Nato Thompson, chief curator of Creative Time and genuinely innovative thinker, gave a talk Wednesday night (March 20th) at the Hammer Museum to a crowd of artists, students, and art world friends. Like other talks of Nato’s I’ve heard in the past, it was highly performative, peppered with humor, and distinctly lacking in jargon or coded touchstones of an art historical theoretical canon (except, perhaps, as the butt of jokes). Wearing a hoodie in solidarity to honor the memory of shooting victim Trayvon Martin in central Florida last week, Nato set the current political stage for a discussion of activism and art (“a false duality” as he called it) and proceeded to systematically break down the artificial divisions that the so-called “art world” places between itself and everything else – especially broader cultural production (in advertising) that drives consumerism and impacts our very subjectivities, affecting how we make meaning in the world. What was so refreshing about this talk was that Nato was calling us out, collectively, for pretending that art is separate from this broader cultural context. By way of example, by refusing to take into account the effect that advertising guru Leo Burnett (inventor of the Pillsbury doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, and others) has had on contemporary artists makes us (the art world) seem insane. Burnett said of advertising: “We absorb it through our pores without knowing it. Through osmosis.” Of course we do, and of course that changes how we think. How powerful, and how insidious.
Starting with the industrial revolution, Nato painted a broad-reaching picture of the ability of capital to consume people and radically change our very understanding of ourselves, tracing generations bombarded by the mechanisms of cultural production and the increasingly rapid co-optation of identity by forces of power. He made a very apt observation about the odd phenomenon of the hipster – the paranoid product of generations accustomed to forming identity through the consumption of music, fashion, and image that then sees that identity co-opted and sold back to them in an ever-diminishing time frame. Hipsters are “the shadow” of all of us, afraid to “hitch our wagons” to anything at all. Hipsters are everywhere, yet no one will admit to being one. And though Nato used such heavyweights as Adorno & Horkheimer, Guy DeBord, Walter Benjamin, and of course, Marx to underscore his argument, he did so in such a fluid, cogent, and narrative way that their dense theories became accessible and powerful as a result. This cultural history portion was very resonant, but once he began to draw a line between the production of space, meaning as created by bodies in space, and the rising tide of social aesthetics (basically, art’s reaction to this cultural context by seeking new access to meaning via relationships of bodies to space) the connections didn’t feel quite so strong. Perhaps this was because he cut himself a bit short towards the end, but the points raised did make sense in the larger context he had set up. My review of his presentation is short and inadequate, but the full video podcast version will soon be available on the Hammer’s website. This talk also anticipates his new book, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Age of Cultural Production which is due out in May.
I always admire Nato in how his form and style of presentation follows his content. Nato does this very deliberately, and is sometimes criticized as an “anti-intellectual,” which I think is crazy - he posted a great little essay about this recently on his blog. He fights the good fight against the false sequestering of art, and does so in a way that enhances accessibility rather than obfuscates it in a haze of self-referential jargon. Breaking down these dichotomies moves both ways – forcing the art world to engage with everything else does not necessarily make the world engage with art, but it certainly allows us to better grapple with our eyes wide open.
As I was reflecting on this talk and its implications for my own little world, I recently received this in my inbox:
Here is an interesting petition for a good cause: a notoriously criminal art gallery is working with the Democratic party under the banner of the 99%. Please share! Maybe we can hold these groups accountable:
http://www.change.org/petitions/ace-museum-all-in-for-the-1
Here is a blog about it with some interesting discussion:
http://acemuseum.wordpress.com/
(Thanks to Jennifer Gradecki for sending this along).
This petition against ACE Museum in conjunction with the Democratic Party co-opting the language of Occupy and the 99% is a case in point of the insipid nature of the political/cultural/advertising complex. But we cultural producers and consumers are a bit more saavy now – we can peer through the visual and emotional onslaught, and we’re getting better at it all the time.
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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David Reed likes this.
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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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Millie Wilson, Steven Reigns and Alex Forman like this.
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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Kim Holleman Art and Sara Wintz like this.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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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Millie Wilson and Ryan Majestic like this.
The below is a conversation between myself and Justin Langlois, Research Director at Broken City Lab, conducted over email this past month. Check them out at www.brokencitylab.org.
JUSTIN: So, I have a quick question, with regard to your categories of social practice, where might you situate practices that are more overtly activistic? While a level of activism is likely most overt in the New Models category, I was curious about your decision to not include that word or that specific language in those categories — is it a matter of it being an inappropriate description, or just not nuanced enough, too much baggage? I have my own concerns with activism as an idea, but it’d be interesting to hear your take on it.
SUE: I think activist practices run throughout all of the categories that I put forward. Just a caveat - all those categories are quite malleable at this point, I feel that they are simply a useful starting point for discussion of some social practices, but they are certainly not the be-all and end-all. I do hope they change and gain more clarity as time goes on.??I feel that, as much as social practice draws from art history, it draws equally from other forms of cultural production. Clearly architecture, urbanism, planning, theater, sociology, even advertising inform social practice, and I would place the history of protest and activism (social movements) in that context. I wrote an article for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest on anarchist activist practices and compared those forms to some forms of social practice. You can read it here - I’d be interested to know your thoughts.
I find that traditional displays of “activism” or protest is one form of many that social practice can take, and has taken throughout its history - but that the socio-political concerns that underly these practices remain similar. Some are more effective in a more “activist” form, while others accomplish their intentions equally well through other formats. Likewise practices that are ineffective - both those traditionally “activist” in their forms and otherwise. At the Open Engagement conference recently, one participant made the point that “protest in this country is dead,” and that social practice is a reaction to that reality, a new form of activism. I don’t agree with this at all, but I do think that traditional forms of protest are frequently co-opted (um, recent Glenn Beck “rally” in Washington DC on the anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech is one possible example? or the “1984″ Apple computer TV ads?) thus perhaps diluting some of their effectiveness in certain situations, and I conjecture that social practice artists often search for different formats to advance social agendas as a result. Just my two cents on the matter.
JUSTIN: I really enjoy the way in which you’ve outlined the variety of forms of cultural production that inform social practice, though I wonder if that articulation disregards the more social aspects of a social practice as well as the pedagogical aspects informing a social practice. Your loose working-categories touch on this, but it would seem that the categorization you’ve presented there and the (intentional or not) categorization you offered around modes of production are different in their organization, and in turn, equally limit the potentials for activity and affectivity within these practices that become situated through that organization. I completely understand those loose categories as works-in-progress, I suppose I’m just pushing the issue to better understand for myself.
It’s interesting you bring up the example from the OE participant talking about his skepticism of protest. While I don’t know that I’d go as far to say that protest is dead (it is alive, though perhaps significantly under the weather or even terminally ill), I’m inclined to feel that traditional forms of protest are ineffective in advancing any particular agenda and for that matter, I think the abundance of examples of the co-opting of activism’s aesthetics are, as you’ve outlined, a particularly good example of this increasing ineffectiveness.
You brought up a notion that I’ve found continually helpful, which I first read articulated by Sam Gould of Red76 — that is, questions of effectiveness and sincerity in relation to activism and art respectively. It’s a bit escapist to suggest that the in-between is the most interesting position to occupy, but yet there’s something there that could use a better articulation (and in that, perhaps it is in the term social practice).
I might offer that while social practice may or may not be overtly presented as political, we certainly know that politics continually inform it, and for a more effective form of creative push for a social change, it may be that artists taking on new roles in existing infrastructures might provide the best way forward. It’s not a new notion, but perhaps an increasingly pervasive one. And, as you’ve outlined in your article, artists continuing to take on collective forms to present workable organizational structures also continue to present a glimpse of possibility for change that has a lasting impact (whether those structures have been translated to corporate culture or not; Apple is still Steve Jobs and Google is a “friendly” monolith without a face).
To attempt to ground this for myself, perhaps the development of artists as community leaders (a strange term) is the most appropriate way to articulate how I view my practice, and in turn, what I view as being the next step towards a practice aimed at enacting social change. So, while not nearly as radical nor pointed as the collectives you outlined in Between Art and Activism, I believe there is a lot of potential in actively and publicly being in a place and exploring its complexities at a level most appropriate for the person in question. In that, there is an awareness and activation of the process of critique of existing systems and ‘ways of doing’ though with a decidedly less overtly political methodology. Maybe this is similar to Mouffé’s ‘agonistic’ political thought?
SUE: I want to address my notion of categories, which I think is tripping us both up a bit, as helpful as it might seem on the surface. Ultimately, there is only so far that these categories can go – although I do feel social practices are informed by the various forms of cultural production which I have outlined, and once produced they can be slotted (albeit in an ill-fitting way) into helpful categories that improve our understanding of these projects, you are absolutely right in that there is no connection between these two. On cannot remix aspects of architecture, art history, and activism and preconceive a project like Project Row Houses, for example. There are indeed “social aspects” that shape the best and most responsive social practice work in unpredictable ways, and I think that zone of production-in-progress is where I am struggling to write thoughtfully. Perhaps primarily because that zone also requires the writer to become intimately involved in the experience of the project as it is happening to truly gain any kind of understanding. So often, we analyze a project only from the front end (its influences and historical precursors) and from the back-end (its relationship to other similar projects, its effects, its “category” or “movement”), but not situated in the midst of process. Therefore the project in its current snapshot form, whatever that is, becomes mystifying – or worse, seems reproducible when it is not.
This becomes especially urgent when we are dealing with projects that actually seem to have some success in affecting change – then we all start looking for the rule that doesn’t exist in order to somehow reproduce it. The best way I have found to think about this is to consider the science of emergence – how ants and termites (practically brainless) are wired to follow chaotic behavior patterns until a problem presents itself, or food is available, and suddenly they all organize to perform the most amazing engineering feats. Emergence also describes how cities gain their character (how suburban Monterey Park has the best Chinese restaurants around, or how a massive jewelry district emerged in one corner of downtown Los Angeles), and how thoughts form in your head from just a series of zapping neurons and synapses. We want to believe that someone is pulling the strings, that a great conductor has “figured out” how to affect a particular kind of change in a complex environment, but these examples are simply processes that form order from chaos in certain situations. We humans are a bit different than ants, because we are able to reflect on our actions, but even so there is no rule. Artists can be facilitators and catalysts, but that does not mean that any one person is able to bend a complex environment to their will. The best we can do is what you so appropriately call “active being” – and there is something sticky about that process. Being there, in a place, investigating its histories, its resources, and reacting with thoughtfulness. This work is necessarily reactive and reflective, and thus exponentially difficult parse how it came to be. We all search for heroes, though, and it is so much easier to applaud the artist than to find out why and how the project emerged in exactly the way it did.
For more on emergence, I would highly recommend the 2007 Radiolab podcast about the subject - you can find it here. Thanks to Justin Langlois for his thoughts and for allowing me to reprint them here.
Claire Bishop
Chantal Mouffe
The idea of approaching a problem rather than representing or exposing it, and the process through which that approach occurs, is a central concern in social practice.
Claire Bishop, who always provides a nice old-school art historical approach to this tricky subject and is a joy to disagree with, outlines her notion of the central concerns of “participatory art” (a terms that, for her, encompasses the broad sweep of things, from relational aesthetics to public practices to socially-engaged art, whatever you want to call it):
“Recurrently, calls for an art of participation tends to be allied to one or all of the following agendas:
- “the desire to create and active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation. The hope is that the newly-emancipated subjects of participation will find themselves able to determine their own social and political reality.”
- “authorship – the gesture of ceding artistic control is conventionally regarded as a more egalitarian and democratic than the creation of work by a single artist, while shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and unpredictability. Collaborative creativity is therefore understood both to emerge from and to produce, a more positive and non-hierarchical social model.”
- “a perceived crisis in community and collective responsibility. This concern has become more acute since the fall of Communism, the isolating effects of capitalism. One of the main impetuses behind participatory art has therefore been a restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning.”
Bishop’s framework is limited to the form of “participatory” art, the types of practices that involve audience members in the creation or realization of some type of product or event. As such, she sees only a narrow scope for such art – for her it is a fundamentally anti-capitalist form striving to empower the people (its “subjects of participation”), disperse authorship, and restore the social bond. Hinted in her writing is the idea that participatory art is somehow a nostalgic recasting of the lost ideal of Communism. She is clearly unimpressed by this, and searches for a “critical art” amongst what she sees as nostalgic and moralistic practices.
I feel that Bishop accurately points out some tenets that guide some forms of social practice, but she fails to grasp the larger reasoning behind these explorations. For a different and more encompassing theory of social practice, I turn to Belgian political philosopher Chantal Mouffe and her seminal article Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space in the 2008 issue of Art as a Public Issue No. 14.
Mouffe begins by answering the hidden question, “Why the social arena as a site for artistic interventions?” Quoting Andre Gorz: “When self-exploitation acquires a central role in the process of valorization, the production of subjectivity becomes a terrain of the central conflict…Social relations that elude the grasp of value, competitive individualism and market exchange make the latter appear by contrast in their political dimension, as extensions of the power of capital. A front of total resistance to this power is made possible. It necessarily overflows the terrain of production of knowledge towards new practices of living, consuming and collective appropriation of common spaces and everyday culture.”
Clearly, like Bishop, Mouffe also sees these interventions in social spaces as an opposition to the dominant capitalist system and its exploitative symptoms. She explains: “What is needed to widen the field of artistic intervention, by intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the programme of total social mobilization of capitalism. The objective should be to undermine the imaginary environment necessary for its reproduction. As Brian Holmes puts it: ‘Art can offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding.’”
Mouffe casts this kind of “agonistic” practice (which does not promote an oppositional agenda to the dominant system, but rather an acknowledgment of the limits of any form of rational consensus) as playing an activist role in “the struggle against capitalist domination.” Though her distinctly Marxist viewpoint colors her framework for the role of art interventions in social arenas, the idea that these practices play an important part in the critical questioning of societal systems that self-perpetuate based on exclusion is exactly how I like to think about rigorous social artistic practices. They are forms of much-needed critique, played out in the social spaces of everyday life. They are not solely about “restoring the social bond,” or proposing “non-hierarchal organizing,” but rather about exposing flawed societal systems by experimenting with modes of interactions and social critique…whatever those may be.
Project Row Houses in Houston's 3rd Ward, started by artist Rick Lowe
We need only think about the current healthcare debate, in which moralistic anger and irrational fear enters into what should be a rational policy debate. Hopelessness that a rational consensus will ever be achieved has certainly permeated my consciousness, and I am tempted to agree with Mouffe, that such consensus is never possible in a democracy, despite what Enlightenment thinkers have taught us. But this is where I believe social practice has a role. Not in solutions, but in experimenting with process, in pointing out systematic symptoms of post-criticality and hierarchy and exploitation, and how these conditions create an imaginary environment that reproduces such broken systems ad infinitum.
I’m going to try my best to keep these posts a little shorter, but these concepts do not coalesce in my head very easily or in a very fully baked form, so I find myself having to really write through them. Also, I am not exactly the most concise of writers. So, thanks for bearing with me.
I would like to return to my discussion of theoretical frameworks that have been used to analyze socially-engaged artworks (oh, what a difficult term…isn’t all art rife with the social? But I hope you know what I’m talking about by now), as in my previous post on relational aesthetics. In that post, I pointed out that Bourriard’s discussion of relational aesthetics as a “theory of form” just didn’t quite do justice to the social, spatial, and political dimensions of this work. Grant Kester, in his book “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art” gets a little closer to laying out the various layers of social practice, what he terms as “dialogical aesthetics” (another relatively useless term - shoehorning these practices into some qualified type of aesthetics still seems so reductive to me). Kester manages not only to link these practices quite cogently to an art historical lineage, but also to begin to think about a more rounded framework for approaching them critically. Which is why his book, even after 10 years, is still the undisputed central text concerning community-based and socially-engaged artworks.
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces
Kester begins the chapter in which he lays out his analytic framework by talking about conceptual art not only as a move away from the purely visual, but as a robust set of concerns extending beyond (but not entirely rejecting) the art object itself. He says of conceptual artists like Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci and Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “They tend to focus on ways in which the optical experience is conditioned by a given social context or physical situation and by the viewer’s participation.” Seedbed, Acconci’s iconic performance in January of 1971 at Sonnabend in New York, is cited as an example - the viewer must be present to complete the piece, as the interaction between the masturbating artist under the floor and the unaware, disgusted or curious viewer was central to the piece.
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, January 15-29, 1971, New York City
I like this little concise description of conceptual practice from this era, because it throws into relief the different territories we are dealing with in art: optical experience, social or physical context, and viewer participation. It also provides a useful model for distinguishing social practice: in my view, social practice takes the work of conceptualism and twists it to privilege the context over all else. To switch around Kester’s description accordingly, I would say that social practice artists are concerned with the way a given social context or physical situation (usually both) is conditioned by optical experience (or aesthetic exchange) and viewer/creator/stakeholder interaction.
Accordingly to Kester, how successfully an artist enacts this analysis and practicing of the social can be broken into a three-part theoretical framework. He takes John Latham and Barbara Steveni’s Artist Placement Group as the trigger for his first two parts: 1) a project should first be examined by its ability to define art as a “condition of openness.” Does the artist seize the opportunity to approach a problem “unconventionally, naively, open-mindedly, as if from the outside?” He does note, however, that the tolerance for this kind of problem-solving practice drops quickly when applied outside of the art world, as in APG. Secondly, he examines a project in terms of its “critical time-sense.” Is the artist thinking in very long terms, about the “viewer-to-be” and about communities that are not yet emergent? Is the artist also thinking backwards in time, with a historical time-sense? He links this with what he calls a “spatial imagination,” the ability to “comprehend and represent complex social and environmental systems, identify interconnections among the often invisible forces that pattern human and environmental existence.” Finally, Kester ends with an analysis of the ability of the artist/project to “enact these insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters with others.”
I do think that this framework hits upon three major reasons for why an artist might be an appropriate “incidental person,” someone equipped to confront larger societal problems: 1) the ability to approach a problem naively and with a condition of openness; 2) a longer critical “time-sense,” beyond the short-term thinking dictated by certain disciplines (i.e. the market, quarterly, in election cycles, in fiscal years, etc); 3) a spatial imagination as defined above.
Yet the enactment of these artistic insights is where we fall down. Relational aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, conversations and beer drinking and making food for each other…it all feels very 1990s. Form evolves, as I said before. What are things like these day? Well, Mark Allen from Machine Project took over LACMA for a day and will be taking over Visitor Services at the Hammer Museum for a full year. Edgar Arceneaux is renovating houses down in Watts and conducting job-training in green technologies. The LA Urban Rangers are giving tours of public access beaches in Malibu and holding public easement potlucks. And that’s just a few…
LA Urban Rangers, Malibu Beach Safari
How do we approach such projects critically? Do we measure their effects, conduct surveys, link their forms to previous art historical models, interview the artists for some insight into their conceptual rigor? It is fraught territory indeed.
One of the issues with art that is inherently based on social exchange is that these practices have not really been clearly examined or theorized. There is a tendency amongst art writers and curators and artists to smush together all kinds of varied “movements” like Dada, Fluxus, the Situationists, Happenings, relational aesthetics (a la Bourriard), and dialogical aesthetics (a la Kester). Not to mention the fact that a variety of very vague terms are used to describe these practices (community art, public practice, social practice, etc). I have found myself falling into this lazy naming, but I feel that I must start somewhere. Very simply, the language has not been adequately defined, and I hope to work through some of these terms in my posts.
So what exactly am I talking about? Perhaps some of the definitions of writers I look to frequently in my studies of these practices will help map out this fraught territory, and an iterative study of particular projects will help to illustrate the context. We’ll start with Nicholas Bourriard. The term he coined, “relational aesthetics,” now elicits snorts and scoffs, and has come to stand for a post-critical art of “congeniality,” a realm in which a bunch of lazy artists have learned that they can call dinner parties and beer-drinking “artworks” within a gallery or museum setting. “Found” parties rather than objects, injected without much thought or rigor into art historical discourse.
Free Beer - Tom Marioni
I believe, however, that Bourriard was getting at something that has since been colloquially lost in translation - some (but not all) of the art he talks about hits on questions of community, societal mores, the meaning of public space, and how economies or technologies shape day-to-day social interaction. This is interesting, but the “theory of Form” that Bourriard advances lumps these practices with those that concern themselves only with the social networks of the art world and pleasurable congeniality. This is problematic, and does a disservice to the works that are critically examining political and cultural contexts. The metric he advances is simply not adequate to make those distinctions.
Relational Aesthetics
Bourriard calls relational aesthetics a “theory of form” in his series of essays on art from the 1990s. He traces this in the historical trajectory of the avant-garde, positing that the “perceptive, experimental, critical, and participatory” models of current art are carrying on the “modernist fight,” albeit in the context of quite different societal presuppositions. He defines relational art as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” These artworks examine social systems, and turn small exchanges into issues reflective of a broader society shaped by political, economic, and social mores. He calls the “arena of encounter” created by these works “a game” - in which participatory structures are modeled. He believes that this “arena” must be judged by its coherence of form, the symbolic value of the “world” it suggests to us, and the image of human relations reflected by it.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Exhibition View, Secession 2002
Some of the works Bourriard describes include:
“Rikrit Tiravanija organizes a dinner in a collector’s home, and leaves him all the ingredients required to make a Thai soup.”
“Philippe Pareno invites a few people to pursue their favorite hobbies on May Day, on a factory assembly line.”
“Vanessa Beecroft dresses some twenty women in the same way, complete with a red wig, and the visitor merely gets a glimpse of them through the doorway.”
“Christine Hill works as a check-out assistant in a supermarket, organizes a weekly gym workshop in a gallery.”
“Pierre Huyghe summons people to a casting session, makes a TV transmitter available to the public, and puts a photograph of laborers at work on view just a few yards from the building site.”
We could add people like Liam Gillick, Adrian Piper, Tom Marioni, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Jens Haaning to this list according to Bourriard’s rubric - but I still feel uncomfortable lumping the practices of these artists together. Perhaps they are all part of some broader contemporary trajectory, but they each are concerned with such different realms of interaction. Relational aesthetics is a good start, a useful entry into these practices, but is just too reductive in its language. Rigorous social practice rarely begins and ends with friendly interactivity between an artist and a public. We are beyond relational aesthetics as a theory of form, because the form keeps changing and evolving. What we need is a deeper analysis of how artists are inserting themselves into realms that have never traditionally been spaces for art.
