modernism?
COLOUR - Temperature, scale, mix, contrast; perceived, absolute or abstract?
COMPETENCE - conception, control, craft; longevity, new-build; who measures?
COLLABORATION - for Assemblists this means collaboration with new labour, town planners, architects, designers - what about the community? What about artists working in the new media?
CONSTRUCTION - machine tooling, manufacture, pre-fabrication; modelling, gluing, sticking? Ah, the Assemblists want a plan! The 20th Century is littered with plans!
CONTENT - what content? Social, Historical, Artistic, Communal? What?
CREATIVITY - talk of "form" - what "form" is of itself creative??
COMMUNICATION - Here we are: "aims" and "objectives" - the very game-speak of Blair & Co that every teacher across the land detests! Why don't the Assemblists come out and say: we're creating designs for the architecture in the Blair age (forget ecology, make it look green).
CONFIDENCE - Sure Assemblists have confidence for they want part of this rotten Blair/Brown/Tory world. Sure they'll do well in East London for the 2012 Olympics. The whole point of the present era to real artists is: the Consensus is Broken and Confidence is Broken. This is the brilliance of Art Assemblists couldn't even wipe their monied brow about.
CREDIBILITY - None

***

The ASSEMBLISTS make me yearn for STUCKISM (the reaction against Tracey Emin's Tate Bed), for at least they weren't posing an 'ISM' as a means of remodelling society. They were/are questioning.

The best of Art will ever question the top of society to give the rest of society a means to feel human - to 'stir' the multitude into action and not the blind compliance of order ASSEMBLISM poses.

Let a thousand Banksys bloom!