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Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism
Sholette, G.G.
Publication date 2017
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Sholette, G. G. (2017). Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism.
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Delirium and Resistance:
Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus
prof. dr. ir. K.I.J. Maex
ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel
op vrijdag 21 april 2017, te 16:00 uur door Gregory Gerard Sholette
Promotor: prof. dr. C.M.K.E. Lerm-Hayes Universiteit van Amsterdam
Copromotor: dr. J. Boomgaard Universiteit van Amsterdam/Gerrit Rietveldacademie Overige leden: prof. dr. C. Esche University of the Arts London
prof. dr. R.W. Boomkens Universiteit van Amsterdam prof. dr. H. Van Gelder KU Leuven
prof. dr. J. Früchtl Universiteit van Amsterdam
dr. G.W. Lovink Hogeschool van Amsterdam
dr. J.F. Hartle Universiteit van Amsterdam
dr. J.G.C. de Bloois Universiteit van Amsterdam Faculteit: Geesteswetenschappen
i. Samenvatting Waanzin en Verzet: Activistische Kunst en de Crisis van het Kapitalisme
Waanzin en Verzet: Activistische Kunst en de Crisis van het Kapitalisme is een onderzoek naar specifieke
culturele veranderingen die hebben plaatsgevonden in een periode van diepgaande sociaaleconomische verandering en instabiliteit. Dit tijdvak begon ruwweg in de late jaren zeventig met de globalisering en anti-globalisering, en liep via de internetzeepbel tot aan de wereldwijde financiële ineenstorting van 2008 met zijn nasleep van versobering en onzekerheid voor een groot aantal werknemers in de kunsten en daarbuiten. Gedurende deze decennia bepaalden de zogenoemde neoliberale deregulering en privatisering het beleid in de meeste ontwikkelde westerse landen. De afgelopen tien jaar kwamen deze uitgangspunten aanhoudend onder vuur te liggen van zowel politiek links als rechts. Met dit historisch kader in gedachten stel ik in deze studie een aantal vragen met betrekking tot de beeldende kunst. Ten eerste: welke invloed heeft de economische liberalisering gehad op de arbeidsomstandigheden van kunstenaars, en in hoeverre werd de artistieke praktijk subsumed door kapitalistische productiewijzen? Ten tweede: hoe heeft dit extreme dereguleringsbeleid het zelfbeeld beïnvloed van de artistieke avant-garde als bron van creatief verzet tegen kapitalistische subsumption temeer daar belangrijke kenmerken van het neoliberale beleid in feite overeenkomen met die van de artistieke voorhoede zelf? Deze vragen worden ingewikkelder als zij geplaatst worden in het licht van het traditionele beeld/zelfbeeld van kunst als een autonoom fenomeen, dat in wezen immuun is voor de politieke omstandigheden en economische onrust van het historisch moment. Merkwaardig is ook dat openlijk activistische kunst de afgelopen jaren steeds zichtbaarder is geworden, en dat zelfs musea en andere grote culturele instellingen lijken te popelen om een beperkte selectie van deze sociaal geëngageerde kunst op te nemen in hun programmering. De bredere doelstelling van dit proefschrift is om het spoor te volgen van de geëngageerde, activistische kunst vanaf de late jaren zeventig tot op de huidige dag in 2016, voornamelijk aan de hand van case studies uit New York City, waar ik bijna veertig jaar actief ben geweest als kunstenaar en criticus. Het analyseren en plaatsen van mijn directe ervaringen in een bredere sociaal-politieke en historische context effent de weg voor mijn poging de tegenstrijdige krachten te begrijpen die van invloed zijn op veranderende omstandigheden in de artistieke productie, eerst ten tijde van de invoering van het neoliberalistisch gedachtengoed, daarna tijdens de huidige fase van escalerende crisis.
(i. Summary in English) Delirium and Resistance: activist art and the crisis of capitalism
Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism is an investigation into specific
cultural changes that have taken place in a period of intense socio-economic change and instability beginning roughly in the late 1970s with the era of globalization and counter-globalization protests, through the Dot Com technology boom and bust, and on up to the 2008 global financial collapse with its aftermath of austerity and precariousness for numerous workers in the arts and beyond. These are the decades in which so-called neoliberal deregulation and privatization became the dominant policies for the majority of developed Western nations. Over the last decade the preeminence of this paradigm has begun to draw sustained political challenge from both the Left and the Right. It is with this historical framework in mind that my study asks several questions related to the visual arts. First: what effects has this economic liberalization had on the working conditions of artists themselves, and has artistic practice been wholly or partially subsumed by capitalist modes of production? Second: how have these extreme deregulatory policies impacted claims by the artistic avant-garde as a force of creative resistance against capitalist subsumption, especially given that key aspects of neoliberal policy actually parallel aspects of the artistic vanguard itself? These questions become more complicated in light of art’s traditional claims to be an autonomous phenomenon that is essentially immune from the political conditions and economic turmoil of any given historical moment. What is also curious is that overtly activist art has become increasingly visible in recent years, even as museums and other mainstream cultural institutions appear equally eager to selectively incorporate some of this socially engaged art into their programming. Therefore, the broadest aim of this dissertation is to trace the path taken by socially engaged and activist art beginning in the late 1970s on up to the present day in 2016 primarily using case studies drawn from New York City where I have been active as an artist and critic for almost forty years. Analyzing my direct experience within a broader socio-political and historical analytic sets the stage for my attempt at understanding the contradictory forces which are at work in the changing conditions of artistic production first during the era of neoliberalism’s implementation and more recently during its current phase of escalating crisis.
Gone is the first mad delirium…The show is over…Into the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there rings a different chorus; the horse croak of the hawks and hyenas of the battlefield.
Rosa Luxemburg1
1 The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy Feb -April 1915. The Rosa
Chapters i. Samenvatting/Summary, p. 5
ii. Introduction and context of the project, p.11 iii. Chapters:
I. Section One: Artworld
1.0. Introduction I: Welcome to Our Art World, p.25 1.1 Fidelity, Autonomy, Betrayal (2003), p.43
1.2 Let’s do it again comrades, let’s occupy the museum! (2012), p.59
1.3 Bare Art, Debt, Oversupply, Panic!: (On the contradictions of a 21st Century Art Education ) (2016), p.65
II. Section Two: Cities Without Souls
2.0 Introduction II: Naturalizing the Revanchist City, p.95
2.1 Nature as an icon of urban resistance on NYC’s Lower East Side 1979–1984 (1997), p.111 2.2 Mysteries of the Creative Class or I have Seen the Enemy and They is U.S. (2004), p.129 2.3 Occupology, Swarmology, Whateverology: the city of disorder versus the people’s archive (2012), p.135
2.4 Art After Gentrification (2016), p.145 III. Section Three: Resistance
3.0 Introduction III: Critical Praxis/Partisan Art, p.171
3.1 Counting On Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice (1999), p.187
3.2 Dark matter: Activist art and the counter-public sphere (2007), p.207 3.3 On The Maidan Uprising and Imaginary Archive, Kyiv (2014), p.227 3.4 Delirium and Resistance after the Social Turn (2015), p.235
iv. Conclusion, p.263 v. Postcript, p.281
vi. Acknowledgements, p.285 vii. List of images, p.286
viii. Record of previous publication, p.287 ix. References, p.289
Figure 1. The Illuminator/G.U.L.F. April 18 2016. Gulf Labor Coalition, Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), Occupy Museums and The Illuminator respond with a nighttime guerrilla projection onto the Guggenheim Museum New York April 27, 2016 following the museum’s refusal to discuss with these activist art groups the improvement of wages and working conditions for migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi where a new Guggenheim museum has been in the works. (Image courtesy G.U.L.F./The Illuminator).
ii. General Introduction
Questions raised by this thesis.
The title of my study refers to the dizzying contradictions that have come to define contemporary art in the era of neoliberal capitalism. This includes rocketing prices that some art works command in the global market, but also the rising tide of artistic activism focused on social injustice (including seeking fair economic compensation for art workers themselves). All of this is compounded by the crisis of the so-called Great Recession and its aftermath, which may signal the collapse of the neo-liberal model itself. To address this often baffling situation this study argues that there are both new, as well as older, contradictions now haunting the field of contemporary culture as never before. However, these materializing conflicts are amplified when artists focus their practice beyond artistic concerns to address social and political concerns in the “real world.” Therefore two questions that this dissertation seeks to address above all include, first, how can a truly critical and politically resistant artistic culture be possible when art is becoming entangled and perhaps even subsumed within capitalist forms of production, marketing and financialization? And, second, what significant changes have taken place since the completion of my previous research into so-called artistic dark matter in 2008? In addition, a number of important subsidiary questions are also posed here. These include what links the field of art with urban gentrification, and how to respond to the effects of staggering student debt on artists (particularly in the United States context). The relevancy of these inquiries to the delirium and resistance of the contemporary political world seems all the more consequential following recent electoral outcomes that are moving many democratic nations towards increasingly xenophobic, nationalistic, and in some instances authoritarian state governance. While this General Introduction provides a compact description of my thesis investigation, and it also provides the scholarly context and methodological approach used in my research, it is within the body of the thesis itself that one will hopefully find a deeper exploration of the troubling, and often vertiginous conditions that make up contemporary art and society.
Autonomy and Heteronomy.
If an essential feature of artistic practice has been its centuries-old autonomy (whether real or imagined) from worldly economic and political matters, then art’s increasingly far-reaching and radical complicity with capital generates not only a dilemma, it forms a virtual ontological state of contradiction for all artistic practices. However, this problem is especially vexing for those modes of contemporary art that self-identify as socially engaged, interventionist, or activist in nature. Wait, you may be thinking. How does art that freely commit itself to a heteronomous cause –raising consciousness about human rights violations or seeking to improve precarious labor conditions for example– suffer when artistic autonomy is no longer viable? After all, isn’t the collapse of autonomy precisely the attribute that separates engaged art from its art-for-art’s sake brethren? Yes, certainly, this would be the case if we were living in an ideal society where we fished in the afternoon, wrote criticism after dinner, and perhaps made art the day after with no need for professional titles or the sale of one’s labor to make ends-meet, to paraphrase the young Karl Marx.2 Under those circumstances it is
quite likely that the loss of artistic autonomy would be incidental, even celebrated. Therefore, what might have been embraced as the long-awaited success of the avant-garde’s program to merge art with life now arrives at a moment when life itself is embroiled in a game of survival within a world dominated by the high-risk stakes of ultra-deregulated capitalism that is itself in crisis. In addition, given recent elections in the U.S., U.K., Europe and elsewhere, this crisis is spreading to the democratic social institutions of many once stable nations. In short, the stakes involved with merging art and life have radically altered today. For while all art encounters the contradiction of its own entrepreneurial marketization that follows and disciplines the artist herself from classroom to exhibition space and beyond, the committed activist artist must also contend with the paradox of producing work that is always already caught up in a system it openly opposes and deplores. The bulk of my investigation focuses on the complicity and antipathy, as well as delirium and resistance that these partisan art forms have expressed over the past thirty-five years of post-Fordist, enterprise culture.
Dark Matter and after.
The second contradiction investigated by this thesis overlaps with issue of artistic autonomy, but it also expands upon my past research about what I call the dark matter of the artworld, which asked: What if the majority of creative work produced within neo-liberal societies was invisible to the those who manage and interpret contemporary culture, the art historians, collectors, art critics, dealers, museum directors, curators and arts administrators? What if this other sphere of production made up an alternative shadow economy in which ideas, labour, and practices were rooted in notions of participation and pleasure, rather than strict hierarchies based on scarcity and class privilege? Who would stand to benefit from maintaining the invisibility of such shadow creativity? Perhaps most importantly, how would the hierarchical value structure of mainstream cultural institutions be affected if what I mischievously label the dark matter of the artworld began to rise to the surface and make its presence known?
These were the questions that propelled me to write the 2010 book Dark Matter: Art and
Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press). In that study I explored not only what
this so-called dark matter creativity might consist of –ultimately concluding that it was best understood as a surplus archive consisting of unremunerated art laborers and pre-failed art students (the 99% destined not to succeed in traditional artworld terms), activist artists, and also non-professional amateurs– but I also arrived at the conclusion that this marginalized mass of productivity was becoming brighter with potentially profound consequences. And ironically, this dark matter was getting brighter thanks to the socio-economic forces unleashed by, but also necessary to, highly deregulated capitalism and its agenda of privatization. Capital’s liberatory mechanisms included 1.) The just-in-time manufacturing processes that as Mario Tronti predicted in 1960s were transforming life into one enormous “social factory,” and 2.) The ever-expanding networks of communication technology that are so essential to global capital, but which also allow even the most obscure cultural practitioners an opportunity to identify themselves at some level of visibility within a broader cultural setting. Thus, the very-same unrelenting pursuit of profit extraction out of every corner of existence led to a condition in which peripheral or even suppressed cultural agencies were unconcealed, permitting this no-longer dark
matter to forge alternative economic systems and oblige self-actualized communities that sought to challenge the market itself (though sometimes these congealing dark forces were also regrettably disturbing, anti-progressive, misogynist, xenophobic or racist, and at several points in this thesis I address these circumstances as well.) All of this was further exacerbated by the financial crisis and its ongoing aftermath, a point addressed in the chapters on “bare art.” Therefore with regards to the artworld’s brightening the unconcealment of this creative dark matter was making manifest the presence/absence of a vast pool of largely (in)voluntary laborers who nonetheless are instrumental to the reproduction of high culture’s hierarchical institutionality. My prediction was that this long-repressed agency would emerge into self-awareness to take action against its paradoxical position within the artworld because the dark matter agency that most interested me then, as it still does now, is the politically engaged practice of art which disturbs the status quo.
Much has happened since the book Dark Matter was completed almost ten years ago (the dark matter thesis dates back to 1999, but the book manuscript was submitted just after the start of the 2008 global economic collapse). For one thing, progressive (as well as some regressive) cultural and political activists emerged on the world stage starting roughly in 2010 to challenge neoliberal capitalism from Occupy Wall Street (O.W.S.) to the streets and squares of Cairo, Madrid, Damascus, Moscow, Athens, but also institutions of learning including the University of Amsterdam, and most recently in the streets of St. Louis, New York, Baltimore with Black Lives Matter. All in all, the “brightening” of previously pent-up and shadowed energies has far exceeded anything my research in Dark Matter estimated almost a decade earlier. Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism is an attempt to address these circumstances, but it approaches this challenge by incorporating writings that preceded the book Dark Matter (approximately 60% of the total) into its investigation, as well as a substantial balance of completely new material intended to help contextualize both old and recent content.
Accordingly, the goal of this study is to focus this research on acknowledging the concrete contradictions of contemporary culture, while simultaneously rejecting a tendency found in many similarly oriented publications to wax nostalgic about a lost autonomous art practice,
or to normalize activist and socially engaged art either by claiming that these overlooked forms bring added aesthetic value to the field of high culture, or by insisting that within the ranks of socially engaged art unrecognized instances of artistic brilliance, if only we could overcome our cultural prejudices to see them as such. In contrast to both of these tendencies, my ambition is to present socially engaged artistic agency as a problem, or as a set of problems, rife with contradictions, and already fully present within, as well as necessary to, the history and practice of contemporary art.
The chapters that follow approach this objective by embedding the contemporary artworld and its delirious interplay of forces within a Matryoshka doll-like system of deregulated post-Fordist capitalism and high-risk enterprise culture involving issues of gentrification, art and labor, social injustice, and high cultural privileges. And as this process unfolded, so did a series of sub-questions crop up at each successive stage of investigation. These questions include: 1.) What effects has the liberalization and financialization of the global capitalist economy had on the working conditions of artists, pedagogical studies, urban culture as manifest within the artworld as a historical and also contemporary institutional real and symbolic economy? 2.) To what degree, and with what outcomes, have artistic practices –especially those self-defined as oppositional, activist, and/or socially engaged– been wholly or partially subsumed by capitalist modes of production and the hyper-entrepreneurial risk-economy which it has engendered over the past forty years? 3.) How do these conditions that veer from delirium to crisis and back again impact the (neo) avant-garde’s claims to be a force of creative resistance in light of the fact that key aspects of neoliberal policy parallel aspects of the artistic vanguard itself? 4.) And finally, are there new, or perhaps old but overlooked artistic possibilities that will allow art to again take up the mantel of an alternative to capitalism in the 21st century? Context and Related Literature Review.
For reasons that I hope become evident immediately, this investigation is not preoccupied with famous art careers, blue-chip galleries, familiar historical narratives or trending global museums. Instead, the approach taken here seeks out a critical examination of artistic practices and artistic conditions, especially those self-described as oppositional, collective and/ or activist, as these forms have emerged, evolved, and sometimes collapsed during the rise,
institutionalization, and crisis of neoliberal capitalism roughly between the late 1970s and the present day (2016). Set primarily in New York City the perspective of this study draws upon my own experiences, observations and history as a politically engaged, and therefore comparatively marginalized artist, living and working in Manhattan for most of the past forty years (please see additional comments below about the location of this study). But this thesis equally profits from my activity as a long-standing and regularly published writer who is critical of the international contemporary artworld and its institutions. For these reasons my focus herein most often chronicles the overlooked, forgotten or suppressed activities and histories of cultural practitioners who have in many instances been systematically marginalized by the artworld, or who have consciously rejected the artworld, thereby problematizing the mainstream narratives of the contemporary artworld itself.
Interest in socially engaged and activist art has grown considerably in the past five to ten years. This interest is evinced by the many academic papers and conferences devoted to this type of work, but perhaps it is most profoundly evident in the two-dozen or more scholarly volumes that have been published on such practices in the past three years alone. A series of consequential books have recently appeared on this topic by such noted academic scholars as Claire Bishop, Boris Groys, Charles Esche and Matt Bradly, Tom Finkelpearl, Gavin Grindon, Brian Holmes, Shannon Jackson, Grant Kester, Marc James Léger, Yates Mckee, Gerald Raunig, John Roberts, Stevphen Shukaitis, Nato Thompson, Marina Vishmidt, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Stephen Wright among a growing number of others. Taken together these important works attest to a definite shift of interest towards what Bishop labeled in 2006 “the social turn in art.” Furtheremore, this surge of scrutiny contrasts with the mere handful of books on the same topic found in the previous three decades combined.3
Nevertheless, despite this new attention several unchallenged presumptions remain almost 3 The writings of American critic Lucy R. Lippard were among the very few Anglo-American resources that focused attention on activist and socially engaged art practices beginning in the late 1960s, though primarily it was her work in the 1980s including the book Get The Message, and then in the 1990s with A Different War, and
The Pink Glass Swan that underscored the importance of such art to me and to a relatively small group of other
scholars. Lippard’s lonesome contributions were then joined during that same decade of the 1990s by critic Nina Felshin’s But Is It Art?, and artist Suzanne Lacy‘s Mapping the Field, as well as by British critic John A. Walker on the U.K. scene as early as 2002, followed by Julie Ault’s Alternative New York, 1965-1985, 2003. However, starting with Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces in 2004, and Thompson and Sholette’s The Interventionists that same year, a steady and growing stream of books about politicized art has began to find their way into print. Arguably, the recent period roughly between 2014 and 2016 marks a truly qualitative and quantitative jump in relevant research, as more than two-dozen relevant volumes were published during this time. (For more details
constant. With a few exceptions that include Roberts, Léger, Charnley and Wright, the general approach to studying socially engaged art today continues to be predetermined by existing, often unquestioned categories of artistic value and aesthetic judgment.4 This is so despite
claims made by most of these writers that their object of study is a new cultural phenomenon. There is also a shared tendency to ignore what I refer to as the “surplus archive” of previous, often failed art that is brimming with precedents to socially engaged art practices. It is my hope the case studies presented here may serve as a modest aide-memoire to this forgetfulness by offering activist a somewhat different genealogy, or genealogies, even if this is non-linear and riddled with gaps and ellipsis. Thirdly, and more complexly, when history is addressed in relation to socially engaged art it tends to be presented as a flat backdrop upon which contemporary artists and events are played out, rather than being grasped as a vibrant archival agency in its own right. This too I hope Delirium and Resistance provides some resistance to.
My approach also contrasts with that of those peers who remain invested in the methodology known as institutional critique. Without dismissing the important exposure of underlying artworld power structures that is germane to this procedure, my efforts pivot alternatively on exploring those artistic practices typically dismissed by the mainstream as essentially extra-institutional (for example activist art and amateur art), but also by simultaneously attending to the many internal “minor” creative agents whose very invisibility within the established artworld transforms them into intramural dark matter: a non-reflective though structurally necessary presence anchoring the institutional norms of visible high culture. In this latter category we find artists who manufacture the work of other, more successful artists, or those who manage biennial level artist’s studios while making their own work in off hours, as well as over-indebted art students (“pre-failed” artists), which is a topic dealt with at some depth in my investigation.
on this phenomenon please turn to the bibliographic References section [viii.] at the end of this dissertation.) 4 Analysis of modern and contemporary art that does not explicitly pivot on matters of aesthetic taste or formal artistic qualities alone include Peter Bürger’s influential Theory of the Avant-Garde (English version 1984), and Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (written between 1961 and 1969), as well as more recently Alain Badiou’s Theses on Contemporary Art (lectures from 2003), or Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) which belong to the dialectical tradition, but also Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (with material written between 1968 and 1989), and Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (first published in 1957) emerging from a sociological approach to art. Here my argument is focused on a new wave of art critical writers over the past ten to fifteen years whose work explicitly addresses politically engaged art or social practice art, as opposed to the field of art or the concept of the avant-garde in general, and who also tend to normalize such practices by applying contemporary art world notions of aesthetic quality including formal sophistication and artistic reflexivity.
A key argument made in this study is that these very same darkly marginal forces previously relegated to invisible status have in recent years begun to materialize as a fully present, often critical or even negative cultural force in their own right. This illumination of dark matter has lead to both culturally positive and politically damaging consequences. For example, in the introduction to Section 1: Welcome to Our Artworld, I consider recent efforts made by otherwise inconspicuous artists to gain representation for their labor, including the demand of production fees from galleries and museums. But contrarily, I also consider in Section 3: Chapter 3, On The Maidan and Imaginary Archive Kyiv the way disenfranchised artists and activists found themselves temporarily aligned with highly nationalistic and reactionary political forces during the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, though I also describe how they struggle to articulate a critical distance from that contingency. Once again, the way forward is deeply marked by contradiction at many levels.
Methodology and structure of the thesis.
The investigative approach taken here is a hybrid of theory, historical research, and empirical reportage. Its overall style is, I believe, closest to the essay format used by Walter Benjamin in such works as Thesis on the Philosophy of History, or by more recent artist-writers such as Martha Rosler or Hito Steyerl. Organized into three thematic sections its tripartite structure is designed to articulate key features of the overall research findings in the categories of 1.) The
Artworld (how is the realm of high culture being fundamentally altered by its contradictory
entanglement with capital, and how does this loss of autonomy impact the working conditions of artists and artistic labor?); 2.) Cities Without Souls (urban gentrification concentrates the contradictory relationship between artitss, including even well-intentioned progressive and activists artists, and the social crisis caused by capitalist value production via real-estate, thus making gentrification like a petri-dish for studying the paradoxical forces being investigated in my project); and 3.) Resistance (what options remain open, or not optn, to practitioners of socially engaged and activist art under such complex and conflicting circumstances?) Each of these sections contains a separate introduction that delves into the thematic topic while weaving together the content of the essays contained within. (Citations for previously published works are listed in the Acknowledgements section [vi.] at the end of the thesis.)
Section One begins with an essay on the artworld written almost twenty years ago in which I lament the then already evident failure of institutional critique. My melancholy rests on the assertion that even as a critic of the artwork we remain in love with the idea of the museum despite its actual shortcomings. Section One then leaps forward into the era of Occupy Wall Street when a new generation of artists formed the group Occupy Museums and unknowingly repeated actions taken in the early 1970s by Hans Haacke, Lucy R. Lippard and other members of Art Workers’ Coalition. The final chapter of Section One focuses on a central motif of the entire dissertation by arguing that at this point in the 21st century the forces of capitalist production have, for all intents and purposes, subsumed artistic modes of production. Art’s absorption by capital has happened despite the fact that it was traditionally predicated on its relative autonomy from the day-to-day concerns of the “real world.” The result of this process of subsumption has left behind what I describe as a “bare” artworld: a field of cultural activity bereft of mystery or depth. Nevertheless, even as the scales of aesthetic mystification fall from our eyes, from within this state of artistic nakedness emerge new types of critique and resistance. The very transparency of “unconcealed contradictions” opens a space for prospective resistance, including amongst artist laborers increasingly made visible to one another and willing to demand fair remuneration for their work. This latter is a theme that runs throughout the thesis and refocuses both of the primary research questions including what happens to art after it is stripped of its traditional autonomy, and as creative dark matter materializes what new forms of critique open-up, and what past forms vanish? Section Two, Cities Without Souls focuses on one of the central conundrums of contemporary art: the process whereby an influx of well intentioned, often politically progressive young artists flood into working class urban neighborhoods and communities of color, and yet by doing so they inevitably also lay the economic groundwork for the expulsion of these very same lower-income residents. It is not only a process that I have witnessed firsthand since arriving in the New York City in the late 1970s, but gentrification has also negatively affected my life and work, and it continues to do so to this day. Therefore, initiating Section Two on art and gentrification is a 1997 essay entitled Nature as an Icon of Urban Resistance that was written right on the cusp of New York’s transformation from a rough, blue-collar city into a strange “neo-Bohemian” simulacrum of itself that caters to the F.I.R.E. (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) economic sectors, as well as of course to the so-called creative classes of which artists arguably make up a small, though ostentatious fraction. The theme of the city’s “vanishing soul” reappears in chapter 2.2, except
that now the case for resistance appears far less optimistic, but hope is rekindled somewhat in chapter 2.3, as Occupy Wall Street brings a moment of critical doubt exploding out of the very same ranks of artists and creative knowledge workers helping to gentrify the city. Too short in duration alas, the occupation of Zuccotti Park ended with a police raid and the final chapter of Section Two, entitled “Art After Gentrification,” examines the rise of regenerative social practice art in which cultural workers now join hands with entrepreneurial capitalism and the policy makers of so-called “creative cities,” but also manage to bring amenities to neglected parts of the inner-city neighborhoods in places such as Chicago, Pittsburgh and Liverpool respectively. Cities
Without Souls simultaneously anchors the study in a particular time and place, while it explores
the contradictions that emerge as heteronomy supersedes autonomy and a growing wave of socially engaged artists seek to identify with the displacement of low-income residents victimized by gentrification, even as these same artists gravitate towards regenerative art practices that in some high-profile instances contribute to the urban expulsion process.
Resistance is the rubric of Section Three. It contains the final five chapters of the dissertation within which a range of additional subthemes emerge including the nature of post-modernist collectivist art and tactical media interventionism, as well as an elaboration of my concept of artistic dark matter. It is in this third section that the contradictions raised in sections one and two are brought into the foreground, re-examined for their positive potential, and incorporated into what might be described as a counter-genealogy of activist art that includes tactical media and culture jamming, as well as socially engaged dialectical aesthetic models of contemporary art practice. By tracing and then re-imagining a genealogy for such art practices the dissertation ends on a note of cautious optimism.
Note on the location of the study.
While the focus throughout this thesis is primarily with events and examples found in New York City (where my labors as an artist, activist, and researcher have been located during most of the past forty years), there are nevertheless two arguments for why this might be read not as a limitation, but rather as a generalizable research advantage. First, New York has typically played the role of harbinger, often quite negatively, regarding socio-economic transformations in urban areas of the developed and also developing world. One important example of this is
the detrimental impact of the city’s cultural sector in fomenting urban gentrification. This is another reason why as a city New York is logical to my thesis since both public and private policy makers place great value on this population of so-called creative workers. But a more significant second factor is the convergence of financial interests and symbolic power situated within the city’s arts and cultural sector, including the extraordinarily high concentration of gatekeeper galleries and internationally dominant museums, as well as cultural journals, arts related educational programs, and the overall level of municipal attention paid to the arts, which is not found elsewhere in the United States. Furthermore, the strong cosmopolitan atmosphere enhanced by a singular diversity of immigrants forces New York to confront the complexity of global diversity, whereas many other localities only encounter this cultural heterogeneity indirectly. Together these factors make the city an influential nodal point of the global arts industry, and therefore a natural target for my research.
In light of this several of my thesis chapters were first written in the 1990s, at a time when I began to notice New York beginning to metamorphose from a culturally complex working class metropolis into a top destination for the global luxury class and their financial investments and artistic preferences. This mutation, now almost complete, has systematically expunged the very memory of that “other” city and its counter-narratives of opposition and urban resistance, precisely the subject matter of my dissertation, and several of these chapters, both old and new, deal specifically with this erasure and its implications for dissident forms of culture.
About the cases studied.
The artistic subjects studied in this thesis focus on a fairly broad array of projects ranging from individual art practices that critically address issues of gentrification on New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, as well as Chicago’s South Side in the 1990s and afterwards, to the collective actions of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (P.A.D./D.); REPOhistory; Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Museums, as well as artists involved in the 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The dissertation also examines the staggering burden of debt that oppresses a younger generation of artistic practitioners, as well as the highly articulate forces of resistance that have sprung up amongst them in the wake of the 2008 near-global capitalist crisis and its austerity-loaded aftermath. Throughout this span of cases, some historical, others quite contemporary, one
constant link related to my central research questions remains present: how do artists not only survive, but generate critical opposition in a social, economic and political context that unceasingly captures selective examples of aesthetic resistance as part and parcel of its cultural hegemony? The fundamental underpinning of my analysis therefore is that while art has represented a non-productive form of human labor for at least a few centuries, that exceptional difference has radically shrunk in recent years, if not altogether vanished. It is as if the old avant-garde desire to merge art with life had succeeded, but at a time when the utopian aspiration of that century-old impulse has been severed from it. Meanwhile, this state of de-mystified everydayness brings with it new possibilities and limitations, new challenges and forms of potential critique. This is the frequently incoherent landscape explored by Delirium and Resistance.
Primary research sources.
The sources upon which this study draws include the Museum of Modern Art (NY) Archive, including especially the P.A.D./D. Archive and Franklin Furnace Archives respectively; the Smithsonian Institutions Archives of American Art, including the papers of Lucy R. Lippard; New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections which contains the REPOhistory Archives; Interference Archive in Brooklyn New York, home to publications and ephemera on a wide range of oppositional movement cultures; as well as a thirty-five year old collection of archival materials in my own research archive. For the more current, less strictly historical topics represented in the most recent writings (the section introductions and final chapters of each section) I have had to rely on NGO reports and news articles to explore such topics as student debt, urban regeneration, and organized artistic resistance to labor exploitation, because few scholarly books or papers have yet to be published on these issues.5 It is my hope that this dissertation will contribute to closing that gap.
Other sources drawn upon include extensive notes, discussions and several interviews made throughout the past few decades as part of my participation in various lecture trips and conferences throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Middle East and many European nations. Among the most recent of these research opportunities include: the thirteenth International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory (SITAC) held in 5 Published books on the economic challenges of rising student debt by academic researchers (as opposed to journalists) includes Temple University professor Sara Goldrick-Rab’s Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial
Mexico City (9/30-10/1/2016); a public discussion between myself and theorist Katherine Waugh at the Skibbereen Arts Festival in West Cork, Ireland (7/27/2016); as a panelist for Martha Rosler’s “Art-Estate,” Town Hall panel at the Mitchel Innes & Nash Gallery, NYC (6/14/2016); “House of Cards: Art Institutions Today,” two-day seminar, Zagreb Croatia with the collective What How and For Whom? (7/8-9/2016) a one-day symposium entitled “Strijd: Art, Activism and the University,” at BAK in Utrecht, The Netherlands (5/18.2016); the Athens Biennial panel “Acting Out: On the Body Politic” in Greece, (4/16,2016). Perhaps most representative of this source of research was the highly focused gathering “Transformative Art Production and Coalition-Building” organized by Rena Raedle, and Vladan Jeremic of Belgrade with Anne-Gro Erikstad of Norway, that brought together a trans-European group of participating collaborators for several days of concentrated conversation on issues related to this dissertation. Held in Trondheim, Norway between September 5th and 6th of 2015, this represents one example of the numerous international discursive opportunities that have directly and indirectly informed this dissertation over the past decade. 6
Andrew Ross’s Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal, OR Books, 2014; and a contrarian position taken up by Skidmore College’s Urban Institute Senior Fellow Sandy Baum in Student Debt: Rhetoric and Realities of Higher
Education Financing, Palgrave Macmillon, 2016. On activism by indebted artists one finds thus far only CUNY
Grad Center PhD candidate Yates McKee’s Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition, Verso, 2016, which I discuss in my introduction to Section One: Welcome to Our Artworld.
6 It is worth noting the diversity of participants present in Trondheim, and the institutions and/or places they represented included: Airi Triisberg (Tallinn, Estonia), Corina L Apostol (ArtLeaks, Bucharest), Danilo Prnjat (DeMaterijalizacija umetnosti, Belgrade), Gregory Sholette (Gulf Labor, New York), Ivor Stodolsky (Perpetuum Mobile, Berlin), Jean-Baptiste Naudy (Ateliers Populaires de Paris), Jelena Vesić (Belgrade), Jesper Alvær (Oslo), Jochen Becker (metroZones, Berlin), Kuba Szreder (Warsaw), Lise Skou (Aarhus), Lise Soskolne (W.A.G.E., New York), Marina Vishmidt (London), Marita Muukkonen (Perpetuum Mobile, Helsinki), Marius Lervåg Aasprong (Trondheim), Minna Henriksson (Helsinki), Mourad El Garouge (Ateliers Populaires de Paris), Noah Fischer (Occupy Museums, New York), Raluca Voinea (ArtLeaks, Bucharest), Sissel M Bergh (Norway).
Figure 2. Protest placard from Occupy Wall Street, NYC,2011. (Courtesy Chris Kasper.)
Section 1: ARTWORLD Introduction: Welcome to Our Artworld
Having died twice, the artist is neither modern nor postmodern, yet caught in the order of time conditioned by her relation to the symptom, her relation to the art world.
Marc James Léger7
How does the growing embrace of socially engaged art practice by mainstream culture relate to unprecedented fiscal indebtedness among students and artists? And what do we make of provocative claims that Occupy Wall Street was in fact a contemporary art project? Part I examines these entwined issues through the common denominator of our art world, a term difficult to define, yet ubiquitous in use. For people directly involved in it, the art world is a familiar space (or system, or economy) that stands apart from the so-called real world, and yet is also increasingly entangled with the real world (which curiously appears less and less real itself of late). This introduction argues that the art world must be analyzed as a “totality” whose features are simultaneously more exposed and less exceptional thanks to the broader crisis of deregulated capitalism and erosion of liberal democracy at the start of the 21st century.
City of God
One phrase, the artworld, appears throughout this dissertation with great frequency and for two reasons above all. First it designates a field of cultural practice, and second it delimits my chosen area of critical enquiry. Most often the expression is used in a commonsensical way; appearing with adjectives such as “contemporary,” “mainstream,” “institutional,” or “elite” preceding it. It was not until after my early essays were completed that I further qualified what the art world actually means in this work. In 2007 I wrote:
By the term art world I mean the integrated, trans-national economy of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials, and trade publications that, together with curators, artists and critics, reproduce the market, as well as the discourse that influences the appreciation and demand for highly valuable artworks.8
Two features of this definition color my subsequent research into contemporary art. First, is the implied lack of impartiality evident from the definition’s focus on the art world as a set of business relations within a capitalist marketplace. No doubt this bias has its roots in my own development as an artist, writer and activist lending all my writings a partisan, anti-capitalist tendency, but also an essayistic, at times polemical tone. Likewise, most of my writings engage with the absence/ presence of a countervailing sphere of invisible or overlooked art production and its history, a missing mass that makes the art world possible in the first place. Thus, my point of view has primarily been one constantly looking up, from down below, or looking in perhaps from a marginalized but parallel dimension of artistic dark matter. The second contention made here is that the art world is an integrated system of production, and not, as some post-modernist critics contend, merely a bundle of overlapping practices, discourses or subcultures with varying degrees of autonomy, connectivity and interdependence. For even though the art world may appear piecemeal, it is, as is capitalism, a totality that is typically visible only as localized phenomena or in a fragment, which is, Adorno cautions, “that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality”.9 Or, to place a bit of spin on a maxim
by György Lukács, despite its fragmented semblance our art world is an objective totality of delirious social relations.10
To clarify this point, it is helpful to consider a famous definition of the art world, made by the philosopher Arthur Danto in a celebrated meditation on Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. As Danto put it, “the art world stands to the real world as the City of God stands to the Earthly city.” In order to gain admission, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes required an indiscernible difference to mark them out from other mass-produced commodities (although Warhol’s boxes were, in fact, built from wood and silkscreened, an issue that Danto overlooked). Danto’s solution is devastatingly simple: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world”.11
8 Sholette, “Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere”, in As Radical As Reality Itself:
Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, M. Beaumont, A. Hemingway, L. Esther and J. Roberts, Peter
Lang, eds., 2007, 429-457.
9 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Bloomsbury/Berg, 2013, 72. 10 György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, MIT Press, 1972.
11 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., Blackwell,1998, 33-43, 40.
This definition of the art world is very well known, but its full implications are rarely discussed. In the opening stages of his thought experiment, Danto introduces “Testadura,” the “philistine” who cannot see the artwork, just another object. It is helpful sometimes to remember that very few people are born speaking art theory, or reeling off the lineage of contemporary art. That is to say, we are all “philistines” at some point. It is art education that shows artists the City of God, though it doesn’t let them through the gates. Instead, perhaps, it reveals the art that seems now to be everywhere: in the underwhelming objects, in gatherings, even perhaps in an Occupy Wall Street (O.W.S.) protest. Stranger still, this art has been stripped bare, first via a long process of artists questioning the power relations that inhabit the theories that they inherit, and second by the myth-melting processes of capital. To understand these contradictions, it is necessary to view the art world with Testadura’s bluntness as I do, from “below.” The key axis of this section therefore, is between the art school, where everything is learned, and the museum, where initiates forget they ever had to learn anything as they perform the rituals of art.12
Danto’s Artworld thesis appeared in 1964, and since then these cultural rituals have been integrated into those of capitalism. Aarchitectural historian David Joselit has recently suggested, a new wave of museum construction seems to “function as the art world”s central banks.” Designed for cities “around the world by star architects like Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meuron”:
in a time of economic instability, precipitated by world-wide financial failures since 2008, people now see art as an international currency. Art is a fungible hedge. [that] must cross borders as easily as the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the renminbi.13
Perhaps it was Haacke’s real estate mappings, real-time projects and critical provenance tracings of Monet and Seurat paintings in the early 1970s that first indicated all that what was once so solid, including works of art, were beginning to melt into thin air. “There is nothing so edifying,” writes W.J.T. Mitchel “as the moral shock of capitalist cultural institutions when they look at their own faces in the mirror”.14 And along with notions of cultural privilege the
idea of artistic autonomy was also dissolving. Since then, these moments of break-down and 12 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside the Public Art Museum, Routledge, 1995.
13 David Joselit, After Art, Princeton University Press, 2012, 3.
demystification have only accelerated. To this assault was added museum interventions by Art Workers’ Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, artistic deconstructions by Daniel Buren and Michael Asher, the cultural utilitarianism of Artists Placement Group, theories of institutional critique from Art & Language, museum maintenance performances by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the dematerialization of art world privilege via Lucy R. Lippard’s copious writings. A bit later on came the critical practices of Martha Rosler, Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Mary Kelly, Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, Conrad Atkinson, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (A.M.C.C.), Art Against Apartheid, the militant art journals Red-Herring and The Fox, and still further on P.A.D./D., Black Audio Film Collective (U.K.), Group Material, followed by John Malpede’s L.A.P.D. (Los Angeles Poverty Department), Bullet Space, Artists Meeting Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, Guerrilla Girls, and Gran Fury, so that by the end of the Cold War a process was unfolding whereby the previously unseen (I do not mean unseen as in un-seeable, but instead intentionally unseen) conditions of cultural labor began to be foregrounded. All of this was paralleled by the rise of a social history of art in the U.S. and the U.K. starting in the 1970s with figures such as T. J. Clark, Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, Linda Nochlin, Frances K. Pohl, Andrew Hemingway, Fred Orton, and Griselda Pollock.
Rather than new, as the avant-garde is often defined as new, this self-critical artistic work represented a disenchanted revelation of the power that sustains the normal art world. At the same time, these moments of resistance were spurred along by real-world political actualities and changes in the working conditions of art as capital subsumed artistic practices into its own forces of production. On the one hand, this process has stripped art bare as critical artists who have labored for decades to reveal the workings of power within it finally triumph. On the other hand, the speculative incursions of 1% oligarchs who want to put the “City of God” to work as a kind of eternalized asset class have turned autonomous art into an unregulated investment market. And here we arrive at the central observation of this thesis. Culture’s internal aesthetic character is now manifest as so many flagrant, unconcealed and utterly ordinary attributes, so many data points so that the desire by 1960s artists to transform their elite social position into that of a “cultural worker” has finally been fulfilled. Today artists are simply another worker, no more or less. We might best describe this new mise en scène as simply “bare art,” the laying bare of art’s autonomy and exceptionality as illusory under current circumstances.
Ironically, the activities of critical artists have been assisted by capital’s own hegemonic reach in which it “mobilizes to its advantage all the attitudes characterizing our species, putting to work life as such,” explains Paolo Virno, or as Jameson explains following Marx, capital is “the first transparent society, that is to say, the first social formation in which the “secret of production” is revealed”.15The secret of artistic production is also revealed to
be social production, a disclosure that has occurred as the pursuit of surplus value comes to dominate all fields of human activity. Like a hallowed covenant we reluctantly pledge ourselves to follow, there is little time or need now for older, ideological facades and cover stories. Claustrophobic, tautological, our bare art world is our bare art world is our bare art world. It emerges in successive and accelerating states of shadowless economic exposure following capital’s ever-quickening swerves from crisis to crisis –the oil crisis and stagflated 1970s, the Savings & Loan meltdown 1980s/1990s, the Dotcom bust in the 2000s, Argentinian default at about the same time, and of course the “great recession” starting late in 2007 with 8.7 million lost jobs between 2008 and 2010. But this does not mean all artists like it. As Caroline Woolard of bfa.M.F.A..phd asked with added incredulity, “what is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?”16
Clearly a growing number of previously invisible cultural producers have begun to see themselves as a category in and for themselves as the social nature of art is unavoidably made visible. Like some weird redundant agency, this no-longer dark matter is commonplace –the art fabricators, handlers, installers whose own art practice always takes a back seat– and simultaneously bristling with a profound potential for positive change as well as an unpredictable and deep-seated sense of resentment. Tuition-indebted artist and co-founder of Occupy Museums Noah Fischer sums up the situation with frustration:
The contemporary art market is one of the largest deregulated transaction platforms in the world—a space where Russian oligarchs launder money, real estate tycoons decorate private museums for tax benefits, and celebrities of fashion, screen, and music trade cash for credibility.17
15 Branden W. Joseph, “Interview with Paolo Virno”, Grey Room, 21, Fall 2005, 35; and Jameson,
Representing Capital, 17.
16 BFAMFAPhD/Caroline Woolard, “Pedagogies of Payment”, The Enemy, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2014: http://
theenemyreader.org/pedagogies-of-payment
Occupy Museums has responded by literally entering the public areas of cultural institutions and staging O.W.S. type protests focused on issues of labor and social justice that address both the media (whose reporters are tipped-off before the intervention takes place), and the audiences of cultural consumers (who happen to be present when the action takes place). Pushing-Back.
Capitalist communication networks serve to quicken and thicken these resistant formations so that groups such as W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), Occupy Museums, Gulf Labor, Debtfair, Art & Labor, MTL (Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain), De-Colonize This Place, and bfa.M.F.A..phd.org among others openly acknowledged that they are indeed an art labor force whose work should not simply benefit the 1% of the art world’s global superstars and mega-galleries. Speaking as artist and organizer of W.A.G.E., Lise Soskolne bluntly lays out the view of a bare art world from below:
Even though it is made up of a for-profit and a non-profit sector, the world of art is an industry just like any other. All of its supporting institutions, including philanthropy, contribute to its perpetuation and growth as such, and all those who contribute to its economy by facilitating the production and distribution of art products, including and especially artists, are wholly unexceptional in their support for and exploitation by it. The role of art and artists within this multibillion-dollar industry is to serve capital— just like everyone else.18
While some artists organize for better “working conditions,” others parody enterprise culture, cunningly montaging the leftovers of a broken society into “mock-institutions”: D.I.Y. organizations that sometimes work as well as or better than the bankrupt institutions their founders initially sought to mimic.19 Debtfair derides the concept of the Art Fair by offering
an open-invitation to all artists in Houston, Texas, to submit work while also relaying their level of student debt:
18 Lise Soskolne, “What is wrong with the art world and how would you fix it?” unpublished W.A.G.E text introducing WAGENCY project, 9/24/2016
19 Mock-institutions or simply mockstitutions is a neologism and a concept elaborated on in my book Dark
Matter (Pluto Press, 2010) and refers to artists or artists’ groups who ironically appropriate institutional title
–such as school, center, bureau, office, institute and so forth– purposely parodies institutional realities as a critical intervention. See also: http://www.veralistcenter.org/art-and-social-justice/glossary/28/mocksituation/
Total debts amongst the artists are tabulated in a running tally while identifying the institutions in which these debts are rooted, [thus] while many feel isolated by their economic reality, Debtfair works to build solidarity and community around our shared economic conditions.20
At this point, we must pause to consider how these forces of resistance actually exist within an art world that is so intimately tied to the interests of the 1%? And consequently, does the past, present and anticipated future defeat of artistic opposition just return U.S. to the age-old complaint of co-option, where every vestige of resistance is pre-deceased, because it will only find itself serving the interests of capital in the end? This was the issue that I took up in Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: In and Beyond the Post-War Art Museum. As I put it at the time: “no matter how imperfectly actually existing museums fulfill their social obligations, the symbolic position of the museum remains inseparable from notions of public space, democratic culture, and citizenship itself”.21Alternative spaces, after all, did create new
opportunities that allowed a different and somewhat more politicized voice to be heard in the public sphere, even as these voices were absorbed into the museum network. The essay also suggests a reason for this attraction to the art world, even by critical, politically-driven artists because:
if institutional power persists in attracting even its opponents, perhaps it is because we love it, or at least the unselfish image it projects, more than it could ever love itself. That is the scandal my essay seeks to comprehend.22
The key issue, to reframe these concerns, is how the totality formed by the art world is understood. Crucially, it must be grasped as a dynamic system; one that adapts but also one that breaks down, if only momentarily. Founded on contradictions the question I asked in 2003 was: “are not museums, universities, corporations, and perhaps even the armed forces not rife with administrative malfunctions, redundancies, and even occasional destabilizing conflicts?”23 Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to say that the prevalence of bare art is
itself evidence of this kind of destabilizing conflict, pulled this way and that by the different
20 Debtfair mission statement by Occupy Museums members Noah Fischer, Kenneth Pietrobono, Tal
Beery, Imani Jacqueline Brown and Arthur Polendo: http://www.noahfischer.org/project/general/214986
21 See page 18.
22 See page 28.
forces that constitute the art world. Undeniably, just as everywhere else, this is not an equal struggle: the resources are almost all in the hands of the patrons, their hedge fund managers and the administrators who do as they are told. However, the point is still pertinent: the art world absorbs resistance and seeks to neutralize it, but its processes do not always succeed in achieving the right kind of inertia.
O.W.S. was a moment of resistance that stood in close relation to the New York art world (though the global Occupy camps were all quite different in character). Let’s Do It Again Comrades, Let’s Occupy The Museum! addresses the presence of an off-stage archive that ripples through the actions of Occupy Museums as a kind of repetition that is also strangely novel: the rediscovery of the art activist tactics of the 1970s and 1980s by a new generation of interventionists including staging protests and performances inside museum lobbies, but also the “human microphone,” or “people’s microphone,” which though it is not specifically an artistic invention actually dates to the anti-nuclear movement some thirty years previous to O.W.S., if not even earlier.24 The essay focuses on Occupy Museums, one of many
post-Occupy groups that has gone on to develop, gradually, a new set of values with which to oppose capitalism including the aforementioned Debtfair project. These groups have emerged from the fundamental contradiction within the art world, and the wider neoliberal economy: there is not enough room or resources for everyone (or so we are constantly reminded). A few experience the exalted version of an artistic career, but most will find themselves barely existing as precarious cultural laborers. For along with revealing the obscene top-heaviness of neoliberal institutions, O.W.S. has also underscored the utter redundancy of most workers in the present economy, including artists.
O.W.S. and the contemporaneous rebellions in other parts of the world also represented for me and other social commentators a critical denouement about contemporary art. Examples include Theorist Stevphen Shukaitis, who interprets the 2011-2012 wave of public square risings as heralding the formation of a new Left constituency that drew upon such Situationist tactics as psychogeography, détournement, and dérive to create “the time and space for the emergence of new forms of collective subjects, rather than a politics formed around already 24 It is possible to see a precedent for the Peoples Mic in the figure of the Town Crier of News Shouter that dates back to medieval Europe.
given demands”.25 Curator Nato Thompson argues that the significant presence of contemporary
artists in O.W.S., the Arab Spring, and other 21st Century uprisings is proof that culture’s role in oppositional movements must be taken seriously, linking this amalgam of art and politics to the late 20th Century anti-globalization movement. For Thompson, what these uprisings share in common is a preference for leaderless leadership, non-hierarchical organizing, and the “creative and productive unity of art and activism”.26 Thompson also defends Occupy’s
frequently criticized lack of political demands by explaining that, “one cannot understand this radical refusal until one appreciates just how intensely O.W.S. sought to avoid its language being used against the movement in the court of public spectacle”.27 Here I am reminded of
Michel De Certeau’s description of the everyday tactical resistance that keeps no territory or winnings, and “has no image of itself”.28 Likewise, the humble O.W.S. tactician neither wants
nor owns anything and is instead engaged in what Stephen Wright terms “usership”, an activity comparable to a bee colony whose pollinating labor collectively generates a far larger economy than the colony requires to sustain and reproduce itself. 29
Occupying the Totality.
While Shukaitis and Thompson acknowledge the central role of artistic vanguards, or a certain interpretation of these practices, in 21st Century Left politics, historian Yates McKee goes one step further in his book Strike Art! by proposing that O.W.S. might be read as a work of contemporary art in itself. Acknowledging his own divided position as both critic and activist, McKee describes the surrealist atmosphere of the O.W.S. encampment as follows: “for those steeped in contemporary art theory, walking into Zuccotti Park was an uncanny experience”.30 But in order to firmly set up the role contemporary art and
avant-25 Stevphen Shukaitis. The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the
Avant-Garde, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015, 8, 29. See also my review of Shukaikis in Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 42, Issue 4, 2016, 998-1001.
26 According to Thompson the union of art and activism defined the anti-globalization movement, but following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 this cultural politics was suppressed only to re-emerge during the period of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Thompson, Seeing Power, 28-30.
27 Thompson, Seeing Power, 30.
28 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984, xix.
29 Stephen Wright is working with ideas generated by among others Yann Moulier Boutang and Henri
Lefebvre who argues that “the user’s space is lived – not represented,” Stephen Wright, Towards A Lexicon of
Usership, Van Abbemuseum, 2013, 26.
garde aesthetics played in Occupy he turns to the concept of prefigurative politics as this is defined by one of movement’s primary architects, the anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber. For Graeber, as for McKee and many other commentators on Occupy, the concept of prefigurative politics involves first visualizing a non-alienated society as a means of realizing its future actualization:
Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives.31
Graeber proposes a link here between political prefiguration and what we might describe as aesthetic imagination and. McKee threads the needle:
Graeber’s text is an essential point of reference in tracking the political and artistic ethos that would inform Occupy, an ethos that, as we have seen, developed in relative autonomy from the art world itself even while drawing nonacademically on the discourses of avant-garde art such as Dada, surrealism, and the Situationists.32 Strike Art!’s emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of pre-figurative politics is reinforced
throughout McKee’s book, including a reference to the late 1960s street theater of the San Francisco Diggers, and also when he cites the ingenious media-oriented creativity of ACT UP in which artists were essential “not merely as decorators or designers, but rather as organizers and tacticians in their own right”.33 Finally, with cards almost revealed, he writes:
Occupy as a totality—rather than just this or that phenomena within it—can itself arguably be considered an artistic project in its own right, assuming we reimagine our sense of what art is or can be.34
This project, McKee asserts, also represented the end of socially engaged art, at least in so far as the latter seeks to be a vanguard practice “defined by its very flirtation with dissolving the category of art altogether into an expanded field of “social engagement”.35 Remarkably, McKee’s
31 ibid., 61.
32 ibid. 61-62.
33 ibid, 28, 41.
34 ibid, 27.
