Premature exposure

Art Terrorist Mr W.Hippy has made a name for himself, quite literally. Well, he stole it in the service of his art. It was on the side of an ice-cream van. Mr Hippy is part of Art-Terrorist collective, The Sensation Of Nothing, based in a notional office in a notional city somewhere in southern England. Here, art terrorists, who sometimes refer to themselves as 'piss artists', 'layabouts' or 'media freaks' can gather to hatch new projects. We dropped in to see what it was all about.

"Art Terrorism has its roots in the press release" explains Captain Mattress, who is working on an AT installation which may materialise in a phone booth in Tiverton, Devon. "Press releases conjure up, as if from nowhere, vapid half-truths about a projected version of reality that have a hope of fulfilment only if the release is published, hopefully widely. National coverage is best, though even local interest is enough to get the ball rolling. The AT idea extends the concept laterally in both planes, temporal and logical, so that the artist is free to conceptualise the projected work of art, and thereby bring about the phenomena associated with its creation and exhibition with a little less effort. The artist's contribution is limited to initial vague ideas about a project plus some vigorous self-publicity; straightforward stuff."

AT projects, in other words, are a new way to take on the art establishment. All that's needed is the germ of an idea and the ability to write a convincing press release. The production of genuine pieces is not excluded from the process; these are normally as an adjunct to the main process, the object of which is to generate awareness of the art event. This is seen as the final work. But eleborate preparation is seen as the way to achieve distinction and critical success. "Some might say it's a matter of producing the largest possible amount of froth" says Captain Mattress, "but the thing is, as with some other art forms, it's actually the quality that counts." He cites the Tony Hart Project, a recent AT effort, in which the collaborating artists produced five-minute news stories on several professional video formats to enable local news channels to pipe their press release content onto the network as easily as possible. Carefully preparted notes suggested possible places at which the material could be dubbed in and out, and scripts gave a selection of link lines for both male and female newscasters, from breakfast to evening news slots. The artists pretended to be actors playing the part of the artists themselves; silhouetted against a backlight, they wore wollen balaclavas and had the caption 'the voice of an actor' at the bottom of the screen.

Of course, a good vehicle for AT activists is the internet (the very medium which plays host to Pravda) and they have not been slow to acknowledge the fact. "It's possible to imagine that Art Terrorism was actually conceived on the net" confides Bona Fide, a part-time electronic genius and afficionado of cynical emptiness. "That is, of course, if you believe the net is a fertile place to nurture ideas. I'm not sure it's worthy of the honour."

AT practitioners, in common with artists from many other historical movements, admire the objet trouvé and relish the opportunity to create a dialectic with a thin veneer of the postmodern; in their more violent moments thay may choose to dash this against the rocks of their cynical, selfconscious stance, while on gentler occasions they may simply toy with the embarrasingly genuine pretentions of earlier movements in fine art, movements which failed to exploit the creative power of the collective imagination. Allegations that the AT movement is simply the crazed offspring of a media-addled world are denied by the practitioners, who point to the way in which they are regaining the upper hand by exploiting the very formats they handle best. "The point is" says Mattress, "that we approach the issue from the opposite end, and that's what makes all the difference."