Social Practice

I am pleased to be conducting a series of interviews as a part of SOCiAL: Art + People, a series of discussions around socially-engaged art in Los Angeles instigated by Anne Bray of Freewaves, and these will be appearing on KCET’s Artbound blog throughout the fall. Below is an excerpt of my intro for an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Dr. Sarah Schrank that posted yesterday on Artbound, and the next iteration will be with Sara Daleiden, David Burns and Kimberli Meyer on the Mak Center’s Artists + Institutions salon series culmination on October 4th.

As a writer, arts organizer, and culture worker interested in socially-engaged art, I am excited to participate in SOC(i)AL: Art + People. There is a regrettable lack of informative art writing about socially-engaged art practices, largely because engaging the many stakeholders in complex reflection and documentation is exceedingly difficult. Yet through SOC(i)AL, we clearly see that this work bleeds into many fields.

The kick-off event, Is L.A. the Creative or Anti-Creative City?, is a conversation between Sarah Schrank, professor of history at Cal State Long Beach, and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, associate professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy, moderated by David Sloane, professor of public policy at USC, on Tuesday, September 18. Professors Schrank and Currid-Halkett are concerned with measuring the effect of cultural economies, artists, land development and cultural institutions on the shape of Los Angeles and other cities, one from a historical perspective and one focused on policy and planning. My interview with them reveals both tired stereotypes and surprising realities about the L.A. art scene and the true value of art.

Read the full interview here.

WHP Founder Edgar Arceneaux in front of Rosa Gutierrez's house

As an advocate for social practice and a former staff and board member of the Watts House Project, I feel a responsibility to respond to the recent LA Times article lambasting the Watts House Project and the character of its founder, Edgar Arceneaux. I am no longer with the project, though I left for purely personal reasons (mainly, the birth of my daughter and the time commitment of motherhood) rather than in protest (as the article implies). Though the project has indeed been rocky over the past few years, and there are indeed residents and former board members who are critical in very valid ways, the article paints a one-sided and partial picture of a complex situation. I don’t see Watts House Project as a looming, money-rich organization that has been surreptitiously hood-winking poor people, or as the product of a free-wheeling, unreliable charismatic leader who promises more than he can deliver with an overblown sense of his own importance. Though Ms. Finkel never explicitly says this in her article, she implies as much through its structure and selected quotes. Rather, Watts House Project is a small, capacity-poor nonprofit with a wildly ambitious mission that is attempting to produce a new model for grassroots urban redevelopment. It has run into a host of permitting, financial, and interpersonal roadblocks in a very complex environment, and has had to adjust itself many, many times to maintain a responsibility to its mission and values. Are there things that it could have done better from the very beginning?  Of course. Are Edgar, the board, the residents, and the artists struggling to find a model that will work well without disastrous unintended consequences (like displacement)? Yes. Is it taking longer than anyone anticipated? Yes, certainly. And does this frustrate residents who have been working with the project since the beginning? Clearly it does.

But these issues require a loving critique, one that responsibly investigates the root causes (many environmental and institutional) and the broader context of challenges facing the project, rather than a reductive expose that blames everything on the founder. This is unfair, and lifts the responsibility to work towards success from the many people who have participated in the project in the best way they know how (including the disgruntled residents, who have been collaborators from the beginning). It plays into the very real systemic inequities and toxic territorialism that makes it so difficult for such projects to succeed in Watts. In a brief effort to unveil some of this complexity, I’d like to address a few of the points in Ms. Finkel’s article that I feel warrant further investigation.

“ONLY THREE RESIDENTS”

Ms. Finkel cites that “only three homeowners” signed up for the ambitious home renovations that would be the product of artist-architect-resident collaborations. This is misleading, as there are only 20 homes on the block, and many are rentals with absentee landlords. Watts House Project made the carefully considered decision to pilot three initial projects with only families that owned their homes, and complete only minor façade improvements on other homes. The organization was very cognizant that significant improvements to rental properties could disproportionately increase the value of the properties and displace the residents of those homes. There are several other families on the block intimately involved with the project in other ways.

HAMMER “GRANT” AND MADRIGAL PROPERTY

Initially, before the project was a non-profit, WHP focused solely on façade improvement, and its scope was only broadened to more significant home renovation after its first year. So the accusation that WHP squandered money on just a paint job and a few improvements on the Madrigal property in 2008 is highly misleading. The Hammer Museum actually asked Edgar to be part of its Artist Residency program (not simply granting the money, as Ms. Finkel’s article states) based precisely on his proposal of façade improvement for the Madrigal property, and this was what happened during the residency period. It was only later, in a completely different phase of the process and unconnected to the Hammer, that larger home renovations were discussed. It is regrettable that Noemi Madrigal had a bad experience with the shed-building process, but the shed was requested by her father Felix Madrigal (who was not interviewed for this article), the owner of the house at that time. WHP prides itself on being responsive, with homeowners as collaborators, and as the shed was identified by Felix (a handyman by trade) as the most important improvement at the time, that is the project that the organization worked on together with the family. It took six months for various reasons –it was mostly volunteer-built (which takes longer than simply hiring an expensive contractor), and included a period of time when Felix was away in Mexico for personal reasons, which halted construction.

ROSA AND THE FLOWER HOUSE

This comment in the article particularly galls me:

As for [Rocco] Landesman, [NEA Chief] reached by phone inWashington, D.C., he said he based his positive impressions on a slide show by Arceneaux as well as a tour of the block, “and it all looked good.” He also talked to one enthusiastic 107th Street resident, Rosa Gutierrez, whose home received a bright flower mural as part of the program.
He said he was not told she was on staff at Watts House Project. And he didn’t have the chance to talk to residents of the three main homes promoted as renovation projects.”

This quote implies that WHP is trying to purposefully pull one over on Landesman, and is misusing monies so as to bestow benefits upon its own staff members. The article fails to mention that Rosa received the mural in 2008 through volunteer labor and at extremely low cost (most of the paint was donated), at the same time as the improvements to the Madrigal façade. She was not hired as a part-time staff member until over a year later, and her name is clearly on the website as being part of the staff and has been since her hiring. Another sensitive issue WHP has run into is the problematic of parading of residents in front of every potential art world funder, so it has limited its “tours” to staff members and residents who have agreed to this kind of meeting. I would be more concerned if Landesman had been introduced to every single homeowner in the midst of their busy days, as if they had nothing better to do than chat with the NEA chief.

GARCIA HOUSE and LOVE HOUSE

These projects have certainly been fraught with delays, and the homeowners have experienced great frustration. Some of that has certainly been WHP’s fault, mostly promising larger plans and in a shorter time than what proved to be possible, and perhaps not having the right expertise on board from the very beginning that could navigate LA permitting and tax law, not to mention Watts politics. But there is more to the story than what was reported in the narratives describing these projects. Just something that was not mentioned:

The Garcia plans were running along fairly smoothly until it became clear that the family had an illegal structure in the back of their property where one of the family members was living. The architects proposed some solutions to allow them to continue with the other plans they had formed (permitting law is such that in order to pull certain permits, illegal structures that are not-up-to-code would have to be rectified at prohibitive cost or torn down altogether – hence the “dining pavilion” idea) but the family was not interested in pulling down that illegal structure. So the plans had to be scaled down to what was possible within LA permitting law. As well, artists Mario Ybarra, Jr. and Karla Diaz had initially planned to do an artistic fence treatment, but were thwarted when Augusto Aguirre via the Watts Towers Art Center created an admittedly lovely mosaic mural literally over one weekend (and without anyone in the family notifying the WHP or the artists). Of course the work of Ybarra and Diaz ended up being delayed – they had to start from scratch in their plans.

CONTRACTS

But really the most vitriol comes from the issue of the residential contracts. I know that discussing contractual issues in depressed areas of our city is a tinderbox topic, because so many people have been taken advantage of. So many. And perhaps because so much of the board was not from this place, they did not anticipate that moving forward in the way they did would spark such negative reactions. For the record, the board was closely split on this issue, whether or not to even present contracts with these terms to the pilot residents at all. This was a real soul-searching moment for everyone who was part of the project. In the end, the decision was made to present the contract with the model terms, and if the residents were uncomfortable, to take those terms out (this is precisely what happened with Moneik Johnson). WHP naively didn’t anticipate that this strategy would generate such negativity. Hind sight is 20/20.

However, I will staunchly defend the terms of the contract, as they go way beyond a simple compliance to tax law. The discussion about these contracts was nuanced and thoughtful (even if the way they were presented to the residents was not). Rather, the reason for these contracts was to guard against the displacement that inevitably accompanies gentrification, and to ensure that money invested into the project would be cycled back into the community itself for a continued cycle of improvement. WHP is not a pay-day lender – just a non-profit requesting a small percentage of the value invested into family homes (50% of PROFIT upon sale, only up to $50k) in order to keep that money in the community and be able to reinvest it in more homes. It requires residents who agree to these improvements to place a stake of this whole project back into their own community, to invest in their neighbors’ future, to be part of a sustainable model. I think it is a key part of the whole vision for replicative capacity of WHP, and the board paused construction for an entire year to work on it, back and forth with lawyers, back and forth amongst ourselves. It was a responsible and important discussion, and there were no precedents, so it took a long time legally to research and implement. After that beleaguered, difficult process, WHP lost sight of how it would be perceived by the pilot residents, and that was a big, big mistake. But it was not a malicious one.

However, and this bears noting, this contract issue has also since been used to drive major wedge between neighbors by the very “community leaders” that Rick Lowe advocates for in the article – perhaps because Watts House Project did not initially pay the “proper respect” required and expected. But just because people are community leaders, does not means that their motives are always pure and their agendas beyond reproach (some are, some aren’t, we all know this). This is not to say that all critique of the project stems from manipulation – some criticisms, like those of frustrated homeowners, are completely valid. But to be escalated to such rampant hostility bespeaks other factors and other agendas at play. Watts is not a void. There are forces in Watts that have harbored personal vendettas against Edgar since day one – he never had a chance with some people, not least because of his color, his personality, his class, his home in Pasadena. He didn’t see this as a reason not to try to start WHP, and he has paid the price for that audacity.

THE FUTURE FOR WHP

As I hope I’ve demonstrated in these explanations, there is a selective collapsing of time and events in Ms. Finkel’s Times article that does little justice to the complexity of the context WHP entered into, its evolution in response to ever-increasing knowledge of that context, nor its very real successes and very specific failings. Which makes me wonder, why was this article written? I am grateful that the Times is paying attention to Watts, and that the article has opened the door for the kind of discussion I am now participating in. There are important larger systemic issues at stake in this investigation and I am thankful to have this forum to discuss them. But there is an air of malevolence about this article, searching for patterns of misappropriation of funds and resources, or just general destructive incompetence, which doesn’t quite add up. Citing the LACMA funding report, for example – the funds spent were pretty low indeed for two artist honoraria and for architects like Escher Gunewardena to create architectural plans for the property (the architects themselves did it pro bono, in fact, or it would have been 10 times as expensive – they only paid their staff for the hours needed to create models and blueprints to present to the Garcias). This is expensive work, and a lot of people worked incredibly hard for very little money to try to make it happen.

If competency is the issue, is the article trying to make the point that WHP should go away? It’s not going away, though I just learned that Edgar has resigned as Executive Director. Perhaps the rhetoric has gotten so toxic that he could simply not function effectively anymore. Did the article reveal this situation, or merely fan the flames? And in a recent LA Times blog post from April 7^th, is it now being leveraged as an indictment against all social practice?

I have been a critic of WHP from the start, and also have spent years of my life working on it. I have had countless conversations with many, many people critiquing the project and its failings and how to make it better. So to say that WHP is not engaged in rigorous critique is an utter falsehood – a much more rigorous self-reflexivity than I ever see in the non-social-practice art world. I wish I knew exactly where this indictment was stemming from, but I can only hope that it is simply a product of trying to wrestle with a complex new model that is struggling in a contentious context, and reduce that very real conflict into a series of sound bites.

What can WHP do better? I am sorry that Edgar had to step down in the midst of ignominious circumstances, but perhaps it is for the best. Will Sheffie is an amazing person and will hopefully be able to shepherd the program into more stable era beyond the necessary chaos of its founding. WHP can separate its pilot residents from its larger replicative model, figure out amicable terms to move ahead (if that is still desired) on all sides, and move ahead on a specific timeline and pace. WHP can strive for greater transparency in its marketing and discussions with funders, and work with neutral evaluators and scholars on a regular basis to commission progress reports. All of these ideas have been discussed by WHP, and I have no doubt they are moving forward as best they can, as they have always done. After all, they aren’t going anywhere.

Last week, the fantastic Justin Langlois of Broken City Lab asked me to answer this question for an interview series they are doing:

Is social practice, as a term or label, more valuable in extending the reach and possibility of visual artists, or more valuable as an articulation of an entirely different space and mode of production?

Interesting question, and I had a great time answering it. You can read my submission here.

The parting thought of my answer is that there is danger in the label social practice, the danger of false expectation - that everything will be fun, easy, feel-good, and bring people together. When in fact, social practice can often be challenging, disturbing, and deal with some really unpleasant subject matter, all to attempt to bring light to some injustice or rework societal systems from some different angle.

Installation of the map outside of LAPD headquarters. Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in January, 2012.

As a case in point, soon after I wrote this answer I went to Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in January candlelight vigil and performance. This reiteration of her 1977 project Three Weeks in May visually catalogued the past three weeks’ incidents of reported rape in Los Angeles through an enormous map installation on the exterior of the LAPD headquarters downtown, accompanied by months of conversations with activists, educational seminars, performances, a sound installation, and various other elements that comprise a signature Lacy project. The culminating performance asked audience members to share their stories, reflect on the crisis of rape in individual lives and in the city as a whole, and finally to commit to a goal to end rape and sexual violence in the next 40 years. Most powerfully, generations of rape activists took the stage at the end after sharing some truly heart-wrenching stories that were difficult to hear, and more than once brought tears to my eyes.

Activists at the final ceremony for Three Weeks in January, January 27.

As squirm-worthy as it seems on the surface, truly examining this subject is a rarity in any forum, especially if one does not have to. It is easy to simply push out of one’s mind. But such is the importance of projects like Lacy’s and their power. As if to reinforce these thoughts in my head, one supporter of the project thanked me for being there. “This means a lot that you are here,” she said. “There are a lot of more fun events you could have gone to tonight.” She was right, but I wouldn’t have traded in my meaningful experience for anything easier or more feel-good.

I have long been anticipating the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival that started yesterday in Los Angeles and continues through the 29th of this month. Challenging as it is to attend art events, especially indeterminant, sometime outdoors, mostly evening events with a 6-month-old baby, I am determined to make the most of this performance smorgasbord. So bring on the good, the bad, the ugly, the old, the iconic, the young, and the daring. Comb your beard, break out your hipster glasses and suede wedges and big flouncy scarves and industrial rope jewelry, and let’s see some time-based art!

Spine of the Earth, 1980, Lita Albuquerque. Ephemeral installation at El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, CA Photo: Lita Albuquerque © Lita Albuquerque Studio, 1980

Here’s my itinerary. It barely scratches the surface of the offerings, so check out the website, but this is my plan so far:

Sunday January 22

1) Pack up the stroller and sweaters, and cart the baby to Lita Albuquerque’s Spine of the Earth at noon on the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook. Who can pass up the chance of seeing a reinterpretation of this seminal 1980 land art piece?

2) After putting baby to bed, change into my party pants and hit up Liz Glynn’s Black Box. Liz is all over the place these days with an exploding career, yet her work remains thoughtful, poetic, and stunningly smart. I can’t wait to see what she’ll do with a space all her own, albeit temporary. Also, I’ve gotten word that Emily Mast is premiering a new piece called Birdbrain that night - not to be missed.

Thursday January 26

I know, I’m missing a lot on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. But I have to work, you know?

3) I can’t miss the amazing OJO at LACE, though, Thursday at 7pm.

Friday January 27

4) I plan on getting home early from work, and hopping the Red Line downtown to make it to the 7pm closing candlelight reception for Suzanne Lacy’s iconic Three Weeks in January at the LAPD. A re-iteration of her Three Weeks in May performance, this is sure to be a powerful, moving, terrifying, and ultimately redemptive piece. Needless to say, baby will stay home.

Myths of Rape , by Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Performed for Three Weeks in May, Suzanne Lacy, 1977 Performed for Lacy's series Three Weeks in May. Photo: Suzanne Lacy

Saturday January 28

5) I can’t wait to attend the Ball of Artists at Greystone Manor. CAN. NOT. WAIT.

So, those are my 5 picks. I would love to attend Andrea Fraser’s new performance on January 23rd, and the very amazing but woefully under-recognized Channa Horwitz’s event on that same day, and Eleanor Antin’s performance at the Hammer on January 29th, but I’ve got to be realistic. See you out there!

Rub in/Lube in at Macy's in downtown LA, December 2011. Photo courtesy Stephen van Dyck.

Today I’m pleased to present the latest installment of the Artists in Solidarity series, featuring the Johns (Burtle and Barlog, respectively), two artists who have been collaborating for six years to construct workshops, interventions, and public actions that catalyze awareness of one’s influence on their environment and community. John and John used my questions as a jumping off point for a fascinating and often funny conversation about pleasure, making art, optimism, and the possibilities for new networks of support opened up by Occupy.

What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA and the Occupy movement in general? Why?

John Burtle: (reads the question)
John Barlog: um
JB: As artists working with participation, seeing all the different ways people engage with the movement has been generative for me.
JB: I think that’s part of what. We were talking about starting with the why.
JB: Well there, are a lot of good things, and a lot of bad things with Occupy…
JB: Why? artists are like vultures. when they see you know something brewing that’s progressive, socially progressive they swoop in, insert propaganda and then ideally people start following it.
(laughter)
JB: Well that’s a very cynical, limited view, but I think it’s a little more than that. Well, I partially just like being part of it, as a body, a physical part of it. Like we went to that march the other day
JB: and we didn’t do anything except walk around
JB: and I don’t normally go to marches
JB: But
JB: The why
JB: Oh yeah, the vultures!
JB: Well, it’s a relatively small space that’s open to…
JB: lots of different types of approaches to protesting broad themes of what? Economic inequality?
JB: Or that a relatively small amount of people made some bad decisions, some poor investments and now we all have to pay for it.
JB: And so much more though.
JB: And I think that’s something I like about it, is how the movement is conscious of how deep, widespread, interconnected the problems are. I don’t know what was your initial encounter with Occupy pie?
JB: I forgot where, but I think I saw a live feed of a General Assembly, and they were doing the people’s mic. Listening to so many voices enthralled with agency, participating in a direct democratic system was super fantastic. One thing I like about the people’s mic is the way it forces us to think about language differently– because it is coming out of our mouths but it’s not from our voice–it encourages criticality and demands empathy.
JB: Really?
JB: Maybe, but just seeing a discussion of that scale carried out relatively effectively got me interested.
JB: And got us wondering about other ways that we could use the consensus model–
JB: Or what can be learned by applying consensus-decision-making to certain activities that we might not normally think to do so. Like giving haircuts?
JB: Screwing in a light bulb?
JB: Hockey? or maybe checkers…
JB: Reaching consensus on when it is time to break consensus.
JB: Puzzles.
JB: Making art?
JB: That’s a hard one.
JB: Like we are doing right now?
JB: Yeah.
JB: But what do you normally think to apply consensus to?
JB: I don’t know. Protesting? Yeah, I don’t know but I feel like there are certain activities that applying consensus to is more absurd then others. And I feel like part of what this project would do is expose that preconception.
JB: I feel like we will also learn a lot about reaching consensus through it. About listening and communicating effectively. When consensus is possible, when it’s easy, when it’s painful and why.
JB: It was impressive to see people that woke up in the morning at City Hall and spent the whole day in committee meetings, working with consensus, having to deal with that, choosing to surrender aspects of one’s self-determination.
JB: The receptiveness of the group to participate in adapted forms of dialogue made us think about a project we had done previously and introduce it at the occupation.
JB:We have conversations using a version of English with a few revisions like removing the command form, or only using the pronoun “we/us,” or not using possessives like “my” or “his, or even just adding primal utterances to our routine vocabulary.
JB: And it sometimes changes over time, depending on who’s using and adding to it.
JB: It was great to use with occupiers to start conversations about how our language affect our perception and actions.
JB: #occupyLanguage
JB: #occupytheBathroom
JB: #occupyAnything
JB: Like the Lube in/Rub in
JB: The Rub in/Lube in
JB: The general idea of that action was to use the free lotion samples to give massages and get massages–it was at the downtown Macy’s mall, at the Macy’s store and the Bed Bodyworks and Beyond–wait there was no “Beyond,” wait no, just–
JB: We took it beyond.
JB: Yeah.
JB: I was surprised how, well I’m not sure why I didn’t think it would go so far, in terms of the rubbing, but I’m glad it did, that felt good. I was surprised they didn’t ask us to stop until we had been doing it with our shirts off.
JB: We worked our way into it, starting with hand massages.
JB: Definitely pushed boundaries of pleasure in public.
JB: Well, some people took it as sexual. Stephen seemed to think the lady walking around saying “Oh my god. Oh my god! Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god! Oh my god!,” he seemed to think that she was, like, slightly aroused, but I think how it relates to the larger movement in general is–that it’s looking at public space scripted by corporatism and how we can interact with those spaces in ways that makes our dreams for a better world come true today.
JB: What’s that Rem Koolhaas quote? Other then the internets, “Shopping is the last form of public activity”
JB: So just spending time at the mall on a rainy day, having good fun not shopping, just sampling is a form of resistance. But it’s also indulging in taking consumerism to the extreme, till it caves in on its self–not even having to buy the product when using it excessively. Real serious stuff.
JB: I think what you were saying about enjoying spending time in public space with a group of people, is partially what I was feeling about serving food at city hall. It was a lot of fun setting up a huge spread of food for people, engaging with strangers over an inherently generous activity.  I think the food tent was one of the strong points of the occupation in the beginning. It was a space that literally nourished the community and it provided an access point for many people engage in occupation.  People could go there and eat from a bounty and find out what was going on. But, also it was a place for people to contribute and get involved. There was one person who brought sooo many cookies she had baked for us, literally like twenty trays. And they were good! Maybe she didn’t feel like she could be camping or go to GAs or maybe she just didn’t want to or whatever for whatever reason,  but contributing cookies was a way she could participate.
JB: It’s helping a basic need to be met–that makes people feel good about what their doing in relation to that, which in turn grows support. And when people are well fed they are less likely to be cranky and more likely to participate generously.
JB: Something else food brought up is the issue of trash and waste, as the occupation at Solidarity Park/City Hall functioned as a space to figure out what possibilities for a society could be on a small scale, I think that it was good for us all see trash pile up. For people to be confronted with how we do rely on municipal and state and private structures to take away our trash and deal with that.

What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?

JB: I’d say it plays a kimmelweck roll
JB: What’s that?
JB: It’s a type of roll with salt and caraway seeds on it.
JB: Oh, that sounds yummy
JB: yeah it’s delicious but I’d say, that maybe our work, especially now that, at least in a lot of cities, the occupation part of the Occupy movement, the physical occupations for indefinite periods of time um, with those being somewhat past– sorta a lot of our work is deals the with temporary occupation of spaces, inserting dialogue into places that aren’t normally places of criticality or reflection. I think now the Occupy movement is gravitating towards actions like that.
JB: Things like occupying foreclosed houses, or housing auctions, or–
JB: Which I think also gets into what you were talking about later, people setting up support networks for each other as a way of getting away from the cash economy.
JB: And I think this is something people in our community do frequently– like bringing soup to a sick friend, participating in someones project, hooking somebody up with work, or donating to a local art space…
JB: or helping pay your friends bail (THANK YOU!).
JB: Yeah.
JB: But, I think kinda we are digressing away from the question.
JB: That’s not a bad thing.
JB: Yeah, but let’s return to it.
JB: How does our artwork interface?
JB: Face to face interface?
JB: Well on a level of verbal communication are we are involved with it, is that what it’s referring to? Smoothidarity?
JB: I think there is also face to face interface where conversations that happen with us and other people at a march, or an email to AAAAAA or facebook or… umaum um. It’s like everybody is just throwing ideas into the pond and were all just fishing and seeing if anything is going to bite
JB: You lost me.
JB: Yeah, me too.
JB: That’s okay.
JB: But, well you know, it’s like all our conversations are ingredients in a big ol’ pot if soup, and we’re seeing what it will taste like then maybe, we’ll add some more of this or that or pepper or…
JB: Sometimes I’ll go to the meetings and just listen, how’s about that?
JB: Just be there
JB: Yeah
JB: Maybe some hand signals?
JB: Na, not even
JB: Yeah, just being a body is a huge way we interact. Maybe that’s not so much being our work as being present. And I think that’s important. And I feel like getting arrested, was something like that, where it wasn’t so much an artwork as it was just about being a present body.
JB: Emily poetically said  in the last one of these, “We must bear witness to these acts which are taking place around us. We must bear witness to the churning of ideas and dialogue, and be willing to see in person when a great shift of power or space is set to be contested.”
JB: That’s so beautiful.
JB: I know right? I wish we had things like that to say.
JB: It’s also just nice and affirming to find people who are doing similar things and having similar discussions.
JB: I’ve had good conversations with people I’ve met there. And there are more people doing creative overtly politically engaged actions and there is more visibility and dialogue regarding those actions. That is a good thing to me. Things like trying to cash a jumbo check for $673 billion, made out to the People of California, or theUC Davis students’ silent protest.
JB: Yeah, and there is a bunch of things like that I think have come out of this movement and even, there are a lot of people that have been doing this kind work for a long time and it is good to hear and see how they approach it.  Like the Rev. Billy, it’s been good to see speeches he gave on Wall St, but it’s always good to  hear what he has to say.
JB: Ahh
JB: Yeah.
JB: Is he a libertarian?
JB:  I don’t know what his deal is
JB:  Poop

Many recent actions are highly performative -  how do you think these “perform” inside or outside of the Occupy context?

JB: Apart from the 6A group, I don’t think I can really identify somebody who’s using scores. They may be doing highly performative actions for definite audiences–like occupying foreclosed houses or those people that rolled themselves out under a red carpet– but I’m pretty sure they aren’t thinking of them as scores.
JB: Yeah, but I’d say a lot of those actions are, a lot of scores are like, well you know there is that Allison Knowles score “make a salad” or a lot of scores are just “do a thing,” “try this action,” and both those examples are like that: “occupy a foreclosed house.”
JB: Hmmm, free hugs there is a lot of free hugs.
JB: Yeah, lots of free hugs.
JB: Yeah, I think there are probably a few historical performances like that
JB: Historical meaning they happened …?
JB: in the history of performance art… I learned about um
JB: Duchamp, Free Hugs?
JB: Yeah ya I swear
JB: Janet (Owen Driggs) talked eloquently about about how a score is a “simultaneous reach for authority and avoidance of authoritarianism.” A frame or prompt that invites interpretation. And the Occupy movement does function in that way where different people are involved in numerous ways. In different cities General Assemblies function slightly differently and the actions they carry out are all different but many are similar and for the same causes– and there are lot of people traveling  between them and discussing ideas and ways of operating.
JB: Occupy is like a score in that it is a basic outline for people to interpret–some people want to end corporate greed and feed the hungry, others are just really upset about chem trails.
JB: Right, and I may not agree that chem trails–
JB: Sure
JB: Yeah, sure
JB: We also passed out some xeroxes of drawings that are kinda like scores, and the Citizens Promoting a More Pleasurable Public zines we put in the library have first hand accounts of actions and events that I think function as scores because they are clear enough descriptions of performances that someone could read it and then do the thing.
JB: There is also that language piece that is kind of like a score–there is a general idea for how the piece is done based on conversations and past experiences. It’s been written down in different ways at different times, there are ideas how the piece is and it changes from one setting to the next. It turns out a lot differently depending on who’s participating and if it’s at someone’s house versus at an art gallery versus at city hall. It’s not like all performances should be performed multiple times or by different people, but those performances that are easily adaptable have an affinity with a movement like Occupy.
JB: I think we were talking earlier about open source culture on the internet, and how that relates to occupy. And, there’s been a lot of activist organizations or movements that have that umbrella system right, like the ELF, ALF, Anonymous,  Bubble Fountain Internationale, and now Occupy
JB: People doing sort-of similar things under a single name, or using that name to add an agenda to an action that maybe would have otherwise not been explicitly political. It also opens it up for anybody to become a part of it–like if some idiot started jumping from penthouse corporate suites to “Occupy Space,” who could really discredit him as part of the movement? That’s actually not such a bad idea… But there’s the Occupy Tundra lady, Diane McEachern, and she is able to just bring it and be part of it where she is, regardless if there aren’t any politicians or people to pretend to listen.
JB: I love McEachern’s direct words, “I am a woman. The dogs are rescues. The tundra is outside of Bethel, Alaska. The day is chill. The sentiment is solid. Find your spot. Occupy it. Even if it is only your own mind.” This type of thinking seems so relevant to the movement now.
JB: Well, There still isn’t any real spokesperson or leader or easily identifiable face, thankfully, at least on a national level, so it really opens it up for participation of any kind from whoever identifies with it in whatever way. For better or for worse, but…
JB:  And we’re still talking about scores?
JB:  Yes, we are still talking about scores.

How do you feel the AAAAAA list (or other Occupy affinity groups) operate? What role do they play? What are the challenges or benefits of these groupings?

JB: Well it’s a place for sharing and discussing things, and for finding participation.
JB:  But it’s also with focus, because you could also find all of those things at the occupation just as easily.
JB: Yeah, people that are familiar with a certain vocabulary and informed about a specific discourse.
JB: You could call it that.
JB: People that went to art school.
JB: That’s not necessarily true.
JB: One of the things about it is that there have only been about four meetings with the group as a whole, two in the beginning and the others more recently, and I only went to those first two and that was–
JB: There were four or three total
JB: Yeah, those were frustrating–
JB: I feel like we tried that and people who are interested in doing that will continue to do that, and there are other people are less interested in that but are still want to do other things with the group and they’ll continue to do those things. And, since they aren’t in opposition, both ways of interacting with the the network can coexist.
JB: I wouldn’t, at least based off those two meetings. We were trying to have the meetings operate on the same type of consensus model that Occupy does, but artists are too individualistic/egoistic to have that work successfully. You know, there are people who are very verbal, have a vision and want that. Artists tend to be bad at trying to manipulate things discretely, and it was pretty obvious that some people had expectations that the group would become some sort of modern day situationist internationale, so they were pushing for something more coherent or formalized that they could attach their names to. And other people, myself included, were not interested in that at all. The 6A group works better as a loose affiliation, rather than a coherent whole.
JB: Anna said something good about that, “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.”
JB: I also think there is something important about the 6A lists that involves people seeing a lot of their friends or people they’re familiar with doing things with the occupy movement–talking about it attending events, making art there–it all provides access points for people to enter it
JB: I wouldn’t say so much it works the other way around
JB: How?
JB: Like bringing activists into an art circle, but that’s just conjecture… does it?
JB: Probably not.
JB: Why is that?
JB: Maybe because it’s not directly affiliated with Occupy LA?
JB: If it was, there might be more of a chance of people not from an art background to become acquainted with contemporary models of practicing art directly engaging with politics. Though, I also understand why the 6A group isn’t an official committee.
JB: There are and were valid reasons.
JB: But that would have been one benefit–
JB: But a thing we were talking about earlier is that artists want their autonomy, so it made the consensus model an uncomfortable one to work with.
JB: Often artists want to do something, they have their mission and their vision, and sometimes it’s very hard to let go of that. With the consensus model you can keep the mission, but you better drop that vision real fast because everything that you want to see is not going to be the same exact thing 100 other people want to see, let alone come to consensus about. Most artists also like to receive credit for what they do, building up their cultural capital and art world cred in order to stake their place in a history that, like all other histories, is bound to be forgotten anyways.
JB: Even when I work with little kids in art class, and we are all making a project together, and we all finally agree on something to do. Then halfway through the project, one of the kids is like, “I want to put a mustache on it,” and the rest of the students says, “no way,” “what are you talking about?” and the kid says “but I really want to put a mustache on that. It needs it, it would be so good.” And then he has a meltdown. Sometimes I feel and see other artists and people in general feeling like that kid.
JB: Sometimes mustaches look good. And you could always shave them off, but I guess not the other way around…
JB: What? You could grow it back.
JB: Touché.
JB: Well definitely with all the support after getting arrested, that’s the time I felt the most part of the group.
JB: Yeah, that’s definitely when the group functioned most as a support network, like what I’d expect the legal committee of an Occupy group to do–I guess they (Occupy LA) didn’t really even have much of a legal committee, they were proposing the formation of a new one at a GA meeting I went to a week ago–so they really didn’t provide much support.
JB: I think this also brings up a large question about what is a manageable-sized support network. When something gets too big things are going to get missed, it’s nobody’s fault stuff just slips by, it goes under the radar. I think that is one of the big problems in our government and also with large corporations. So many people got arrested, the OLA infrastructure wasn’t prepared and they were overwhelmed and that’s why it was good having a group like the 6A group that could do that, to raise bail for us.
JB: Yeah, it’s like a group of friends would do.
JB: Well it is what a group of friends did.
JB: And I think that some of the people who had complaints about it maybe didn’t understand that it was a group of friends helping each other.
JB: But I could see how people would be upset if they see a group of people, artists already having separated themselves from the broader movement, a separate group, having a fundraiser for themselves at a place where public events are held, and it’s advertised on facebook. Also, in terms of demographics, I think that, compared to Occupy LA, the 6A group is predominantly white.
JB: I don’t even have a facebook.
JB: Oh yeah, We should talk about that.
JB: Okay
JB: Cause I feel like the majority of the AAAAAA discourse is on facebook.
JB: I guess that’s kinda why I feel like I’m kinda an outsider on the 6A group too.
JB: That’s ruff. I don’t think it’s good that people feel alienated from our group.
JB: Whatever, well I posted one thing to it.
JB: Ohhh!
JB: Yeah.
JB: How did it make you feel? Dirty?
JB: Well nobody responded to it.
JB: Really?
JB: Well one person.
JB: Oh yeah, Louie.
JB: Let’s not include this.
JB: I think it’s important to talk about because the group is so dependent on this one system for discussion. In some cases it’s great, but it’s also highly flawed.
JB: It’s also flawed at a level of security culture–if people were trying to do serious arrestable actions, they certainly couldn’t use the 6A group to coordinate that. Or in your case, if you’ve done something that lead to an arrest, bam!, everybody knows your ass was just in jail. Which is good because you get support, but then you get your family or employers knowing about that. Not good for living double lives, which is extremely important to me. Sure, if I had facebook I would be privy to more forms of discourse, but I could say that about facebook in general. And, well, there are people that don’t have email too, let alone facebook and they wouldn’t be part of it at all except for those few meetings.
JB: Who doesn’t have email?
JB: If there was no internet would any 6As really ever exist?
JB: Probably not? How ’bout that.
JB: Nope.
JB: Or if it did, it would have to be much more formalized. The internet allows for a kinda a gassidarity, like what we were talking about open source movements. But the 6A group doesn’t really have a platform except that it came about in response to Occupy, so the internet is the glue and now is an important time to be exploring how we can use these tools and see what can come out of it.

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?

JB: Okay, Horizontality!
JB: Alright, you want to read this one?
JB: Okay, there has been a criticism of Occupy’s horizontalism.
JB: Ooo!
JB: polyfoney, pollifauny
JB: What does that mean?
JB: It’s like, multiple foneys.
JB: Oh. Okay.
JB: multiple voices
JB:  Let’s double check.
JB:  Pu-lifony…po·lyph·o·ny, pl. po·lyph·o·nies. Music with two or more independent melodic parts sounded together.
JB: (Finish question… )
JB: Okay, I think you hear that criticism coming the most from the mainstream media because it’s driving them crazy. They can latch on to the catch-phrases like the 99% or whatever or the vague idea of economic critique but they’re not even really addressing that so much, as just sort of… I think much of what the mainstream media is doing is using that to kinda make it into a kinda wingnutty thing which, actually because it is so polyphonous, there are elements of that sort of dome conspiracy theory shit, which is totally regressive. Um, a but, I think within that though, ahh, I think it’s a good thing, in some ways. By not issuing demands you don’t have a specific platform so that a multitude of people can latch onto it that are either moderate or just crazy too. You can project yourself…
JB:  –into whatever this thing is, the critique of our current economic situation and all that surrounds that. But also, like the person at the GA said when she was quoting David Graeber, and lots of people have said it. “by not issuing demands you’re not recognizing the authority.”  But then there are people that are issuing demands and that are working with the city and are total reformists.
JB:  Right, Democrats, as Vlad would say.
JB:  Right, people that think that we can go to the people that fucked everything up in order to fix it. But there is a place for everybody, and there is a place for those people, as long as they are a part of a whole rather than commandeering for political agendas a movement that potentially transcends the norm of US partisan politics. I have to say though, hearing all the initial praise and cooperation of some of the Occupiers with the LAPD and City Hall really made me have serious doubts, but I realized these people, again, are part rather than the whole of this. I also figured that the LAPD and the city were only going to be buddy-buddy for so long, and those people would end up looking like their lackeys once the authority showed itself. But, as we said, and what is really commendable about the whole thing, is that there is a place for everybody that feels that the playing field is far from level, for lack of a better description at the moment.
JB:  There is, and I appreciate that. Both how people are working in that way and that there is space in this movement for so many diverse ways of working.
JB:  I’m totally into trying to fix the dominant system before we burn it down. Cause, who knows? The kindling might go out before the whole thing ignites.
JB:  Yeah, they got their thing. It’s certainly better then bombing children. There are worse things that they could be doing.
JB:  There have definitely been times when I’ve been in a committee meeting when a drunk guy comes over and just start shouting over everybody about unrelated issues then what the committee is talking about. Then he gets on stack and everybody gives this comrade a chance to speak and they go on and on about more unrelated issues that may be interesting but are totally unrelated and everybody tells them to wrap it up and he keeps going and we all have to mic check him to get through the meeting. It’s super frustrating but
JB:  But, sometimes that guy…
JB:  He says good things.
JB:  Yeah, the guy that kept saying, “We are surrounded by assholes!”
JB:  Yeah. and he has great things to say. He is a total globalist, which is great. He swept the park everyday–that sidewalk had probably never been so clean.
JB:  Yeah, so he deserved that mic check, as does everybody.
JB:  Yeah. Oh no, I meant we all mic checked over him because the group basically came to consensus that he wasn’t contributing and to continue the conversation we mic checked over him till he shut up. That is frustrating.  But when it does work, when there is a huge GA, hundreds of people, and we all come to consensus–when it works like that it feels sooo good! That much energy behind an idea is spiritually moving for me. Or when as a group we are looking at a document, and an individual steps forward and says that they block the document. Then they give a specific part they have a problem with and make a proposal for how to change it. And after discussing it everybody is like, Oh yeah. That is better. That does make more sense. That’s so wonderful to see that kind of collective energy.  That so many people are working within the assembly to contribute and have their voice be hear. I’m continually blown away and inspired by that. To me it’s worth the times that you have to wait through the drunk guy.
JB:  Yeah?
JB:  Yeah.
JB:  And like I said, sometimes he has good things to say.
JB:  It’s definitely an ambitious decision-making process to work around. I think I’m not sure if other people, um, er I don’t think its been given credit as much as its been critiqued to shit because everybody is so caught up in the snap, snap, snap. They don’t want to have to think about things for long. People aren’t used to really sitting down and talking through things intensely, giving everybody a chance for their opinion to be heard. We’re used to either doing what someone tell us to do, or to just do what we want–synthesizing those things to come to a decision for “us” rather than “you” or “me” takes so much more time and energy.
JB:  That’s our culture in general really.
JB:  I mean shit happens so fast. So, you can’t, people are… it’s hard to keep up with.  I guess perseverence has to be to behind a mass consensus model like that. Um, because if it’s not there it’s, not going to happen.
JB:  And I think it’s important because there is such a lack of a space for people to participate in our government right now. You know?
JB:  Mmhmm. Or none at all. But if there was space to participate, I wouldn’t want to . When has the government really given fair representation for all? Even if I was participating, somebody else is still getting shat on and left in the dust because “representation” by nature is exclusionary. That’s why we need to look to ourselves for representation and action, not putting hope in others for ourselves.
JB:  We have so little agency within that system that this model that does offer us a way to get shit done that we want to get done within this large social project, that is really powerful.
JB: It’s a clear example of direct action. We don’t believe that the people that represent us at the various levels of government– our interests are not their priority. So instead of continuing to put faith in them, we represent ourselves in our own movements and daily actions and attitudes towards each other.

What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?

JB: I don’t know, the word hope is so loaded these days.
JB: Yeah.
JB: But um,
JB: Well it’s “hopes” not “hope.”
JB: Well
JB: Yeah, I think, ahhh well, I hope that… guess it’s going to get optimistic up in here.
JB: Yeah
JB: Let’s just get (inaudible)
JB: Naw na na, let’s get beyond that.
JB: Aawww yeah, ice cream.
JB: I hope that we don’t even need banks, just turn the banks into some other thing, like museums to commemorate the fall of financial tyranny. Turn the credit unions into some other shit. We don’t have to use money anymore. We don’t have to have jobs. We’ll just ahh
JB: Just chill.
JB: Just chill on the beach.
JB: on the beach
JB: and ah.. we’ll do our own thing well all have to pitch in. We’ll all have to do the dirty jobs, but we’ll all pitch in.
JB: What could that support network look like now?
JB: Well there are a bunch of ideas, like time-banking. But that still has a problem about the quantification of labor… I mean, how do you get past money?
JB: Yeah, I don’t know, go to the beach?
JB: Yeah, but I don’t want to go the beach tonight, it’s cold and rainy.

“hopes for…” take two

JB: Ok, ummm hopes.
JB: Okay, so I feel torn between two ways different ways of answering this question, one is for moving to a place where we don’t need money anymore.
JB: Ahh a Utopian answer.
JB: Yeah, like one of the demands, I don’t know if it’s from Wall St. or LA, is to turn all undeveloped property into land for public use, which…
JB: Er, yeah, and why stop there
JB: Yeah, let’s look at those demands
JB: um
JB: But okay,
JB: This it?
JB: Yeah, good enough.
JB: Hmmm, free college education, I hope for that one.
JB: One trillion dollars for infrastructure? Seems like not enough.
JB: Across the board debt forgiveness.
JB: Yeah, across the board debt forgiveness for all, Oh boy, that’s sweet.
JB: That’s going to be a tough one.
JB: No, that’s not happening.
JB: Right so that’s one way of answering that question, but through the immediate future I’d like to see the movement continue to grow to include even broader populations, because our strength lies in our numbers. So I hope that we keep welcoming everyone into our movement, and that we don’t get paralyzed by over-critiquing each other. That we continue to encourage participation and not shut it down.
JB: Yeah, I think consistently welcoming everyone into the movement is vital, even if we are in some ways ourselves outsiders. Whether it’s at a dinner table, on a bus–or like I made a point to have discussions with the police that arrested me at the raid about how the “economic crisis” had affected them and explaining that that was part of what we were protesting. They talked about things like how their pensions and overtime had been cut — Many of them were extremely receptive and in some cases even appreciative to what we were doing. I go back and forth about what role the cops have in this thing but I use it as an example as to how I’d like to see us interacting with people that feel they are outside of the movement.
JB: Or, I was talking to one person who was always afraid to answer the phone cause it would usually be someone calling about how he owed money. But the for the last two months he had been excited to talk to the bill collection agencies because he would just talk with the caller about how he had been going down to the occupation, about how messed up everybody’s situation is, and about predatory lending and other things the banks did that fucked us all over and all the other Occupy stuff. He seemed to be totally empowered by the whole thing. I hope that there remains to be a vast spectrum of ways in which people participate that are useful for them.
JB: The 99% tumblr is another good example of a very clearly intentional way people participate that doesn’t require a large amount of time or commitment.
JB: There are also realistic things is I can see happening like the amendment regarding corporate personhood getting overturned. And the city of Los Angeles coming out and supporting it getting overturned is one of the clear example that we are putting pressure on our governing bodies and I hope that pressure will escalate and other reform like that will happen. I think that stuff is totally doable but…
JB: Yeah, but that’s just reform to a completely fucked system. I think we really need much more than things like that. Until competition and accumulation of capital isn’t at the forefront of how countries and economies function, we won’t see big issues truly resolved–like climate change or poverty. Hyper-corporate capitalism holds only the short-term dear, and what follows is for the next bunch of competitors to sort through. We really need an attitude shift, stop being so selfish, and I’m not sure, but I hope Occupy can tackle that–we need to move past the idea of scarcity and start to provide for each other whenever or however we can, start production that doesn’t just end with consumption; production generating production. Does it mean expropriation? Or just reallocation of resources? I don’t know, but our current approach to the idea of property is leaving billions in the cold, or the heat. I think we need support networks not operating on the basis of profit that will supersede those offered by the dominant system–and we’re already seeing them, but not enough. How does that happen on such a large scale? Participation from all, but also people who can provide specialties, like healthcare or construction. That’s the hard part.
JB: Right.
JB: But we’re going to be hoping.
JB: Hoping. Always hoping.
JB: Hope usually means that it’s not going to happen.
JB: Ahh ha, I don’t know about that.
JB: Um ahh what’s his name? But that’s something that ahh ahh, that guy that people think are smart?
JB: Obama?
JB: No, that funny lookin’ philosopher guy um, it doesn’t matter. He said…
JB: Zizek?
JB: Yeah, he spoke at Liberty Park and was like this is sweet, what you are all doing is super great, but ahh um, in the next few decades due to global climate change huge sections of Africa are going to get so hot that there will need to evacuate entire populations and the big question is how do we do what you’re talking about, create these support networks that can support communities, but then also be able to do that on a global scale without people in power manipulating the situation for their exclusive benefit and control?
JB: Well I think a big problem is not so much money as scarcity; the idea that there is not enough to go around. But, there probably is enough, or there could be if we changed what it was we produced and the way we value goods.
JB: What else am I hopeful for? Oh, I hope that it doesn’t get co-opted by the Democrats.
JB: Urban Outfitters
JB: But that can, I mean maybe it’s or it can be argued that that is a good thing. But, I would hope that it …
JB: That it doesn’t capitulate?
JB: Yeah.
JB: I think that capitulate is a good word because it’s like it doesn’t lose it’s potency.
JB: Mhmm, yeah
JB: Cause it’s like, sure, it’s great if the Democrats pick it up but I don’t want it to become…
JB: Yeah, I don’t want the demands to become really actually what a politicians or political decision makers could view as a realistic list of demands.
JB:  You want debt forgiveness for all to be on the list.
JB: Exactly!  Because, if you set back your demands for what’s achievable there will be nowhere further to strive once those demand are met. So fuck demands. By keeping our goals “unrealistic” over time, it keeps people stretching further and further what could be realistic.
JB: I think this is also gets into the larger discussions around what is the role of a radical social movement like this one is. Is it is more effective as a resistance or revolution.
JB: Tell us more, John
JB: There is a great interview with Chris Hedges speaking at Wall St. and he pointed out that in this country, the social movements are considered successful — the ones that brought about widespread change like the Civil Rights Movement, the Suffrage Movement, the Labor Movement never actually came to power. They never actually came to be in the dominant position in the government, and there is value in that because once you take power it forces you to give u your ideals, your demands for justice — you have to compromise, and really none of us want that…
JB: Um, and maybe now that the different occupations have been dispersed, a diversity of tactics have gained attention.
JB: At the last GA we attended there were lots of conversations around flashmobs …
JB: Yeah, that was a great one to attend. The conversation about direct action, people recognize a problem and try to do something about it. Either fix it or bring attention to it. Things like filling a pothole on your street with bright green cement because you know the city isn’t going to do shit.
JB: So yeah, new tactics emerging or, or you know, what seemed more logical to me from the start is occupying foreclosed houses, is starting to happen. And claiming them for people that are evicted. That’s starting to catch on because that directly addresses the issue. That takes it straight to the actual site.
JB: Yeah, that the port shut down, and the occupation of the old Rampart police station…
JB: Those sounded great, I didn’t go to them though.
JB: Yeah, I think that is really great that so many actions are happening and I hope that there will be lots more of that. And I feel like in some ways that the fleeting moment we are in is a bit of the party is over, time to go back to work.

Emily Lacy performing at the Occupy Bailraiser event at Machine Project in Echo Park, December 4, 2011.

Emily Lacy is a Los Angeles-based musician, performer, and sound artist. Her work with music and performance creates resonating layers of sound that have recently infused several Occupy solidarity events in the city, and her experience at the raid of the Occupy LA encampment deeply affected her thoughts and feelings about the movement. Below she describes both her intellectual thoughts about the movement as well as her embedded bodily emotions in a fluid and articulate narrative that is, at once, both heartbreaking and hopeful.

What are you making/interested in making with regards to Occupy LA & the Occupy movement in general? Why?

EL: I’m interested in making sounds and music that supports protesters. In some cases, it means bringing music to spaces that are not even thinking about Occupy, like a random DIY music show I might be playing. In other cases, it could be making sounds in the background of a march or protest to facilitate unity and harmony among people and ideas. Sound and music are such flexible mediums that they work well in these contexts. The music can take on traditional forms of song with guitar and voice, or more experimental soundscape-type-of-material, with megaphones I discovered that can loop and play back. The music runs the spectrum from folk to punk, to art music, or sound art.

What role do you feel you/your work plays in interfacing with the protest? What role would you like it to play?

EL: I’m not sure what role it’s playing or will play in the future. Let’s say that the outcome is to be determined. I can only say that I want to contribute to things in a positive fashion. I look around and I see a world getting darker, and these protests have given people like me hope that things could change for the better.

Many recent actions are highly performative -  how do you think these “perform” inside or outside of the Occupy context?

EL: Well, I think a lot of the aspects of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in themselves have been very performative. The whole idea of a 24-hour protest comes off to me as very much like a performance. They are durational in the way that a lot of long-form performance or music is durational. Anything that then takes place at the site becomes an act of performative protest, people having a working group meeting for example or preparing a meal for protesters - those acts in themselves become performative in my view. They serve practical, immediate purposes but also act as a symbolic protest because of site-specificity. Camping as a performance I think is something that has come to light. Also there have been amazing actions like the Chicago protesters who collected trash from the site of a foreclosed home and then delivered the trash to Bank of America’s doorstep and eventually its lobby (Bank of America had foreclosed on the home). That was an action that really spoke to me. Also, recently protesters lay down in front of a gala in Washington, D.C. and put red carpets over their bodies, effectively suggesting the partygoers would need to walk all over them (and the entire 99%) to enter the festivities inside. Those are powerful gestures to me.

I think as major encampments have been raided what I am experiencing is a distinct lack of continuous performance: lack of duration, lack of continuity within the performative framework of a 24-hour protest – that has now been effectively silenced. It was like a flame that didn’t ever go out, the tents were constantly performing, but now they have been slashed and pushed down into another kind of politics.

Artist-actions, or people who identify as artists, and their performative actions that have taken place inside or outside of Occupy as protesters, it’s interesting to think about. I was happy that Pete Seeger at over 90 years of age joined protesters in New York recently for a midnight march. It’s very inspiring to feel that thread from him, someone who is a great hero of mine. It’s interesting too that within the language of Occupy, very serious issues of labor are being brought up all around us, and very visibly within the art world context on many levels. For instance the letter that was circulating in relation to Marina Abramović’s performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) by someone who had auditioned and was offered a job within the Abramović performance, I thought that had very interesting implications. There were also art handlers protesting Sotheby’s because they were asked to take a paycut while their CEO takes home 60K a day. A day! That was one of the first times in this movement that I started to feel things dramatically on a strictly mathematical level. It does not seem right to allow these kinds of labor relationships to exist.

I think great performances can help us ask questions, or can help us find the courage to ask questions that we most desperately need to ask: am I doing enough to contribute to this moment in time? Are my rights in danger? What lengths will I go to for justice? Have I become a zombie by my acquiescence to the state of things as they are?

How do you feel the AAAAAA list (or other Occupy artist affinity groups) operate? What role do they play? What are the challenges or benefits of these groupings?

EL: The AAAAAA list has been great for me in that it has created a sub-community of artists within the Occupy context in Los Angeles. It has created a place for dialogue and support, and that’s very useful to me. I’m grateful to the people who’ve made it what it is. I’m curious to see how it, and the movement, develops over time.

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?

EL: I think it’s great that it has created a sense of equality. At these things, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, or what your job is. You have a voice because you have a voice. America, like the whole world, is complicated, but I think what’s great about Occupy among other things is you see a kind of cross-continental and cross-regional sort of global solidarity coming out of this. You hear a language of unity instead of one of competitiveness or divisiveness. When is the last time you heard of people in Egypt marching for protesters in Oakland? We are marching for each other across city, state, and national lines. There’s a power in that idea that we are all in this together. I still think the broader ideas of Occupy are just emerging, almost as if we are moving into this translation-like stage, where we are moving from one language to another and the meaning isn’t totally clear yet. It’s like a state of mutation. Maybe this is what change looks like. Criticisms around lack of clarity I think relate to a culture that is used to sound bites, and a two-party system where meaning is very easy to deduce on the surface. I think the goal of Occupy is pretty clear though: Let’s make a system that works better. Now the process and the attempts at getting there, to a better system and a better dialogue, sure those might look messy because they are messy. Therapy is also messy, but do we criticize people for trying to help themselves in that context? The movement and the General Assemblies are something like the forming of a people’s union, a way to surface grievances and provide support for each other, though we all work for different people.

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 feel about the ways Occupy protests have continued? How do you think the Occupy movement should respond?

EL: I think it’s a scary time. Witnessing the raid at Occupy LA was really educational for me as a citizen of this world. I thought a lot about the power of ideas, and the danger an idea can take on when it stands for something that’s viewed as radical, or highly political in nature. In this case, as in many others, we are talking physically about camping tents. Fucking camping tents! But the tents are a symbol for this kind of call for justice, the tents are a symbol for a movement that is saying the current system must be confronted for what it is: corrupt, broken, suspicious. The tents we’re saying we will not let these things go unnoticed, we will sleep outside until we fix this. Imagine if the tents were doves, symbols of the peace movement. Imagine if you saw 1400 riot police moving into slash and destroy living things. What I saw that night when the police came in and established their position was incredible, it was a shift in power, and thus in ideas. The physical removal of people and things changed the power dynamic and thus the dialogue, and in that way it felt like a kind of spiritual violence. Even though they didn’t use tear gas, it was still violent. Because they took the park away (legal or not) they changed the current exchange of symbols. They took away a statement. They took away a dangerous idea. I saw something removed and extracted that night and it felt so terrifying. I had never felt so physically like the enemy before. These sites are being treated as crime scenes and that is very alienating. I will never forget some of the things I saw that night. It’s not the same as watching something on TV,  there is a danger and a violence that exists in the flesh I can’t describe otherwise.

I believe it is important to witness these things. Even if you don’t plan to be arrested, we must bear witness to these acts which are taking place around us. We must bear witness to the churning of ideas and dialogue, and be willing to see in person when a great shift of power or space is set to be contested. Responding to a photograph or video footage will not do the trick. It’s not the same as witnessing injustice firsthand. Shifting the experience of the movement and the protests back into the physical body, from the realm of ideas, is a different experience altogether.  It’s a different reality because you fear for your life in a different way. You fear for the implications of your physical body. Maybe what I saw challenged my view of the relation of the body to ideas. We must witness that, I believe, if we are willing to succeed in this.

How should Occupy respond? By not giving up, by building something important again. By standing together. By inventing new ways to protest. By continuing an active dialogue that is totally relevant to our daily lives.

What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?

EL: My hopes are to end up in a world that is more reflective of my values. I believe I should have the right to dental care and health care, without question. I have teeth that have literally fallen out of my mouth due to neglect. We’ve acquiesced to a system that allows this. I haven’t had a physical in over 5 years, since I last had health insurance through a job. Even then I was exploited through the costs of insurance I was required to pay at that point. I believe that going to college should not have been a 125K economic mistake. I believe that we should not be exploited at the hands of those at the very top, for relationally sick economic gains. I’d like to know that my mother will not have to work till the day she dies to survive, and that she’ll have affordable healthcare through the rest of her life. I’d like to live in a world that reflects these things. I want people put before profits. This is the struggle I see articulated in the Occupy movement. And it is a struggle. It’s also not just about humans either, our planet and our environment are too being looted for profit. I want the looting to stop.

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.

A recent article about the codification of public space by Anna B. Scott lays bare the tangled mess we’ve wrought through re-development and arts funding.

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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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.
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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.

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.

Photo courtesy Glenn Primm, 2011.

What are your own hopes for the occupy movement?

JOD: I read in today’s Guardian that the billionaire Koch brothers are about to launch a nationwide database of Americans who share their views.  Named Themis for the Greek goddess who imposes divine order on human affairs, it will “give concrete form to the vast network of alliances (they) have cultivated over the past twenty years on the right of US politics,” just in time for the 2012 election.

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.