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.
Every couple of months at the Hammer, a group of older women from a Brandeis Alumni group come for a tour and lunch in the museum cafe. I had the pleasure of touring this group the last time they came, through the show “Second Nature.” The show, which is coming down very shortly, consists of a fantastic collection of sculpture from the last 10 years (mostly by Los Angeles-based or educated young artists) donated by media exec Dean Valentine to the Hammer’s contemporary collection. The varied pieces within it, though having some relationship to one another in their generational response to object making, are quite diverse, and challenging in terms of an overarching tour.
The Brandeis women, of a clearly different generation than these artists (who included Edgar Arceneaux, Sterling Ruby, Ruby Neri, Stephen G. Rhoades, Martin Kersels, Paul Sietsema, and Nathan Mabry among others), were resistant to art in these forms, and had much to say. One protested the “cerebral” nature of conceptual or post-conceptual art, a refrain I hear frequently as a docent. “These artists need to get out of their heads and into their hearts,” she admonished. Others just shook their heads disapprovingly when I introduced Sterling Ruby’s monumental “Stalamite: Recondite Burning,” an obelisk-like organic coagulation of melted plastic, enormous and stunning in its expressionism.
As their guide, I tried my best to give context for the work they were seeing, to try to lay the groundwork that these artists were not attempting to represent or even necessarily “express themselves” in the vague, cliched sense, but were posing a question or conceptual critique - about the larger framework in which they were making art, about art and object-making in a digital age, about media in general. This leap is still nearly impossible for many art viewers of a certain generation. They are interested (they are there, after all) but they don’t get it, and they become frustrated that they don’t get it.
I think those of us who live and breathe contemporary art forget this, quite often. We like preaching to the converted, and the divide between those who “get it” and those who don’t remains difficult to hurdle. Building access to contemporary art and learning to appreciate good contemporary art takes time. It’s like trying to explain the taste of a good apple versus a bad apple when the person you are talking to has never tasted an apple before…and not only that, is absolutely resistant to apples in general. I was more than thrilled when at the end of the tour, one of the women said, “Well, for art we didn’t like that much, we sure did talk about it a lot.” I felt like hugging her - yes, I wanted to say, yes, that’s the whole point.
Which brings me to the space for museum education - a really fascinating and dynamic space that embodies all sorts of interesting conflicts, like the Brandeis group experience described above. Museum education departments are morphing beyond the docent-training, curriculum-building, K-12 oriented places they once were, where kids fingerpaint after learning about Impressionism. These departments are increasingly the incubators for social practice…for like the artists who are so interested in problem-solving and spatial and social context, museum educators have long had to deal with both art and its public context. Traditional curators are sometimes a bit baffled by social practice, especially as it becomes less and less object-based - a couple of curators have admitted to me that they don’t feel they have the skill set to “judge” good or bad social practices (apples to oranges, again). But museum educators are used to integrating publics with pedagogy and art historical context - they are programmers and teachers and problem-solvers. Obviously not all educators are equipped to really explore these liminal social spaces, preferring to confine themselves to lesson plans and traditional notions of art education - but the space is there. Educators like Eungie Joo of the New Museum and her fantastically interdisciplinary “Museum as Hub” program, or Sarah Schultz of the Walker, are consistently breaking new ground in terms of curatorial and educational collaboration, supporting social practice, pushing the boundaries of arts education, and creating spaces to incubate new pedagogical ideas. It is no surprise that among the three LA art institutions interested in partnering with the Watts House Project, all three are doing so through their education departments.
Clearly I’m a bit of a booster, being a museum educator myself, but I find deep connections forming between these departments and the art practices I am so interested in, and I am excited to see what innovative programs arise from those interstices.
I’m going to try my best to keep these posts a little shorter, but these concepts do not coalesce in my head very easily or in a very fully baked form, so I find myself having to really write through them. Also, I am not exactly the most concise of writers. So, thanks for bearing with me.
I would like to return to my discussion of theoretical frameworks that have been used to analyze socially-engaged artworks (oh, what a difficult term…isn’t all art rife with the social? But I hope you know what I’m talking about by now), as in my previous post on relational aesthetics. In that post, I pointed out that Bourriard’s discussion of relational aesthetics as a “theory of form” just didn’t quite do justice to the social, spatial, and political dimensions of this work. Grant Kester, in his book “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art” gets a little closer to laying out the various layers of social practice, what he terms as “dialogical aesthetics” (another relatively useless term - shoehorning these practices into some qualified type of aesthetics still seems so reductive to me). Kester manages not only to link these practices quite cogently to an art historical lineage, but also to begin to think about a more rounded framework for approaching them critically. Which is why his book, even after 10 years, is still the undisputed central text concerning community-based and socially-engaged artworks.
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces
Kester begins the chapter in which he lays out his analytic framework by talking about conceptual art not only as a move away from the purely visual, but as a robust set of concerns extending beyond (but not entirely rejecting) the art object itself. He says of conceptual artists like Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci and Felix Gonzalez-Torres: “They tend to focus on ways in which the optical experience is conditioned by a given social context or physical situation and by the viewer’s participation.” Seedbed, Acconci’s iconic performance in January of 1971 at Sonnabend in New York, is cited as an example - the viewer must be present to complete the piece, as the interaction between the masturbating artist under the floor and the unaware, disgusted or curious viewer was central to the piece.
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, January 15-29, 1971, New York City
I like this little concise description of conceptual practice from this era, because it throws into relief the different territories we are dealing with in art: optical experience, social or physical context, and viewer participation. It also provides a useful model for distinguishing social practice: in my view, social practice takes the work of conceptualism and twists it to privilege the context over all else. To switch around Kester’s description accordingly, I would say that social practice artists are concerned with the way a given social context or physical situation (usually both) is conditioned by optical experience (or aesthetic exchange) and viewer/creator/stakeholder interaction.
Accordingly to Kester, how successfully an artist enacts this analysis and practicing of the social can be broken into a three-part theoretical framework. He takes John Latham and Barbara Steveni’s Artist Placement Group as the trigger for his first two parts: 1) a project should first be examined by its ability to define art as a “condition of openness.” Does the artist seize the opportunity to approach a problem “unconventionally, naively, open-mindedly, as if from the outside?” He does note, however, that the tolerance for this kind of problem-solving practice drops quickly when applied outside of the art world, as in APG. Secondly, he examines a project in terms of its “critical time-sense.” Is the artist thinking in very long terms, about the “viewer-to-be” and about communities that are not yet emergent? Is the artist also thinking backwards in time, with a historical time-sense? He links this with what he calls a “spatial imagination,” the ability to “comprehend and represent complex social and environmental systems, identify interconnections among the often invisible forces that pattern human and environmental existence.” Finally, Kester ends with an analysis of the ability of the artist/project to “enact these insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters with others.”
I do think that this framework hits upon three major reasons for why an artist might be an appropriate “incidental person,” someone equipped to confront larger societal problems: 1) the ability to approach a problem naively and with a condition of openness; 2) a longer critical “time-sense,” beyond the short-term thinking dictated by certain disciplines (i.e. the market, quarterly, in election cycles, in fiscal years, etc); 3) a spatial imagination as defined above.
Yet the enactment of these artistic insights is where we fall down. Relational aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, conversations and beer drinking and making food for each other…it all feels very 1990s. Form evolves, as I said before. What are things like these day? Well, Mark Allen from Machine Project took over LACMA for a day and will be taking over Visitor Services at the Hammer Museum for a full year. Edgar Arceneaux is renovating houses down in Watts and conducting job-training in green technologies. The LA Urban Rangers are giving tours of public access beaches in Malibu and holding public easement potlucks. And that’s just a few…
LA Urban Rangers, Malibu Beach Safari
How do we approach such projects critically? Do we measure their effects, conduct surveys, link their forms to previous art historical models, interview the artists for some insight into their conceptual rigor? It is fraught territory indeed.
