Reflections and Perspectives on We Happy Few
We Happy Few is an artwork by Claire Reddleman which explores structures of meaning and their relationships to perspective and ideology, power and memory. Here, she reflects on the theoretical perspectives of this work.
_________________The significance of an activity must be sought in terms of the whole organisation, which is more than the sum of its separable parts. What we are looking for, always, is the actual life that the whole organisation is there to express.Raymond Williams, The Analysis of Culture
We Happy Few is an attempt to make, in photographic form, a structuralist critique of Western engagement with Iraq.
Structuralism views experience not as the ground of culture but as its effect, the product of the ways in which individuals are transformed into thinking, feeling and perceiving subjects of different kinds in the context of differently structured relations of symbolic exchange. (Bennett et al, 1989, p.12)
This leads me to posit the hypothesis that meaning is always generated, whether or not intended, because art practitioners, like all other human subjects, operate within a system of signification, because "[i]ndividual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs." (Volosinov, 1973, p.149)
We Happy Few comprises two triptychs which engage with signification as a practice through which meaning becomes possible. My endeavour became to make artwork that was seriously engaged with signification. I believe that the condition of life is structural and that the impulse to signification is not in itself productive of meaning unless made conscious:
'experience' [can] not, by definition, be the ground of anything, since one [can] only live and experience one's conditions in and through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the culture. These categories, however, [do] not arise from or in experience: rather, experience [is] their 'effect' […] These [are], however, not merely collective rather than individual productions: they were for the structuralists, unconscious structures. (Hall, 1989, p.29)
We Happy Few, therefore, aims to make conscious this dynamic.