Social Practice

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.

Today I am pleased to highlight artist, activist, writer and organizer Robby Herbst, who maintains his own interdisciplinary art practice as well as works with the LA-based collective Llano del Rio. A long-time activist, Robby’s critical questioning of the Occupy movement comes from his core interest and passion for challenging dominant hegemonies. Though he is undeniably supportive and excited about artist actions and self-organizing at Occupy, embedding and interfacing his current projects in that context, Robby asks some key and uncomfortable questions. How far does radical action extend? Can artists infuse political demand into the poetics of their practices? Does the professed horizontalism of the General Assembly only go as far as our dominant institutions of culture allow it to go? Robby has demands rather than hopes for this movement, and one of those demands is an evolution in how artists interface with their society.

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

RH: What I’ve been working on to date largely has been further developing projects that I’ve been working on since before the occupation movement. And the occupation has provided interesting places to develop them. With the Llano Del Rio Collective, I’ve been working on the “Antagonists Guide to the Assholes of LA” since at least this summer. It’s a guide that seeks to promote agonistic approaches to democracy by highlighting sights where assholes dwell (governmental, corporate, military, etc). Some of the public programming we’ve put together, which helps frame the meaning of the forthcoming guide, was going to take place elsewhere. However, the occupation at city hall has provided an excellent place to discuss artists claiming power over assholes. Also we’ve rushed to distribute some of the research we’ve done regarding contestable sights near the occupation, so that it can be helpful to occupiers and their supporters.

I’ve also been working on a project with the Dumbo Art Center in Brooklyn. A public performance for that project (which will have a gallery iteration in February) was originally planned to happen at Occupy Wall Street on its first weekend there in NY. However, for several reasons (including a strong desire to be in dialogue with LA), I decided to do these actions here in Los Angeles. The piece involves the creation of human pyramids that reflects on an IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) diagram created in 1911. The diagram is called Pyramid of Capitalist System and it depicts capitalist class structure as a human pyramid. Working with mostly novice dancers and acrobats, we are building class war human pyramids down at the occupation.

Other than these projects already in the works, I hope to contribute in making AAAAAA a forum of affiliation to scheme creative and critical actions which add to vocalization of the movement or an intensification of it here in LA.

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

RH: Anything that gets folks interested or present in the occupations is a great thing. That is largely how I visualize this interface. If any of the projects that I am doing beyond that causes people to think, act, or relate in another way than they expected to–then that would be swell too. If through our attempts at organizing in relationship to Occupy LA , our artist community more generally begins to consciously embrace a practice of demand along with their poetics–that would be a wonderful thing too.

Many recent actions seem based on performing “scores” – why do you think this is, and how do you think these performances “perform” in the Occupy context?

RH: I am not sure if I agree with your statement. While score-based work is the impetus for some people’s work, I can equally point at a larger number of projects that aren’t score-based. Perhaps if your statement it is truthful it could just be reflective of a peer group who are a part of this affiliation. It might also be that people who are interested in self-organized space are also interested in performative acts of autonomy.

Ultimately scoring is a straightforward way to do public space performances–subtly affecting crowds. I don’t need to talk about Kaprow and Cage nor the Situationists and their relationships to chance and serendipity and non-hegemonic ways of manipulating subjectivities, do I?

Robby Herbst, Didactic Pyramid installation.

How do you feel the AAAAAA list is operating? What role is it playing? What are the challenges or benefits of this loose grouping?

RH: So much to say here…. But I’ll try to stick with what’s on hand.
It’s a networking group at the moment–folks share ideas, articles, thoughts and reflections. Folks give the thumbs up to projects in mind and completed. They share ideas and impulses. They share articles and news and opinions. They respond. They share discourses they’ve enjoyed from other communities of the internet. They throw their two cents in. Generally it’s a positive and supportive environment that ideally creates both a context for the presentation and discussion of perhaps offbeat or ideally radical public projects which aim to challenge, interface and engage the struggle. Generally there’s not many lurkers or (I think this is the right term) and inflamers around–this is a great thing. People who are talking are involved in places other than the internet.

There have been a few announced meetings. The first two occurred the first week of the occupations and were unexpectedly large. It was enough perhaps to have such a big group come together to out themselves, as it were, to being personally passionate about this struggle for economic justice. That outing was the outcome of those meetings–that and that we would come up with a name and perhaps develop a website. (A calendar where folks could list what they were doing, and see what was going down creatively, along with the facebook page, was put together almost right away). Rob Ray put up a webpage for everybody–no meeting was had to make and do it–but that seemed to be ok with everyone. I had hoped that beyond this architecture we could articulate language that might frame a position and make a statement as to where we stood together as we did our self-organized acts. This group articulation hasn’t happened yet and at one point I was disappointed by that. It seems that the will to do the work of building consensus on ideas was beyond either the interest or ability of the group–so this kind of language, “what we stand for” is not outlined. I feel that having something to push against and with is important (even if it is water)–but the desire to go there yet hasn’t shown itself that fiercely.

Later meetings included a bar get-together where some folks got drinks and worked to get to know one another. This was an attempt, I believe, to develop working and political intimacy in a group that for many stretched beyond their immediate peer group. Then recently a group of folks got together from the AAAAAA group to plan an action in solidarity with the General Strike in Oakland. That project appeared very successful and I was happy that AAAAAA facilitated a format for its creation.

Otherwise, people who are planning projects that fall on the same day have co-publicized one another’s projects. As well, an Occupy LA reader was group-sourced and produced through the list. And it seems that a Free School of sorts was worked on through it.

The benefits of the group are all of the above plus the supportive environment.

The group is a work in process and I think people are discovering that it is what they make of it. Beyond the anti-police violence that occurred in solidarity with the Oakland General Strike, I am not aware of projects that have affected the stridency of intensified social protest. The group has not functioned as a creative agency, nor as something like San Francisco’s Art and Revolution. And this is both a good and a bad thing. It allows space for people to do their thing and provides a forum for people to dream together more vital actions–but it doesn’t necessarily spur vital action. It allows for it and facilitates it, but it doesn’t demand it. At times this feels like a problem, at other times, it feels like an opportunity that will (and has) make itself known. In my mind the loose structure supports a laboratory approach, where together we are experiencing (as LA artists) the possibilities of radicalized aesthetics playing themselves out here. That LA artists are embracing this experiment beyond the safety of galleries or schools, but within the complexity of independent space–that’s a big positive in my book. One I can support. AAAAAA is an evolution. I think both LA and LA’s art scene (institutional as well as self-organized) needs evolution. I hope that AAAAAA will continue to evolve to occupy the arts–in radical as well as formal potentials.

There has been criticism of the Occupy movements and the horizontalism of the General Assembly – a polyphony of voices and lack of clarity in message or goal. What are your thoughts on this critique?

RH: This is a tremendous question for me and I won’t get far into this at all. If I read into your question, then I apologize. But the very short of it is that for me this question has implications which directly connect with contemporary art practice, especially regarding the rhetoric surrounding the supposed openness of social or relational practices. Like the occupations themselves, these structures exist within certain ideological contexts. Just as art practices are frequently contained within institutions which themselves work to suppress underlying ideologies and structures, the utopianism surrounding horizontalism working within these movement(s) functions largely to make invisible pervading ideologies and structures which should also be subject to critique. The basic critic would be that the horizon of horizontalism can only go as far as that which can be articulated in a given frame. And the terrain of that framework is only described by those that control the institutional framework of a culture. So in LA, you get people who claim horizontalism as far as it doesn’t confront historical police violence, and in Oakland you get horizontalism as long as you don’t destroy property and don’t take over and demand collective ownership over foreclosed upon property.

I am not saying that polyphony is useless as many on the left and right declare. The only real power of OWS is in its current polyphony. That it as of yet has refused to be captured, it will remain an itch in the side of our culture until somehow perhaps it is regularized. But the manner that it will be regularized and the direction that this regularization takes will be defined by the demands that people make. And if the demands are only articulated through the horizon that dominates our contexts in Los Angeles, or Oakland, or the US – than I am aware that this horizon may not be quite as interesting as I could see.

An interesting footnote would be Jodi Dean and her talk at Not An Alternative.

What are your own hopes for the Occupy movement?

RH: Hopes–after Obama I am not so interested in hope. My demand of the occupy movement is that it continues to challenge dominant frameworks in the world which have placed the rights of private property far over the head of the commons.

I recently wrote an article on similarities in the recent evolution of anarchist groups in Los Angeles and art collectives or artists engaging in social practice, specifically comparing the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities‘ weekly food program and the Artists for Social Justice. Below is an excerpt in which I attempt to trace historical similarities between the avant-garde and anarchism, finally contrasting those to relatively recent strategies of horizontalism, reflexivity, and exchange.

Look out for Issue #7 of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest when it comes out in a couple of weeks – not only will you find my full article, but also a constellation of other great writings.

The similarities between the avant-garde and anarchism extend beyond their similar “shock and rupture” tactics; political theorists and art historians alike have declared both to be failed movements. In the avant-garde movement, this failure arises from a paradoxical hierarchy encased in the primacy of the art object. If the art object itself contains the power to elicit epiphany, than the artist is elevated to a status “uniquely open to the world,” and viewers that are open to the transformative experience of the object are likewise more educated and socially aware than those who are not.[1]

Anarchists struggle with a similar created hierarchy, often denouncing those with any connection to institutions and systems of the current society. This has led to an insular mindset dominated by ideologues, with adherence to extremism serving as a measure of commitment. The desire to completely dissociate has undermined the goals of systematic revolution and greater freedom, replacing one hegemony with another.

Complicating these intrinsic problematics is the proven ability of capitalist systems to subsume and harness radical tactics into new forms of control. Belgian political philosopher Chantal Mouffé writes: “The aesthetic strategies of the counterculture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency, are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period.”[2] As mass marketing employs the surface aesthetics of the avant-garde or revolutionary iconography to imbue brands with “cool,” strategies of the alternative arts movement are now foundational pillars of the worldwide art market, and corporate structures (as in Google or Apple) embrace a superficial ideal of egalitarian self-management, the “shock and rupture” tactics of the radical left are effectively deflated.

Because of this systematic adaptability, many have claimed “any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralized by capitalism.”[3] In the past few years, however, both artistic practice and anarchist organizing have come to embrace new strategies of radicality that are distanced from “shock” tactics in their commitment to a social and spatial awareness. Exemplified by the two Los Angeles groups (the anarchist RAC, and artistic Artists for Social Justice) that started in 2007, this radicality emerges in self-reflexive organization and practical exchange.