Performative reading of Judith Butler's talk "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street" with Nancy Popp, Mathew Timmons, Anna Mayer, and other occupiers. October 2011.
Today I’m pleased to be highlighting Nancy Popp, a Los Angeles-based artist who has been part of both the New York and LA Occupations. Nancy has been so involved in recent events in both cities, that her interview was written over several weeks. The normal text portions were originally written on November 7th, and the italicized additons were made on November 26th, once she had returned from New York. In the meantime, coordinated evictions from occupied public space have begun in cities across the nation, instances of police brutality have multiplied, and the Occupy movement faces a crossroads. Nancy draws upon her experience as an activist as well as her years of working and intervening in public space to weigh in on where Occupy has been, where it might go, and what needs to happen next.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?
NP: I’m interested in performative actions that create a ripple effect in the minds and bodies of those who experience them or participate in them. Public space and social context have been part of my work for over 10 years now; I tend to create interventionist gestures that are simple, but expand into multiple challenges to established structures or hierarchies by the way they take up or occupy public space. So the work functions as a singularly-bodied occupation of multiple sites, of myself and of the space and context being occupied.
Actions like these and their resonance can create connections between people, give them pause to question and think about their own roles, and encourage them to explore their own actions and gestures. That moment of pause and resonance is so important; it’s the spark that allows the imagination to alight. If doesn’t always catch, and you can’t control it or foresee all the results, but that spark is so important to generate in another person…how that person responds is up to them.
Some examples of concrete actions: a performative reading of Judith Butler’s amazing talk “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street” with Mathew Timmons, Anna Mayer, and two other occupiers; singing protest songs with Emily Lacy; a roving choir of Mathew Timmons, Sean Gall, Jordan Biren and others asking for Radical Proposals courtesy of Rosten Woo; posting the names of LAPD police brutality victims at the Oakland Solidarity protest with Adam Vuiitton, Ken Ehrlich and Sean Gall. I also have been wanting to manifest a previously-published Hammock intervention around the city, highlighting those structures as sites of occupation, identifying them as such.
We have an opportunity to bring ideas to a space to be rigorously played with. The more collective intelligence and creative problem solving we can generate, the greater the potential to discover strategies that work to challenge the systems we’re entrenched in. Whatever energy we put into this kind of creative imagining will manifest the strategies that will lead us to where we want to go. We’re generating the solutions through the struggle to find them.
Mostly, I’m interested in dialogue. To this end, a group of about five 6A‘ers got together and put out a reader to foster a dialogue that can travel through space, time and history. We asked other 6A’ers to contribute texts of any kind that were inspirational to or inspired by Occupy LA. We have nearly 100 pages of critical essays, speeches, poems, essays, experimental prose, performance scores and dialogue that resulted from the first round. We’re currently working on creating smaller PDF volumes to be distributed online, hopefully in conjunction with texts from other Occupations around the world. OccuPrint and the Occupennial are two possible venues which also showcase some remarkable work.
Draft one of the Occupy LA Reader can be downloaded here: ola-reader-full
I’m also interested in connections. I heard Gloria Steinem in conversation with Mona Eltahaway recently at the Hammer Museum; Steinem expanded on the oft-quoted Mies van der Rohe phrase “God is in the details” by reminding us “The Goddess is in connections.” Connections are powerful motivators and instigators. Part of what is driving this swell of occupations is making those connections in a society that fosters disconnection and compartmentalization. Another connection — Eltahaway’s recent physical and sexual assault at the hands of the riot police in Tahrir Square during the continued revolution in Egypt. This connects so many things for me in light of my recent experiences in New York- police brutality, patriarchal dominance in the public sphere, and the use of violence as a degenerative tool by unjust powers that will erode them from within. I also have a friend, a poet in Cairo in the movement there who I’m regularly in touch with; I think of her and that connection often and strive to make it visible here in the Occupation.
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
NP: Occupations are as much generative spaces where possibilities can be explored as they are protests. Of course this also means conflict will arise and conflicting methods/goals/agendas will collide against each other. This is totally to be expected and the energy generated from these conflicts can fuel the exploration towards broader understandings and solutions- but there needs to be something directing the energy in towards that, otherwise it will become destructive.
I see many actions being created as both responding to that energy and helping direct it towards generative solutions, rather than getting bogged down in destructive conflict; that’s the role I would want to see any action play. That and draw people to occupy, whether it’s a physical site or their own sphere, help create a space where people want to be, where they are seen, where there is respect for difference and otherness.
I also see artists as having had a lot of practice dealing with conflict and disappointment in persevering to create work and sustain a practice — whatever that means for each one of us. In that way, problems don’t deter us so easily. We keep trying to find a way to access and create what we need.
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
NP: Scores can be shared, re-inerpreted, distributed. It’s a way to say to someone else, OK — now you try it. Make it for yourself. Make yourself. It’s a communal form of creating.
The scores I included in the Occupy LA Reader were written for Robby Herbst’s Llano Del Rio Guide “Scores for the City” at his request. They were ideas I had for actions that I wrote in directive language; I tried to imagine others enacting what I wanted to do, and describe what would translate between me and another through the action.
Scores seem natural allies for occupying. Each iteration is different, unpredictable- and that’s part of it’s strength. This is very similar to the Occupations springing up around the country — each is unique and manifests unique strengths and flaws.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
NP: The operating of this group is constantly shifting and in flux. When Robby Herbst, Mathew Timmons and I met up on the first day of the Occupation, we hoped to gather a group of folks who would be interested in participating in creating actions and interventions alongside and interconnected to the Occupation. We weren’t sure who would show up or what would come out of it, but we knew there was a unique opportunity for dialogue and collaboration occurring and wanted to jump into that possibility.
We originally had a few large meetings; from there, folks got connected and inspired to create their own actions. It’s since manifesting a series of small groups who participate in realizing each others ideas; then the focus shifts to another idea or action and folks re-align.
6A functions really differently from other similar groupings I’ve seen in New York in that it’s not an ‘official’ sub-committee of the Occupation. I’m not sure what role it’s playing except to organize actions/projects/events/discussions outside of the formal structure of the Occupation — although many folks have participated in that formal structure; in most cases they felt it best to continue to create outside of it so as not to be limited to it.
There seems to be a need for both large group affiliation — for connectivity and broadening- and small groups- for facility, inspiration, spontaneity, intimacy. I echo Matias’s comments in that I would find it impossible to navigate this web of events and connections without social media. It completely shapes, creates, and makes much of this dialogue and connection possible. At the same time, the flood of information is so great that even with social networking, I can barely keep up. My concern at this point of a shift in the physical structure of the Occupation is that we won’t be bound tightly enough to continue operating in tandem or solidarity. We need to strengthen our conceptual/physical ties to one another to continue to retain the power that comes from numbers.
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
NP: It’s important to notice who’s doing the critiquing and what their position is, what they want or expect. I love Adam Overton/Guru Rugu’s “Answers are not the answer!” Each answer becomes obsolete in time anyway. Believe me, I’ve felt this frustration myself! It’s hard to work in an unformed space and not expect- even push- for something to form! I think we’re fighting against the system of powerlessness manifesting within ourselves when we struggle with this ‘lack of clarity and goals’ question. I’ve seen some remarkable clarity manifest! And then it dissipates and you have to create anew.
I want to see more polyphony! There are huge issues of hetero-normativiy, gender polarities, mono-racial and -cultural dominance and a lack of transparency both here and in New York.
The goals critique is a bogus issue created by media and current power structures who don’t want to be confronted and outed. Naomi Klein’s recent piece for the Guardian, while melodramatic in tone, includes some very rigorous analysis of why the Occupy movement is so threatening to the status quo and our government.
What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?
Here are a few ideas:
-Remain generative, with a level of spontaneity that allows it to be sharp, intelligent and responsive
-Continue long past our truncated, amnesiac election cycles and develop an active, aware, engaged body or populace that engenders engagement
-Become inclusive of difference-of race, ethnicity, gender, class, education and economics
-Seek justice as opposed to power
-Expand in unforeseen, creative ways and find allies in unlikely spaces
And, at this timely juncture, find a way to sustain our connections, collectivity and action — through temporary centralized physical sites, or by reconstructing the relationship to the occupation of physical public spaces.
As someone who has spent time in several Occupy sites across the country, how would you compare them?
My experiences are in New York and Los Angeles, and soon, Buenos Aires.
I haven’t been as compelled to participate in the organizing bodies of the Occupation here in LA; in New York I found those bodies totally compelling and interesting, and so I was more participatory there. The dialogue was rigorous; participants had a higher degree of skill in facilitating and negotiating in groups. At the same time, there were similar problems in the consensus process that I’ve seen here in LA. There have been issues of transparency and self-appointed leaders operating in cooperation with the city government and LAPD without the GA’s knowledge, as well as incidents of racial discrimination and intimidation; these issues have been a part of Occupy LA from the start.
There is also much broader support for Occupy Wall Street amongst local unions and organized labor, churches, and community centers; many meetings I attended were in labor union offices. The day of the raid a large number of clergy came out to support the movement and offer an alternative site to occupy. This has been a major hurdle here in LA, both politically and geographically — contacting and developing allies to create a broader social support for the Occupation.
There’s an emphasis in Los Angeles on social practices and the physical Occupation site as a space of investigation and exploration that is uniquely suited to the psycho-geography of this city. I didn’t see that in New York; there the actions by artists are much more concrete in the sense that they are modeled on previous forms of action/protest, or information-disseminating, or materially-based forms (film making, design, drawing). I met many of the artists organizing in OWS; to me they seemed like a series of guilds, highly productive and structured. Here in the west, there’s much more space, all is looser in terms of identification and definition. This has relative strengths and weaknesses, and influences how we operate and associate in so fluid a manner.
I’m excited given the history of activism and protest in Buenos Aires what I may find there. From what I’ve been able to ascertain it’s not a large movement, and there may be some skepticism about how serious we are in the U.S. given Argentina’s very deep history of political dictatorship, injustice and brutality … but I am looking forward to learning as much as I can.
The contestation of space (and particularly public space) has been brought to a head in encampments around the country. What are your thoughts on this, and how do you think the Occupy movement should respond?
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal since the Liberty Park evictions and witnessing the responses in NYC last week.
The occupation of public space is very powerful and, although in some ways symbolic, represents a real threat to the control of society and enforced codes of power. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such a strong response to evict the occupations from their physical sites. It’s paramount to strategize a way to continue to occupy public spaces.
An interesting development was the planning and strategizing for OWS has moved from Liberty Park to a privately-owned public space on Wall Street; most sub-committee meetings happen there, it functions as a nerve center for the organizing of the occupation. When Liberty Park was raided that space was shut down simultaneously. The separation raises questions about hierarchies of organizing but also shows that the physical site of occupation is a part of a larger organizing body. My sense is both are needed.
However, a single site is too precarious, and can become too much a point of contention rather than a placeholder. Ideally, multiple sites are the most effective, and require a tremendous amount of energy to seize and retain. Although I’m not sure this is the best use of the energy and resources we currently possess, I envision temporary pop-up occupations in numerous sites in the same city to be an effective gesture to occupy and hold space. The question of how temporary sites could meet the basic needs of those who live in them would be an important one to address.
Although each Occupation will have to solve this issue as it relates to their site, networking across Occupations is incredibly important, to build a larger community and learn from each other.
Today I’m thrilled to publish an interview with Matias Viegener, artist, writer, teacher, and member of the collaboration Fallen Fruit. As a critical theorist and long-time activist, Matias feels the historical weight of the Occupy movement in comparison to other moments of solidarity and protest that he has experienced in his lifetime. Through his writing, one feels his struggle to contextualize and make sense of disparate events unfolding with lightning rapidity before his eyes - the result is a complex picture of the movement at this moment in time, enfolding the performative artworks of his colleagues, theoretical and historical precedents, political actions, and personal impact into a compelling narrative.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?
MV: Things have been moving so fast that mostly it’s all I can do to keep up with the daily developments, locally and internationally. I’ve been politically active in various forms all my life, but as I look back on my involvements with the culture wars, ACT UP, abortion clinic defenses, the Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan protests, it seems to me I was only ever working on 5 or 10 percent of the problem – on aspects, symptoms and expressions of the problem. For the first time in my life, I feel like there is a movement that has taken on if not all of the problem, 60, 70 or 80 percent of it. A movement global in scope that connects war, unemployment, poverty, gender, racism and plutocracy with capital and global, corporate statism. The implications of this critical matrix, and what it could lead to, has the oligarchy running more scared than I’ve ever seen it. And for good reason.
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
MV: My work has become increasingly participatory over the years, both with Fallen Fruit and my own practice. I’ve been working on a group of meditations or visualizations that have grown out of my long history with them. Despite my cynicism for them (I could kindly say they’re a core New Age “technology”), they helped me greatly during a long hard depression about 15 years ago. I tried everything from psychiatric drugs to cognitive therapy, psychoanalysis (the luxury option), hypnosis, tarot cards, and self-help books. What I found was that self-help was often the most populist and certainly the cheapest of all forms of assistance. I developed great respect for it while holding my so-called aesthetic judgment in abeyance. I’ve been working on a series of visualizations, one of which is a Fruit Meditation, generated together with my collaborators in Fallen Fruit, David Burns and Austin Young. Though led by a facilitator, the audience participates in a collective experiment that moves from the body and embodiment (through food in the case of Fallen Fruit) to our connectedness, our interdependence: the way we feed each other.
Frankly, I am quite puzzled as to how to make work about the moment in which we find ourselves. This feels like nothing else. The velocity is enormous. There is far too much information to absorb. Everything feels immediate and highly mediated; the reaction is often one of intense engagement and also alienation. We need new forms to express this.
I experience most of this historical moment not by being there but through various media. Perhaps this was always true for people, but it feels especially pronounced now – perhaps because of a shift in social media technology. I remember watching the Oliver North Iran-Contra hearings in the 80s, over the then-new CNet and CNN. Suddenly the public was in the courtroom with the camera, unmediated by television news edits. It was a new level of visibility, no commercials, no editing – just being there.
I’m attaching an example below of the kind of work that interests me: group authored, multi-vocal, and participatory. Last Thursday (Nov 17, 2011) I was watching the protests in downtown LA at work, on my laptop, over livestream and ustream. I was so agitated at what I saw I posted my thoughts on Facebook and many people began responding and cross posting. What happened over that hour is reflected in the document below. To me it offers a glimpse of both the time we live in and one way to convey it to others.
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
MV: People at Occupy LA and at all the OWS-related movements around the world understand that they are not the first to organize in an oppositional way. We’re not the first to recognize the diabolical link between politics and capital, nor the first to make connections between micro and macro, personal and political.
The performative aspect of protest has been around since at the least the 1960s. Martin Luther King was assassinated when I was very young, and one of my earliest memories is of my mother taking us to a protest at which people of all races held hands, wept and sang together. I didn’t understand what it meant, but I felt the power of the moment. It was a social ritual, an unauthored performance, but definitely with a kind of script: the spirituals and folk songs everyone sang by heart (or learned on the spot). It took decades before I felt the social intensity of that moment again, despite the anti-war protests of my childhood and the (South African) Divestiture protests I went to in college and grad school. ACT UP was galvanizing in part because of the exceptional tactics that it developed, from performance protests to the Stop the Church action at St, Patrick’s Cathedral to the storming of newsrooms reporting on the Gulf War. The Wall Street intervention and shouting down Bush Sr.’s Secretary of Health at the World Aids Conference in 1989 were the peak of this for me. Perhaps because it was literally gay men’s bodies that were in question, we developed an embodied activism that in a silent, deadly time (the late 80s) that felt more powerful than anything I had experienced before then.
Recently a few artists, spearheaded by Tucker Neel (via AAAAAA), staged a cleaning performance at City Hall. Inspired by the Maintenance Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and an Angeleno feminist collective from 80s, Mother Art, we took soap, water, mops and brooms downtown to clean the contested sites of the Occupy movement. It was a few days after the eviction of Zucotti Park, and we were thinking of the charges of uncleanliness and sanitation by which Bloomberg justified his decision. Whose dirt is this, we wonder, especially in the age of reduced city and social services everywhere. The dirt is pervasive. It’s not so much on us, but all over the system. Cleaning actual dirt was energizing: doing something that is mostly private in public. We worked silently for the most part, except when people questioned us. The silence was important to me, as I hear too much, read too much, and my head often feels as if it’s bursting at the seams. Three women from Mother Art joined us, and we were able to talk to them afterwards. The connection with other generations working on similar issues with related strategies was amazing.
The Mic Check is a powerful new tactic, speaking in unison, speaking without or around technology. But it sometimes makes me nervous, and I know I’m not the only one. It can feel Orwellian or something, a groupspeak. Performances like Mathew Timmons’ Credit readings really resonate with and interrogate the idea of the choral and how it both opposes and echoes state capitalism. Credit is Timmons’ 2008 conceptual writing project, collecting all the offers of credit cards and loans he received in mailings, advertisements and letters. The personal information is blocked out, and the assembled volume of appropriated texts demonstrates both the vocabulary and the urgency with which credit is pushed on us. It resonates strongly in this era of unemployment, credit default and poverty. Timmons readings at OLA and other sites are usually choral, with the text spoken and sung by at least two performers, at turns harmonic and dissonant. The effect is church-like and disruptive, highlighting the spell of credit, how monetized our world is, and how pervasive the tentacles of capitalism.
I see Owen Drigg’s Octupy in a related light. The octopus is a tangible way of describing corporate power, a useful metaphor, but turning it into a participatory performance re-appropriates it. Built with garbage, it becomes a public toy; it may be playful, but it’s serious play. The octopus’s deployment works on multiple levels: the one vs. the many, the controller vs. the controlled, and the opposition between corporate bodies and natural bodies. This “body” is both natural and artificial, a corporate body (lots of people in there) and a mythical body. Without making an actual sound, it is both monophonic and polyphonic.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
MV: I’ve been reading and posting to the AAAAAA list since the beginning, through the fiasco of the naming process. It’s still called “ART BLOC LA (name tbd)” of course, because there was never a final consensus on adapting AAAAAA. I was both interested in and detached from the naming process. I understood the desire for a name, and agreed that ART BLOC was not great (“bloc” is hard to swallow; East Bloc, voting bloc, etc) but provisionally adequate. My desire since Sept 17th (the start of OWS) has been to be a citizen first, and then perhaps an artist. The political weight of this moment so greatly exceeds the parameters of the art world that I am reluctant to spend time either talking with or critiquing it. The art world has a lot to answer for, both in its treatment of artists and its complicity with plutocracy (“1% for art,” etc) – but at the moment the art world I inhabit is a local, temporary, often nomadic, artist-organized one, in which remarkable things are happening.
There was a frenzy of activity, participation and resentment around the naming process, so in essence it remains without a name. This is symptomatic of Occupy overall, its trouble with names (the echo of “occupation”), leaders, and the formulation of a fixed agenda. Jen Hofer and Rob Ray, who worked hard to organize the group and come up with a name (and more than a name but not actually a platform), were so battered by the experience they seem to have withdrawn from the conversation. Things like this are lamentable. While at the start I saw what seemed like parochialism in our conversations, things have broadened out a lot. I’m on AAAAAA every day and it’s a primary source for me, along with Martha Rosler, McKenzie Wark and Jodie Dean on Facebook. My ambivalence toward Facebook has evaporated for now: I’d never be able to find and filter this information alone, and I suddenly find the argument on the role of social media in new forms of activism more plausible.
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
MV: I haven’t been to many General Assemblies, and few for their entire duration. I find them hard, in part because I’m too cynical. I’ve been through these processes before, most intensely with ACT UP. Consensus and radical democracy are exhilarating because they differ so greatly from our failed system of representational politics. They’re especially electrifying now because we’ve reached a threshold of dissatisfaction. I went through consensus-based activism in my 20s and haven’t yet found a way to engage actively with the Occupy GAs or the committees. So I just witness passively, and with love when I can. Everyone needs to learn first-hand how hard it is to organize and to create truly democratic structures. Active listening is probably the hardest thing of all, and I think that’s what makes organizing hard for artists and intellectuals. We think we understand what’s being said before it’s finished, or that we could state it more succinctly, with more efficacy. It doesn’t matter if we can. In fact it’s often not productive for us to do so. This is why I appreciate Vera Brunner-Sung, Elana Mann, Kristen Smiarowski, and Juliana Snapper’s collective ARLA, which has been so active at OLA. They utilize the listening strategies developed by composer Pauline Oliveros along with Jungian psychology; they wear large papier-mâché ears and their sonic performances are followed by discussions of listening and silence – all aspects to active listening, manifesting presence and connectedness. Adam Overton (with Signify, Sanctify, Believe and the Experimental Meditation Center) and his collaborative work with numerous artists embodies a different strain of the social practice I’m so compelled by. From a background in experimental sound practices and energetic work, Adam’s projects articulate new collective modalities. His work is gentle and immersive and more than anything, heterotopic.
Utopian leftist movements mostly speak in terms of homogeneity (who are we and what are our demands, what is the platform?), while I am interested in heterogeneity, contradiction and what Foucault calls heterotopia: where a single space swells up to contain contradictory and unlocatable possibilities, as in a city park that becomes a cruising zone for gay men at night. I see Occupy as an accumulation of differences, a site of condensed difference. This interaction of unionists, anarchists, the homeless, artists and grass-roots activists creates proximate density: a form of intelligence. There’s a frenzy of transformative systematic thinking, a liveliness and almost delirium – what Lefebvre describes as Dionysian Marxism. A sort of carnival in which things are turned topsy-turvy and beggars speak to burghers. I’m still observing more than I’m responding, and as I said above, I’m wondering if this new historical moment, this heterotopic moment, requires us as artists to create new forms and new modalities, participatory, performative and expressive modalities, not just to represent the moment but just to keep up with it. It feels to me like history is moving faster than we are.
What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?
MV: I’ve been lucky enough to be in New York, Amsterdam and London in the last two months, and visit the Occupy sites there. Since Sept 17th every spare moment has been devoted to visiting, reading on and thinking about the movement. It infuses my teaching. I think this is the great political moment of our time, and probably of our lives. For a long time the determining historical event of this century seemed to be 9/11, and the decade that followed it was a terrible, fearful time, a deceitful decade. With our fear-mongering politicians, a stunned electorate bounced between the center and the far right, with barely a flash of activism. The power of the Occupy movement comes from its pioneering tactics and innovations in form – its amoebic shape – a refusal to be pigeonholed into one thing, and its resistance to speaking in terms the media insists on (an agenda of issues, a clear list of demands, a designated leader). It posseses an organic form, a bottom-up structure, and an appropriate contempt for our governmental, political and legal institutions. Most vitally, it has thrust the issue of wealth inequality onto an international stage. This gives me hope that another world is possible.
“People are being arrested.”
This is a transcript from Nov 17, 2011 of an hour-long conversation on Facebook during the Occupy protest in downtown LA. I was watching the protest over livestream and ustream, live video feeds (on the ground, so to speak), while sitting in my windowless office at CalArts. Posting my impressions and reactions on Facebook turned into a remarkable public conversation of 40 to 50 people, including various students, artists, poets, political activists, journalists, former students, academics, friends from college, friends from New York, my brother, and acquaintances from Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland and Sweden. It runs chronologically backward in time, with the last things first, and the first things last. It reads in either direction. Something is captured here better than in any other form I can think of.
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Matias Viegener In cafeteria there’s a mob too. Faces I know, all more or less the same age. Hard to talk. Stirfry or salad? My head is bursting at the seams. People are on the streets.
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Matias Viegener “Camera quality is shit at night.”
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Matias Viegener Both cameras are offline. One channel has a commercial. I’m going to get food. I thank you all, interlocutors and friends. People are being arrested.
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Matjames Metson what link are you watching? 11 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener www.livestream.com/owslosangeles and www.ustream.tv/channel/occupy-los-angeles-live. they are back online. · 10 minutes ago · Like · Comment
Matjames Metson thank you sir 8 minutes ago · Like
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Matias Viegener The being there and not being there at the same time. It’s like 9/11 but not so extreme. Watching but feeling as if you’re there. Knowing you’re not there. Knowing others are there. Others like you. And like me.
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Française Maischic, Chris Sollars, Harold Abramowitz and Jonathan Skinner like this.
Jonathan Skinner I particularly liked watching (here in solitary Ithaca) the live helicopter feed from NYC with the soundtrack of the LA feed, that crossover, its making perfect sense 14 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
Matias Viegener Jonathan, sense now is different from sense then isn’t it? 13 minutes ago · Like
Jonathan Skinner making perfect senses (plural) 11 minutes ago · Like
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Matias Viegener “Our street.” “Whose street?” “Our street.”
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Matias Viegener The aesthete in me loves the blurred camera. Streaks of light. Chanting “from New York to LA, occupy the USA.” Rattling of the equipment.
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Stephen van Dyck, Marc Allen Herbst, Dont Rhine, Catalina Fog, Dizaster Royale, Anita Marie, Billy Hamilton, Millie Wilson, Harold Abramowitz and Alexandra Wagman like this.
Matias Viegener aesthetes, everywhere 9 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
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Matias Viegener So we’re watching this together.
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Cara Baldwin it’s more than watching. 21 minutes ago · Like
Cara Baldwin but carry on. 21 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener more than watching, yes. but not being present. being other and being there at the same time. 18 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
Anita Marie Thanks for the play by play. I’m stuck at work and dying to know what’s going on! 14 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener So many conversations. Cameras. Social media. How do you rally a crowd? No words to describe what I’m feeling. Connected and disconnected at the same time.
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Millie Wilson, Cara Baldwin and John Sevigny like this.
Matt Dunnerstick The voices are calling out my name, asking me to Occupy Vapor Street. 26 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
Cara Baldwin I’ve wanted to find a new word, at least an adequate word for this feeling for some time. 24 minutes ago · UnLike · Comment 1 Matias Viegener an intensity. eerie. an event formation. uncanny. dialogic. disembodied. 23 minutes ago · Like
Cara Baldwin i have a handwritten list to my right. a third set of terms to describe our present condition. it begins with embodiment/durational performance/poesis 21 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener no, it begins with handwriting! 20 minutes ago · Like · Comment 2
David Weiner What’s the URL? 17 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener www.livestream.com/owslosangeles and www.ustream.tv/channel/occupy-los-angeles-live 15 minutes ago · Like · Comment 2 ·
David Weiner Thx 12 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener People are being arrested. Police put up a tent so no one can see. It’s peaceful they say (the camera people). All you see onscreen is lit office buildings. Streaks. White t-shirts.
Like · Comment · 29 minutes ago near Los Angeles
Matt Dunnerstick And there is a face on the screen. But it yet has no shape. The camera is too close and shaky for discernible edges. 27 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener I hear voices but no bodies. City has declared where the cameraman is standing “closed.” Move or get arrested. 26 minutes ago · Like
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Matias Viegener Helicopters. Chanting “you are the 99%.” So many people talking to me here, online, right now. Colin. Kim. Matt. Linda. Doug. We’re all here, aren’t we?
Like · Comment · 32 minutes ago near Los Angeles
Millie Wilson, Edeevardian Ear, Rose Kernochan, Kim Holleman Art, Jonathan Skinner, Alex Forman and Doug Rice like this.
Kim Conner When it is up, you can see NY on http://www.ustream.tv/theother99 The Other 99 on Ustream.TV: -Twitter- @TheOther99 @Iwilloccupy This channel i…See More 31 minutes ago · Like · Comment
Matt Dunnerstick I’m here it’s true. 30 minutes ago · UnLike · Comment 1
Colin Dickey Here here! 29 minutes ago · UnLike · Comment 2
Matias Viegener There is no there here. 27 minutes ago · Like · Comment 2
Linda Pollack present! 26 minutes ago · UnLike · Comment 2
David Reed I, yes, me too. 21 minutes ago · UnLike · Comment 1
Matias Viegener yes, you too. and you. and. 21 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener Chanting again. “We are the 99%.” Camera on the move. Very blurry. Thanks to the viewers. (me). (you).
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Millie Wilson likes this.
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Matias Viegener Is this the way it ends?
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Shoghig Halajian likes this.
Kim Conner not with a bang? 36 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener just with blurred cameras 36 minutes ago · Like
Colin Dickey Not with a bang, but a whimper. 35 minutes ago · Like Matias Viegener and the dying of the light 34 minutes ago · Like Matias Viegener (couldn’t resist a line of poetry) 34 minutes ago · Like Kim Conner (me neither) 32 minutes ago · Like
Kim Conner (either) 32 minutes ago · Like
Kim Conner (or) 31 minutes ago · Like
Jonathan Jackson Poe … 27 minutes ago · Like
Colin Dickey At least it wasn’t The Doors. 26 minutes ago · Like 1 Matias Viegener it’s not the End either 25 minutes ago · Like 2
Ovsei Tender Berkman that is how it begins. 21 minutes ago · Like 2
Luiz Ricardo It’s the beginning. Re-evolution. 12 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
Denise Knee-Sea Li Yes, and now it’s time to do some bardo-travelling and rebirthing into the next life… 7 minutes ago · Like
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Matias Viegener Much quieter. Camera has backed away, camera people are talking. Legal observers in green hats. A rabbi. People are being arrested. It’s not very climactic.
Like · Comment · 41 minutes ago near Los Angeles
Matt Dunnerstick I mistook this for an inventory of dreams 41 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener It is like dreaming. I’m here, they’re there. You’re somewhere else. 40 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
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Matias Viegener “How many officers here are reserves” the camera man asks. “How many officers here really want to be here” an invisible bystander says. “They’re doing their job.” “At least they have jobs” another one says.
Like · Comment · 45 minutes ago near Los Angeles
Valentin Viegener, Susannah Copi, Tiffani Snow, Colin Dickey, Kim Conner, and Doug Rice like this.
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Matias Viegener Is it 400 protesters? Can’t see them all. Lots of cops. 300 for sure. Now the cop on the bullhorn is joking to the protestors. A moment of levity.
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Harold Abramowitz likes this.
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Matias Viegener Black uniforms, but the protesters are in every color. It’s a stand-off. It’s not a riot. Why are the cops wearing riot gear? Their helmets look like lolly pops.
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Dizaster Royale and Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson like this.
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Matias Viegener Protestors hold hand-held cameras. Shaky pics, look like there are thousands of police and it’s hard to see how many protesters (would it be inverted if we saw police cameras?) Protesters chanting “the whole world is watching.”
Like · Comment · 53 minutes ago near Los Angeles
Harold Abramowitz likes this.
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Matias Viegener Protesters chanting “the whole world is watching.” I’m watching on my laptop, in my office, at work. It feels like just me watching them. This can’t be the case. Alone and together at the same time.
Like · Comment · 1 hour ago near Los Angeles
Tiffani Snow, Millie Wilson, Stephanie Taylor, Linda Pollack, Anita Marie and Stephen Krcmar like this.
Linda Pollack I’m watching on MY laptop in my studio in the garment district, on the 11th floor facing north, direction of the plaza- I can hear the helicopters, watch the live stream and read other’s comments. Surround sound / surround experience. 56 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener At CalArts, deep underground. I think my desk faces NY though. 56 minutes ago · Like
Brian Bauman the personal is political, but the personal is electronic because i keep my blog online, i upload my video diary, i find my sex in chat rooms and now i get my revolution on ustream. 21 minutes ago · Like
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Gino De Young Frequently inside the building being occupied, conflicted.
53 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener Gino, that’s another kind of intensity. All of this is so new. And fast. 53 minutes ago · Like
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Matias Viegener 300 police, green guns with rubber bullets, batons, riot helmets, guns cocked. 400 protestors chanting “this is what a police state looks like.”
Like · Comment · 1 hour ago near Los Angeles
Cara Baldwin, Jacquelyn Davis, Jacob Wren, Floriaat Bleuin, Allison Carter, Harold Abramowitz, Millie Wilson, Joe Bussell, Amarnath Ravva, Edeevardian Ear, Francesca Penzani, Nicholas Grider, Ryan Majestic, Kim Holleman Art, Hamish Danks Brown, Rob Ray, Robert Frashure, Marcus Ewert, Christopher Hershey-Van Horn, William Dinan, Gretchen Frazier, Dizaster Royale, Chola Con Cello, Luiz Ricardo, Steven Nelson and Franck Perry like this.
Amy Tofte Wow. Be careful. 1 hour ago · Like
Matias Viegener I’m watching all this online. Scary too, tho in a very different way. 59 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
Française Maischic in other news, the Brooklyn Bridge right now http://twitpic.com/7fk5ss The scene at the Brooklyn Bridge right now: on Twitpic 59 minutes ago · Like · Comment
Matias Viegener intense but I am staying with/in LA right now 59 minutes ago · Like · Comment 1
Matias Viegener (a New Yorker finally lets go of NY) 58 minutes ago · Like · Comment 2
Bruce Christopher Carr don’t let go!!! 52 minutes ago · UnLike · Comment 2
Susannah Copi sounds eerily like Tompkins Square Park in 1988. 10 minutes ago · Like
Anna Joy Springer Talk about good art. 2 minutes ago · Like
Matias Viegener Agonizing, and energizing, to watch people I know, half recognize, don’t recognize, getting hassled, arrested, resisting and persisting RIGHT NOW in downtown LA
Like · Comment · about an hour ago near Los Angeles
Anna Joy Springer, Sara Wintz, Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, Doug Rice, Millie Wilson, Harold Abramowitz, Ruben Verdu, Luiz Ricardo and Ed Giardina like this.
Ruben Verdu keep it on!!! about an hour ago · UnLike · Comment 1
Doug Rice to break on through to the other side. the only real hope. 57 minutes ago · Like
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Matias Viegener Watching OLA protesters - people I know, half recognize, coming & going – being arrested, hassled, and trying to keep moving RIGHT NOW in downtown LA www.livestream.com Occupy Wall Street Los Angeles brings you live stream coverage and and pre-recorded video coverage from independent journalists on the ground at nonviolent protests around the world. The team is made of local supporters who are inspired by the movement by NY…
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ARLA Listening Performance, Occupy LA site, November 11, 2011. Photo courtesy Carol Cheh.
Today I am pleased to highlight Elana Mann, an artist who works collaboratively with other artists and in collectives of many different scales on performative events and artistic actions. Here she writes eloquently about communication - the feats, foibles, and failures at the Occupy protests, from the “empathetic power” of the human microphone and prolonged dialogue of the General Assembly, to the voices of those who feel disenfranchised and alienated from the movement. Her recently formed performance collective ARLA has been conducting listening activities and performances as a method through which to investigate these communication practices, interfacing with the protests in both solidarity and criticism. Her interest in these provisional modes of communications expands to the movement as a whole, which, she argues eloquently, is improvising a new relationship of protest & resistance to our interconnected and globalized society.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?
At Occupy LA I have been working with the collective ARLA to create performances around active listening and sounding. I co-founded ARLA in the spring of 2011 with filmmaker Vera Brunner-Sung, choreographer Kristen Smiarowski, and musician Juliana Snapper, The collective utilizes the listening strategies developed by the composer Pauline Oliveros, techniques of Jungian psychology and the history of social practice as a jumping off point to create new visual and performance art.
ARLA has initiated a series of performances at Occupy LA the first of which took place on November 11th. During the first performance we facilitated listening exercises and a listening parade through the space of the downtown protest. We held up large paper-mache ears and protest signs with ears on them throughout the parade. My collaborator Juliana’s account of this action is the following: “The simple physical presence of people carrying large paper-mache ears was met with a kind of hungry recognition - recognition of what it meant that we were holding the symbols (giant ears) and a sense of relaxation where we carried them (easy eye contact, curiosity).” Afterward, we performed Pauline Oliveros’ sonic meditation Teach yourself to fly (1974) and then a composition written by Juliana Snapper and myself entitled People’s Microphony (2011). The sonic performances were followed by a dialog about silence and power, how sound aids activism (or not) and how listening is functioning in Occupy LA. The occupiers, artists, and activists that were part of our group spoke about the experience as an opening of a space to meet each other as human beings rather than as combatants or collaborators. We then attended the General Assembly (GA) with our sculptural and physical ears out. ARLA is intending to hold these performances on weekly basis at Occupy LA and is also planning some performance events around downtown Los Angeles.
ARLA, 2011.
I think it is also important to note here that myself, along with other artists of AAAAAA, have been actively participating, attending, and contributing one another’s artworks at Occupy LA alongside creating our own works. This collaborative spirit is significant in a city that often feels fragmentary and impenetrable. The support for one another is facilitated by the Google and FB groups, but also a shared mission to work alongside the occupy movement as artists with all of our powerful symbolic, analytical, aesthetic, and social tools. The Occupy movement has opened my imagination and my heart and I am contributing to it in ways that I know how – and I mean contribute in the broadest sense, which includes both critique and solidarity.
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
Our main question is: How can we facilitate tuning into each other’s voices and bodies in an active way, rather than a passive one? On the topic of listening, Juliana writes, “Churchill spoke of the courage it takes to sit down and listen as even more precious than the courage it takes to get up and speak. Any protest is necessarily focused on techniques for being heard and understood, but we have fewer tools, a more impoverished language for how to listen.” ARLA wanted to bring the alternative techniques and ideas of listening to Occupy LA that we have been developing since our group began. Although none of the ARLA members are currently occupying the space, we had been there off and on and around our other life commitments. While at Occupy, we had noticed both the challenges and the potentials for listening at the City Hall and the GA. We were also aware of the remarkable speaking/listening techniques that are happening in the Occupy movement as a whole (including the human microphone). We have our ears turned to “DisOccupy” and “Unpermitted LA,” which are groups that include voices who feel very marginalized by the Occupy LA protest. Communication problems (which are all too common) sometimes plague our own AAAAAA group as well. Since ARLA believes active listening can break through communication impasses, we felt that our work could positively impact Occupy LA and a broader culture that tunes out certain voices and bodies in general.
Also, both Juliana and I have been completely inspired by the empathetic power of the human microphone and also the problems of putting someone else’s words in your mouth and through your body. So we wanted to both add to the environment of dialog that was happening at Occupy and also play/interrogate the structure of the human microphone and its embodied force.
ARLA would like to continue to grow this art and listening practice within the Occupy movement and beyond, both in a purely functional way and also in an ineffective way.
ARLA Ear Strengthening Performance, Occupy LA site, November 11, 2011. Photo courtesy Carol Cheh.
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
A lot of folks are not using scores in their pieces at Occupy LA, but certainly in the work of ARLA we are. I think that the power of scores for ARLA is both historical and social: we can evoke scores of Pauline Oliveros, or Jungian psychology games that are historical and improvise our own interpretations to imbue them with contemporary meaning. We are drawing wisdom of the past into the present moment. Also, the scores we write can act as instructions, manifestos, and propaganda all in one. This seems very fitting to a protest environment, where Xeroxed sheets of papers with scores printed on them can be easily dispersed, read, and performed by anyone. We just sent some of our scores to Malmo, Sweden where they were distributed to a group led by members of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest editorial collective.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
At first the group met just to form a loose network of support around art activities taking place at Occupy LA. The group also became a fantastic way to disperse information about what is happening both in the Occupy movement and with each other. I stalk/follow this group like no other.
We haven’t met a huge amount as a group, but when we do the variety of people and opinions is very stark: some people want to become a more organized coalition within Occupy LA and others feel ambivalent about being a member of any group at all (even the AAAAAA splinter group). This desire to commune and also to separate is AAAAAA’s biggest strength and also its greatest challenge. I do think this coming together has opened up the possibility for organizing and gathering beyond Occupy as well.
Within just these past few week, the tone of the group has taken a noticeable shift as certain AAAAAAers have become clearer about what they want out of the group and the Occupy movement as a whole. A number of AAAAAAs are starting to organize based on ideas of Art and Labor, folks are proposing an Artists’ Union, artists are protesting problematic museum fund-raisers and planning to occupy museums, and members of W.A.G.E. have joined our ranks. I am excited to see where this new direction goes, as AAAAAA begins to dissect the economics of the art world and how its structure mirrors the divide between the 99% and the 1%.
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
The criticism of the Occupy movement comes from the clashing of staid historical scripts of protest and the current improvisation that is happening on the ground right now. Folks seem to be looking toward each other rather than the political agendas of those already in power. This realization came to me when I was attending a recent conference at the University of California, Riverside called “Improvisation, History, and the Past.” During the day of presentation and discussion, the theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha spoke about the improvisational techniques of Tibetan protesters against the repressive regime of the Chinese occupiers. I began to think about how the Occupy movement is improvising new relationships to uncertainty and power as well as finding expressive negotiations with constraint.
The scripts of how past protests operated (particularly protests from the 60s/70s) are clouding people’s minds for how protest should function and operate now. I heard someone on the radio today advising the Occupy movement to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). I am so glad that the members of the Occupy movement try to listen to the people next to them instead of the demands of the media or the politicians. The Occupy movement is improvising how protest should function to disrupt today’s decentralized, interconnected, and neo-liberal economy. I see the current improvisational thrust of Occupy to be moving around consciousness-raising on a national and international level, an attempt at deeply listen to the concerns of people who have been silenced for a long time.
What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?
My desire is that the improvisational practice of freedom within the Occupy movement continues to grow and expand beyond the confined of the protest. This improvisational way of living creates further flexibilities and responsibilities to change rather than fixed states driven by fear. Echoing this sentiment, artist and mediator Dorit Cypis wrote so beautifully in a recent Facebook post: “So right. Occupy has no one site. Occupy has become a state of mind that we each must take on and spread through individual and collective daily actions. Protest the ‘empire’ while self-witnessing how we each may be colluding in small ways. Live reciprocity and generosity. Listen empathically and choose when to take decisive action to enliven ‘a brave new world’.” Through improvisation, maybe we will discover a way toward a more equal, functional, and just future.
Today, Janet Owen Driggs (writer, curator, artist, and member of the two-person collaboration Owen Driggs with Matthew Owen Driggs) writes eloquently about the many-armed metaphor of the octopus, and its relationship to the Occupy movement. While at first a seemingly straightforward symbol of the stranglehold corporations have on our society, Janet unfolds the many possible meanings of this mollusk, including its relationship to the tentacular city map of Los Angeles and the distributed intelligence of a leaderless movement. Through this lens, she contextualizes her actions as well as those of her AAAAAA colleagues, meditating on authorship and collaboration, public space as a site for art and action, and the power of horizontal society.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA and the Occupy movement in general? Why?
JOD: With artist friends and people we’ve met through AAAAAA and Occupy LA, Owen Driggs (that’s Matthew Owen Driggs and me) is organizing construction of a giant octopus puppet. 70 ft long and 20 ft tall, the puppet is made of bamboo, old bicycle inner tubes, and plastic shopping bags. It will be wrapped around Los Angeles City Hall in a performance on Sunday November 20, at noon.
In a very straightforward agitprop fashion the conjunction of puppet and building is meant to represent the way corporations entwine with and corrupt our legislative processes. But four other things also inspire us:
First: the necessity of performing public space, which “must be actively created and self-consciously sustained against the grain of an architecture built as much for machines as people, more for commercial than common use…[It is] the result of constructive intervention rather than laissez-faire disinterest” (Benjamin Barber). Not surprisingly the Owen Driggs website is: http://performingpublicspace.org/
Second, the history of Southern Pacific Railroad – “the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil” that Frank Norris described in his 1901 book The Octopus. Most particularly, we are interested in its relationship to land speculation in Los Angeles and its role in the birth of corporate personhood.
Third: the history of propaganda – late nineteenth and early twentieth century cartoonists used the octopus to characterize corporate form, detail the complex operations of such corporations as Southern Pacific and Standard Oil (check out Vulgar Army), and variously depict corporate operations as overwhelming, insidious, deceptive, seductive, brutal, and/or alien.
There are certainly references to the corporate octopus happening now – Zina Saunders Kochtopus Attacks and Molly Crabapple’s Vampire Squid for instance. And there are undoubtedly other visual metaphors in play – the fat cat and greedy pig being the most common I think. But the older cartoons suggest that the octopus affords a visual metaphor that can speak to more than just greed and grasp.
Which brings me to the fourth influence: the octopus brain. Rather as corporations have ‘person’ status in the US so octopuses, by virtue of their intelligence, have vertebra status in the UK. More than just smart though, scientists speculate that these creatures, which have over “half of their 500 million neurons…in the arms themselves”, may have “a collaborative, cooperative, but distributed mind”. This seems a really rich model/metaphor by which to think about the kind of non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian organization and relationships that the occupations aim for.
So, partly to have the image happen in the world and partly to create opportunities for talking about all the above mentioned, we’ve organized a couple of conversations at Occupy LA, we’re working on an update of those nineteenth century cartoons, and every Sunday we’re on the steps of City Hall all day building the puppet with anyone and everyone who’d like to join in. We’ll be there again on Sunday 13, as well as on Friday and Saturday 18 + 19 November, with the performance at noon on Sunday 20. Please join us to build and perform – contact owendriggs@yahoo.com, or just turn up.
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
JOD: Most of my thoughts about this are in my first response above – but at root the puppet is part of my attempt to support and contribute, as a non-resident occupier, as much energy as I can to something that is more than a reactive protest.
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
JOD: Do they? Certainly some of the artists in the AAAAAA group are utilizing scores. In accord with a traditional musical score for example, Mathew Timmons’s book Credit has been “sung, shouted, whispered, scatted, chanted and droned”. While chiming with the more recent traditions of performance art scores, Nancy Popp’s “Scores for the City” are in the forthcoming Occupy LA Reader, and Louis Vuitton described suggestions for action in his email call to support the Oakland Strike: “SCORE”.
There are complicated things going on here I think – or at least things clashing in my brain in response to your question. Is the word ‘score’ being used to describe directions for participation in political action? If so, why call it a score rather than, say, ‘directions’ or ‘instructions’? Because the word ‘instructions’ suggests a more authoritarian position than the word ‘score’ perhaps? Or because a ‘score’ is not only something of an invitation to play, it also invokes the cultural provenance and attendant authority of venerable performing art ancestors?
If this is a simultaneous reach for authority and avoidance of authoritarianism, then I think the artists concerned have found an interesting way to navigate some difficult waters. Waters in which, though the individual Author is apparently dissolving, authoring still has value. The performance of scores occurs to me as a way to swim back and forth between the roles of author and collaborator. And even between the islands I’m going to barbarously shorthand here as the “white cube” – a place where individual abstracted revelations of interiority and/or inherency are valued – and the public realm, where art has traditionally been a vehicle for narrative or rhetorical information and meaning is created collectively.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
JOD: In my experience the list is a place to share information, build alliances, test ideas, meet (somewhat) likeminded others, and offer and recruit help. It has all the limitations of any email list and all of the networking, “I’m not alone”, strengths. I particularly cherish the two big ‘analog’ meetings we had early on at Occupy LA – frankly the LA art world will never feel quite so alien again!
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
JOD: I am a big fan of horizontalism as it is defined in Marina Sitrin’s Horizontalism: voices of popular power in Argentina: “democratic communication on a level plane (that) involves – or at least intentionally strives towards – non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian creation rather than reaction.”
Yes, the General Assembly (GA) can be both frustrating and tedious. But any process that challenges the verticality of authoritarian, politics-as-usual – anything that challenges the engrained habits of monovocality – is bound to feel polyphonous.
And, while there may not be a five-point list of demands that fit nicely in a press release, the range of opinions represented at Occupy LA are united by the demand that our social, political and economic structures stop servicing corporate greed and re-calibrate to assuage human need. With politics-as-usual leaving no choice but submission to a system that prioritizes the pursuit of profit over absolutely everything else, our gathering together embodies that demand.
The power dynamics of capitalism determine contemporary social relations. Non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian relationships will not come about until those dynamics change. Horizontalism does not defer social change to a later date; instead participants create the future in their present social relationships. It is both a goal and a tool by which to approach the goal.
A couple of weeks ago Brian Holmes wrote on his blog about “the strength of a movement that can be leaderless because it is based on principles that all can uphold and that no one can appropriate as personal property and power. Such a movement can grow without being instrumentalized, coopted, reduced to the travesty that defines our totally corrupt society.” I second that, with all of our tentacles. We are doing politics differently.
Today I’m excited to highlight artist Anna Mayer, a performance artist who maintains a solo practice as well as an ongoing collaboration with Jemima Wyman as CamLab. Anna admits that she doesn’t “have an activist practice in the way that I have an art practice,” so though she is a strong supporter of the Occupy movement, she approaches it more aesthetically and formally rather than in terms of radical action. Her interest lies in the ability of Occupy LA (OLA) to “generate culture,” and sees the role of artists as providing aesthetic means through which to extend the message of the protesters. She is concerned, in her practice and in the movement, with bodies and embodiment, and sees corporeal relations and interactions playing out in this site of resistance.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?
AM: I’m interested first and foremost in supporting the Occupy movement—and doing things that are performative is a way of being there in a way that is engaging for me and, I hope, for others. I don’t have an activist practice in the way that I have an art practice, so the way that I engage with ideas and events is first and foremost as an artist. Also, I can’t be at OLA very often, as I work full-time and have to chosen to continue to meet art world deadlines, so I tend towards wanting to formalize or aestheticize my presence there.
I feel the OLA movement’s strengths are that it’s embodied and, because it’s located in a specific place and durational, it’s visible and undeniable in a way that other actions aren’t. The text that Nancy Popp, Mathew Timmons, and I did a performative reading of speaks to these issues—in her speech-turned-essay Judith Butler talks about how, because bodies were implicated at the Tahrir Square protests (for which many camped out durationally), the stakes were different than other kinds of protests. This kind of embodiment isn’t a new tactic, but it’s an effective one.
In my work I’m interested in the issues of embodiment and implication, as well as playing with established rhetorical strategies and enacting more than one voice. These issues are all day-to-day concerns at OLA.
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
AM: I’m interested primarily in emphasizing the bodily aspect of the protest—aestheticizing the experience in such a way that it makes protesting bodies more visible. Jemima Wyman and I (we collaborate as CamLab) did a performance where we stretched a long—60’—length of optical fabric between our bodies and invited passerbys to cut a head hole and occupy it with us. This was about mapping the space between our bodies and others’, making all of us more visible to people walking or driving by. These are ideas that we work with in our practice already, so to take it to OLA felt fairly seamless. The fabric was a conversation piece for the people in and around it to start talking.
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
AM: Scores have the potential to be enacted by anyone, so that way of working probably feels inclusive and/or accessible. It isn’t about presenting a fully-realized spectacle that puts an audience in the automatic position of viewer. With a score at hand there is always the possibility of the viewer performing, too. Conceptually I think scores are perfect in the context of OLA because they’re about the imagined or proposed, which is a lot of what protest is about for me. That said, I think the more materially-engaged works or actions that have happened and are happening are also very effective in their more invested strategies.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
AM: The AAAAAA list seems to be useful in that it provides a kind of structure for a number of LA artists to enter the protest. People make connections with potential collaborators and supporters through its online presence, too.
I’ve struggled somewhat with the idea of artists organizing in a way that’s overtly autonomous from the OLA infrastructure and/or in a group that’s too tightly packaged, because that makes it easier for the effort to be only about art concerns/careers rather than about the protest. However, I think AAAAAA works because its very loose infrastructure is something that’s manageable for people to join and contribute to (or not). Many artists who work jobs to support themselves are short on time and energy for much else, so it’s good to be able to start with an already existing network.
I’ve come around to the idea that part of the strength of OLA is that it can generate culture that extends beyond it. I also hope that artists can use their networks and presumed ability to ‘tastemake’ to (potentially) bring more bodies to the movement.
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
AM: I believe that this movement is a chance for a conversation that is actually—despite so much criticism that it’s ‘all over the place’—narrow enough to where a number of different kinds of people and groups can discuss and negotiate not only what is being discussed but how. This process is non-efficient if we think about efficiency in terms of streamlined internet activism or some kind of idealized (false) vision of how Congress takes care of business. I appreciate how this protest demands its own timeline. This is in a large part because so many people have taken up residence in the protest, giving over large chunks of their schedules and lives to the in-person process of discussing how and, eventually, specifically what.
What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?
AM: I hope it can be sustained indefinitely. Monday morning (November 7) I read in the LA Weekly about City Council hearings to decide whether $1 million of city money would go to fund Gensler (corporation) or to fund housing for people who are homeless. In that article Occupy LA is reported on as an entity that is now lobbying in city affairs. That such a relatively new coalition can have that kind of agency is testament to its strength and necessity. I hope that the very necessary critiques from the inside of the movement—see DeColonize LA and ‘Are Women Safe at Occupy Protests’, among others—will make it stronger and longer.
Today I am pleased to highlight artist, activist, writer and organizer Robby Herbst, who maintains his own interdisciplinary art practice as well as works with the LA-based collective Llano del Rio. A long-time activist, Robby’s critical questioning of the Occupy movement comes from his core interest and passion for challenging dominant hegemonies. Though he is undeniably supportive and excited about artist actions and self-organizing at Occupy, embedding and interfacing his current projects in that context, Robby asks some key and uncomfortable questions. How far does radical action extend? Can artists infuse political demand into the poetics of their practices? Does the professed horizontalism of the General Assembly only go as far as our dominant institutions of culture allow it to go? Robby has demands rather than hopes for this movement, and one of those demands is an evolution in how artists interface with their society.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?
RH: What I’ve been working on to date largely has been further developing projects that I’ve been working on since before the occupation movement. And the occupation has provided interesting places to develop them. With the Llano Del Rio Collective, I’ve been working on the “Antagonists Guide to the Assholes of LA” since at least this summer. It’s a guide that seeks to promote agonistic approaches to democracy by highlighting sights where assholes dwell (governmental, corporate, military, etc). Some of the public programming we’ve put together, which helps frame the meaning of the forthcoming guide, was going to take place elsewhere. However, the occupation at city hall has provided an excellent place to discuss artists claiming power over assholes. Also we’ve rushed to distribute some of the research we’ve done regarding contestable sights near the occupation, so that it can be helpful to occupiers and their supporters.
I’ve also been working on a project with the Dumbo Art Center in Brooklyn. A public performance for that project (which will have a gallery iteration in February) was originally planned to happen at Occupy Wall Street on its first weekend there in NY. However, for several reasons (including a strong desire to be in dialogue with LA), I decided to do these actions here in Los Angeles. The piece involves the creation of human pyramids that reflects on an IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) diagram created in 1911. The diagram is called Pyramid of Capitalist System and it depicts capitalist class structure as a human pyramid. Working with mostly novice dancers and acrobats, we are building class war human pyramids down at the occupation.
Other than these projects already in the works, I hope to contribute in making AAAAAA a forum of affiliation to scheme creative and critical actions which add to vocalization of the movement or an intensification of it here in LA.
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
RH: Anything that gets folks interested or present in the occupations is a great thing. That is largely how I visualize this interface. If any of the projects that I am doing beyond that causes people to think, act, or relate in another way than they expected to–then that would be swell too. If through our attempts at organizing in relationship to Occupy LA , our artist community more generally begins to consciously embrace a practice of demand along with their poetics–that would be a wonderful thing too.
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
RH: I am not sure if I agree with your statement. While score-based work is the impetus for some people’s work, I can equally point at a larger number of projects that aren’t score-based. Perhaps if your statement it is truthful it could just be reflective of a peer group who are a part of this affiliation. It might also be that people who are interested in self-organized space are also interested in performative acts of autonomy.
Ultimately scoring is a straightforward way to do public space performances–subtly affecting crowds. I don’t need to talk about Kaprow and Cage nor the Situationists and their relationships to chance and serendipity and non-hegemonic ways of manipulating subjectivities, do I?
Robby Herbst, Didactic Pyramid installation.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
RH: So much to say here…. But I’ll try to stick with what’s on hand.
It’s a networking group at the moment–folks share ideas, articles, thoughts and reflections. Folks give the thumbs up to projects in mind and completed. They share ideas and impulses. They share articles and news and opinions. They respond. They share discourses they’ve enjoyed from other communities of the internet. They throw their two cents in. Generally it’s a positive and supportive environment that ideally creates both a context for the presentation and discussion of perhaps offbeat or ideally radical public projects which aim to challenge, interface and engage the struggle. Generally there’s not many lurkers or (I think this is the right term) and inflamers around–this is a great thing. People who are talking are involved in places other than the internet.
There have been a few announced meetings. The first two occurred the first week of the occupations and were unexpectedly large. It was enough perhaps to have such a big group come together to out themselves, as it were, to being personally passionate about this struggle for economic justice. That outing was the outcome of those meetings–that and that we would come up with a name and perhaps develop a website. (A calendar where folks could list what they were doing, and see what was going down creatively, along with the facebook page, was put together almost right away). Rob Ray put up a webpage for everybody–no meeting was had to make and do it–but that seemed to be ok with everyone. I had hoped that beyond this architecture we could articulate language that might frame a position and make a statement as to where we stood together as we did our self-organized acts. This group articulation hasn’t happened yet and at one point I was disappointed by that. It seems that the will to do the work of building consensus on ideas was beyond either the interest or ability of the group–so this kind of language, “what we stand for” is not outlined. I feel that having something to push against and with is important (even if it is water)–but the desire to go there yet hasn’t shown itself that fiercely.
Later meetings included a bar get-together where some folks got drinks and worked to get to know one another. This was an attempt, I believe, to develop working and political intimacy in a group that for many stretched beyond their immediate peer group. Then recently a group of folks got together from the AAAAAA group to plan an action in solidarity with the General Strike in Oakland. That project appeared very successful and I was happy that AAAAAA facilitated a format for its creation.
Otherwise, people who are planning projects that fall on the same day have co-publicized one another’s projects. As well, an Occupy LA reader was group-sourced and produced through the list. And it seems that a Free School of sorts was worked on through it.
The benefits of the group are all of the above plus the supportive environment.
The group is a work in process and I think people are discovering that it is what they make of it. Beyond the anti-police violence that occurred in solidarity with the Oakland General Strike, I am not aware of projects that have affected the stridency of intensified social protest. The group has not functioned as a creative agency, nor as something like San Francisco’s Art and Revolution. And this is both a good and a bad thing. It allows space for people to do their thing and provides a forum for people to dream together more vital actions–but it doesn’t necessarily spur vital action. It allows for it and facilitates it, but it doesn’t demand it. At times this feels like a problem, at other times, it feels like an opportunity that will (and has) make itself known. In my mind the loose structure supports a laboratory approach, where together we are experiencing (as LA artists) the possibilities of radicalized aesthetics playing themselves out here. That LA artists are embracing this experiment beyond the safety of galleries or schools, but within the complexity of independent space–that’s a big positive in my book. One I can support. AAAAAA is an evolution. I think both LA and LA’s art scene (institutional as well as self-organized) needs evolution. I hope that AAAAAA will continue to evolve to occupy the arts–in radical as well as formal potentials.
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
RH: This is a tremendous question for me and I won’t get far into this at all. If I read into your question, then I apologize. But the very short of it is that for me this question has implications which directly connect with contemporary art practice, especially regarding the rhetoric surrounding the supposed openness of social or relational practices. Like the occupations themselves, these structures exist within certain ideological contexts. Just as art practices are frequently contained within institutions which themselves work to suppress underlying ideologies and structures, the utopianism surrounding horizontalism working within these movement(s) functions largely to make invisible pervading ideologies and structures which should also be subject to critique. The basic critic would be that the horizon of horizontalism can only go as far as that which can be articulated in a given frame. And the terrain of that framework is only described by those that control the institutional framework of a culture. So in LA, you get people who claim horizontalism as far as it doesn’t confront historical police violence, and in Oakland you get horizontalism as long as you don’t destroy property and don’t take over and demand collective ownership over foreclosed upon property.
I am not saying that polyphony is useless as many on the left and right declare. The only real power of OWS is in its current polyphony. That it as of yet has refused to be captured, it will remain an itch in the side of our culture until somehow perhaps it is regularized. But the manner that it will be regularized and the direction that this regularization takes will be defined by the demands that people make. And if the demands are only articulated through the horizon that dominates our contexts in Los Angeles, or Oakland, or the US – than I am aware that this horizon may not be quite as interesting as I could see.
RH: Hopes–after Obama I am not so interested in hope. My demand of the occupy movement is that it continues to challenge dominant frameworks in the world which have placed the rights of private property far over the head of the commons.
Yesterday and the day before, the Getty held a conference entitled “Perspectives on Progressivism and the Museum,” which was a laudable effort to gather museum educators and scholars from around the country (and from the UK) to reconsider the progressive role of the art museum in civic politics and social justice, with an eye towards the sweeping national initiatives of the Progressivist era of the 30s and 40s. I moderated an artist panel this morning called “Social Practice and the Institution,” which gathered David Burns from Fallen Fruit, Edgar Arceneaux from Watts House Project, and performance artist Elana Mann in conversation about their own socially-engaged practices and interfaces with institutions. At the very end of the panel, a comment from a respondent struck me deeply - how can the local efforts of these artists - whose progressive practices eke out new ways of thinking, leverage new networks, and build new capacities in the ways people live and interact - translate to sweeping changes in our greater institutions? How can we scale up progressive practices in order to change the way economies or states operate in relation to their people?
It is fitting to be writing this post just after Guy Fawkes day, with the Occupy movements in their fervor invading city streets and city halls. I have become aware of many artist friends who have seized upon this moment of protest and discontent along with so many others. In an effort to understand how artists with social practices who have been engaging with protest and activism and issues of social justice throughout their careers are organizing in response and/or solidarity, I have asked several artists involved in the Occupy movements to send me their thoughts. I will post several of these interviews every week for the next few weeks, and through the varied perspectives of these very smart and creative people, coalesce my own understanding of art and protest in this context. As the polyphony of these occupations seem to be moving from incoherence to some actionable goals - like National Bank Transfer day (which was yesterday) - I am interested in how process becomes message becomes action, how aesthetics becomes symbol becomes division or solidarity, and how leaderless protest translates to progressive policy (and if that’s even possible anymore). The conversations are complex and layered and entangled, and they are happening right now.
Adam Overton is the first artist I want to highlight - a performance artist focused on the subtle and meditative, Adam is part of a loose self-organized group of artists and other cultural producers performing actions and organizing events in solidarity with Occupy - they are called AAAAAA. His positive and laid-back message is a response to the criticism of Occupy’s drawn-out decision-making process and lack of centrality. He is pondering here as well on his role as an artist in the midst of such protest energy - how he both feeds upon and reflects it.
What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?
AO: Personally, I’m primarily interested in occupying space, with others, and also by myself. I’ve been going down to Occupy LA and working on stuff on the lawn (mostly writing) – I think of it as chillaxistance: engaging with everyday endeavours, and art-production, while basking in the occupy-energy.
Beyond city hall, I’m interested in the Occupy-movement continuing to spread into everyday life and surroundings – but not in some sort of manifest destiny, grabby, selfish sort of way. Rather, I’m interested in seeing folks reclaim various facets of their lives, big and small, and continuing to share (resources, skills, knowledge, energy, etc) the way i see people sharing downtown. Among other things, I’m interested in making nice-nice (as we say in the massage biz).
What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?
AO: I’m not really sure. I’m not that interested in serving as an example of any kind, but I am interested in being myself – an artist – down at Occupy LA, whatever that’s worth. This all somehow feels important to me to be down there, to be a part of what’s going on – both giving and receiving. There’s a lot of learning going on, a lot of witnessing. Many of the things I’ve done down there so far performance-wise have been pretty subtle; many things have been more like gentle quiet activities (giving out a hollah to the touchy-feely committee!!); I’m sure I could do some more “direct” and spectacular actions, but I’m not sure yet if I want to go there. I somehow feel very humbled by it all. Perhaps that will change with time? Maybe I’ll have more to share, or a more outspoken approach at some point? For now I’m just barely there, but still there (which feels like a lot more than not being there).
Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?
AO: Well, not all of the scores that have been created and announced have been performed [yet]. Many of them are very thought-full, and represent how I’m processing everything intellectually. There’s a lot to process right now. A lot of the things I notice are subtle, or rhetorical, things that seem glaringly funny, or odd, or depressing, or troubling. The scores are sometimes a way to notice these things out loud, to transcribe them, to replay them, to turn them upside down, to play with them, etc – to critique them. And then they can be passed along electronically via email, facebook, etc. Sometimes it’s enough for the instructions/descriptions to simply be read/imagined. Some of the scores I’ve been enjoying reading/imagining/performing are by my friend Mikal Czech:
That said, I am interested in performing scores down there, and I have been, off and on. When performing alone, it’s been an interesting way of altering my sense of space, or reality, or personal interactions. Dérives are like that – they’re like drugs minus the drugs. They heighten my senses, draw out subtexts, present alternative ways of existing/playing in space – without all the forgetfulness and side-effects. It can sometimes be hard to notice where certain scores start and end, and I find that useful in terms of trying to expand the movement from Occupy LA to Occupy Everything.
When performing with others, it’s been a fun way of engaging socially in much in the same way that games do. Games/scores seem odd – they’re often life-like, but surreal, and give the persons involved permission to do and notice things they wouldn’t normally think they’re allowed to. They push you into another perspective. A lot of learning happens in scores/games. I’m not sure what is to be learned, but I’d like to think that the human population and/or spirit is somehow evolving with each game/score. It feels magical. I think it’s important to engage with magic and an evolutionary spirit in this space. Games/scores seem to be an aeffective way to engage serious matters playfully, and to model different ways of thinking, acting, and interacting.
How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?
AO: AAAAAA is nice – people write emails back and forth, facebook posts back and forth – right now we mostly seem to be sharing information, knowledge, opinions, ideas, videos, articles, proposals for action, critiques of things that have happened so far, etc. For me, its foremost role has been to encourage me to continue thinking about all this Occupy stuff, everyday. I read messages when I wake up, during my breaks, on my phone, when I’m procrastinating, and before I go to bed. I’m immersed. If I was just on my own, not engaged with this group, I might only hear about things every few days or weeks; in other groups I’d likely encounter the kind of uncritical rhetoric that really turns me off, and that further alienates me. If I didn’t have people sending me stuff, I might think that everything had petered out, or that it’s not my movement, not for me. But instead I see my friends thinking about it all, being concerned, being excited, being worried, wanting more, asking for help, proposing meetings, encouraging discussion, and going down there and doing things. I can’t help but feel infected by this and want to stay involved. AAAAAA encourages my continued engagement.
I’m fairly wary of the rhetoric of large groups. I like mission statements, but only up to a point. As much as I like scores, I generally don’t like to participate in things I’m not concerned enough with or connected enough to. I generally don’t like being a part of things that involve a lot of finger-pointing, finger-waving, or righteous indignation. Except on a handful of issues, I’m just really uncertain about how to aeffect change in a way that agrees with me. So, as a whole, AAAAAA is really working for me right now. It so far seems to simply represent a group of concerned beings, mostly [only?] artists from our community. People tend to function autonomously, doing things when they want, or not. There has been no specific pressure placed on anyone to participate. I like this. A challenge of this is that it can be hard to keep certain kinds of momentums going. For instance, I spoke to a friend today about how we had wished there had been more large group meetings (there were only 2, right around the start - the rest has been small clusters of folks). There are several reasons why folks haven’t met as a large group since then – people are busy, and there have been a lot of calls for “action” rather than more meetings – but I actually think the main reason more large meetings haven’t been called is that folks have been afraid that calling a meeting might push them into some sort of leadership spotlight. I certainly feel that way – if I’m always the one pushing for meetings, do the meetings then become “Adam’s meetings”? I don’t think anyone wants to become seen as an owner of the group. I think it’s a nice sentiment, but it can also slow things down, and fewer meetings are called – everyone waits for someone else. I might be totally wrong about this – this might just be my own paranoia. Anyways, I’m a firm believer that unexpected things emerge when people meet, both online and off.
Another challenge has been catching folks up, making newcomers feel welcome. It’s hard to do that on a mailing list. I get the feeling that most of the people who have been participating lately on the list and on-site have been participating from the start. Folks coming to the list late might be more hesitant to jump in to something that feels like it’s already moving, or something that feels dominated by folks who are already active. I think those sorts of boundaries get lessened when we actually meet in the space – but not that many physical meetings have been taking place. Again, I might just be assuming a lot of bullshit! But there are challenges, and I think it’s been mostly good.
There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly model – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?
AO: Sure, I think the argument is that the clearer the message gets, the more easily the “problems” can be treated – but who’s going to treat them? And if they whittle it down to the 2 most popular ones and then treat them, does that mean we go home? What happens to all the other concerns? There are so many issues at play, so many to deal with – to dumb it down into one thing seems incredibly frustrating, and exclusive. I love how many voices there are. I think there should be even more. I cannot stand when folks say dumb things like “we’re all here for the same reason.” No, we’re not! Stop trying to unite us into your false karass! Things are much more complicated and nuanced, and the confusion of not having a clear message has caused people to talk, and talk, and talk, and talk – and debate. People are learning a buttload. From each other. At least those willing to listen. Many people down there are much worse off than I am, economically-speaking, educationally, politically, etc, so I’m mostly there to listen. Simplifying their many arguments into a few, dumbing them down is not the answer. Answers are not necessarily the answer (though that might be a privileged thing to say…).
To anyone complaining about the messiness of horizontalism – get over it. It’s giant fucking sandbox. Get dirty. And, it’s only reeeeallly messy if you’re in a hurry and trying to get-things-done. Trying to set a deadline is often an exercise in futility and frustration. The General Assembly and endless dialogue at Occupy LA and online suggests that folks move from being end-focused to being more process-focused – shifting things away from
fast-food politics, rhetoric, and discourse. If you’re only looking for results – for immediate change – then you’re going to hate life while attending a General Assembly, or an affinity group meeting. I’m there for the process, to learn from people, to hear voices that I haven’t heard before, to consider their arguments I haven’t considered. And to state my mind, to support others, to point out things that rub me the wrong way. I’ve witnessed some hard-blocks down there – and more often than not they’ve brought up really interesting and valid critiques of the action or decision that was about to be made, that everyone seemed to be completely on board with a moment earlier. If anything, in this day and age when
libertarian, anti-government messages seem to be all the rage, the messiness of the process at least makes me appreciate the level of skill and attention to detail and process that seems to go into making government a not-as-messy place. The messiness of Washington makes a different kind of sense.
What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?
AO: More conversation, more learning, more hope, more minds changing, more radical juxtaposition, more reframing, more rehashing, more investigating, more restating, more paraphrasing, more mediation, more meditation, more introspection, more disbelief that a person like “that” actually exists, more awe with how many people are here and actually care deeply about some of the same things as me, more gentleness, more humble occupation, more complexity, more creative approaches to radical everyday existence, more acceptance, etc.
Less aping of politicians’/pundits’ rhetorical flourishes, less demonizing of the Other, less finger-wagging, less interrupting, less yelling, less anxiety, less stress, less worry, less anger, less simplification, less declaration, etc.
