The occupied museum. Dissident art practices of artist collectives Occupy Museums, Gulf Labor Coalition and Liberate Tate.

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The occupied museum.

Dissident art practices of artist collectives Occupy Museums, Gulf

Labor Coalition and Liberate Tate.

Noah Fischer, The dirty currency of artworld speculation. March 2014.

Sophie Dogterom 6049664

MA Art History

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. C.M.K.E. Lerm-Hayes Co-reader: Dr. M.K. van Mechelen

Date: 2 July 2018 Word count: 22505

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Abstract

Since the 1980s, neoliberal values have increasingly impregnated artistic practice, production and presentation in Europe and North America. This thesis shows some of the ethical implications this has on museums, by investigating the practice of activist artist collectives Liberate Tate, Gulf Labor Coalition and Occupy Museums. By assessment of the different tactics these activist collectives deploy, this thesis argues that they successfully open up a space for reimagining what a museum can be. Furthermore, it demonstrates that their unsanctioned performances, guerilla interventions, boycotts and occupations can be political tools in the fight against injustice that is promoted through neoliberal institutions.

Keywords: art activism, Liberate Tate, Occupy Museums, Gulf Labor Coalition, corporate

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1. Introduction

In this thesis, I investigate the political potential of unauthorized art practices that takes place in the museum space. My motivation comes from a firm belief in the role artists can play in embodying and visualizing radical cultural and political shifts. I focus on three activist artist collectives who use the museum as their platform, but take the means and production of display into their own hands through unsanctioned interventions. I will argue that hereby, these artists open up a space of resistance ‘within the target’s territory’ (Lambert, 2018, p. 120). The reason they target the museum as a contested site, but at the same time deploy it as a space of possible counter narratives, follows from the important place these institutions take up in society. Museums are expressions of the values of society as a whole and offer space for reflection on and debate about these values. In these institutions, collections and canons are gathered and ideas are formed. The importance of museums in society can be seen more specifically in resent surveys by the Museums Association in the UK and Museums R + D in the US, which found that museums are considered the most trustworthy source of information1_{(Museums Association, 2013, p.6; Reach 2015). They rate higher than local}

papers, the government, or academic researchers. Museums are considered a more reliable source of historical information than books, teachers or even personal accounts (Reach Advisors, 2015, p. 3). In other words: museums are seen as authorities in truth-making.

Because museums are part of the hegemonic structure (Dai-Rong, 2006, p. 4), the stories they produce normalize power (Crimp, 1980, p. 50). Consequently, it is crucial to investigate which stories are told and whose position these narratives reinforce. These power relations have become increasingly obscured by the blending of public and private money that resulted from political and economic conditions since the 1980s. Museums in Europe have become increasingly privatized due to decreased governmental funding, a result of the demise of the welfare state and a rise in the neoliberal belief in the regulation of the market (Mahony, 2014, p. 10).2_{The reasons for declining public money for art institutions is}

thoroughly described by Chin-Tao Wu in Privitizing Culture (2002) to which I will return later.

1_{I focus on these numbers since I could not find such numbers concerning the Netherlands – that would make} an interesting research topic.

2_{In the US, the situation is a bit different because museums have always been public/private hybrids although} they are based on the European model. They do not originate from royal collections, nor are they supported by ‘socialist governments’ (Gibbs, 2018, n.p.). According to Andrea Fraser, this is the result from the ‘longstanding, deep-seated hostility of Americans to the public sector, which has come back in force since the 1980s’ (Burns, 2016, n.p.).

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The process of defunding has accelerated since the 2008 global crisis that greatly affected museum funding (Vogel, 2008, n.p.). This can be seen, for instance, in the Museums Association’s 2012 to 2015 annual reports on the impact of cuts on UK museums. To compensate budget cuts, museums have partnered with global corporations. This trend started when the Whitney Museum opened the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in 1983, sponsored by and named after the tobacco company (Brenson, 1983, p. 11). It has since become common for museums name part of their collections, wings, or free-to-the-public days after their corporate sponsors. Through these partnerships, the museum’s public function becomes mingled with private interests. As Patrick Steel of the Museums Association explains: ‘Commercial sponsors have an agenda to promote and are answerable to private interests’ (Steel, n.d., n.p.). A conflict of interest between the public good and the concerns of museums’ donors rises when, ‘dependent on corporate sponsors, many curators no longer promote the critical debate once deemed essential to the public reception of difficult art’ (Foster, 2015, p. 115).

Another consequence of the corporatization of art institutions is that museums have adapted corporate strategies like global expansion. A new type of museum director is hired based upon expertise in business management rather than in traditional academic scholarship. This can be seen with Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation between 1988 and 2008 (Pilkington, 2008, n.p.). Museums became brands with global ambitions. Their expansionism is welcomed by countries in the Gulf, who see these Western art institutions as a mode of access global respectability. However, the expansion into the Gulf region comes with discussions about museums’ ethical responsibilities in inhumane labour practices (McClellan, 2012; Ajana, 2015).

Now that we have established the compromising consequences of the privatization of museums, in combination with their apparent trustworthiness, we have to take into account that the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state also resulted in a rise in global inequality. As the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer shows, these shifts have caused people to experience a lack of ‘belief that the overall system is working for them’ (Edelman, 2017, n.p.). This explains why it is important to critique the funding and functioning of museums – but also why it is important to cherish them, as it is there that the trust in public institutions can be restored.

We may ask: how can we re-imagine the museum as a space of possibility when it is completely corporatized? An answer can be found in the unsanctioned art practice of three activist artist collectives that reclaim the museum as a vital site for resistance against the

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the affiliated G.U.L.F., and Liberate Tate. These activist artist collectives form part of a growing number of protests directed at international museums because they are (un)knowingly upholding capitalism, imperialism, racism and colonialism (Not an Alternative, 2016, p.4). By investigating the methods these collectives deploy, we can discern counterstrategies to these systems of oppression. In the following, I will compare these methods, strategies and tactics in their contexts and eventually come to an assessment of such practices to substantiate the belief that unsanctioned art practice in the museum is a fundamental critique of neoliberal capitalism. Overall, I aim to answer the question of what the possibilities and limitations are of the polemic and unsanctioned (artistic) work of these collectives, and if and how their artistic interventions can function as political instruments.

I focus on Liberate Tate, Occupy Museums and the Gulf Labor Coalition because they are exemplifications of artists that redefine art as political action, and do so through specific engagement with the discourses and institutions of the art world. Their practice shows a paradoxical consciousness of complicity in the oppressing structures of the art world as well as an optimism in finding a solution. These collectives are united in the belief that the art institutions that they target have a responsibility regarding labour rights, climate change, inequality and the ethics of corporate funding. Their practice combines artistic concerns with political resistance and includes works of art, performances, boycotts, occupations and demonstrations that take place in, or in relation to, museums. Through their unsanctioned, provocative performances and direct actions they demand attention for the forms of social injustice propagated by art institutions. They confront audiences with the otherwise unraised questions about the dark underbelly of the institution. How do these institutions function? Who pays and why? Who builds them? And who benefits from them? What ideology do the artists and works that are on display promote? They find themselves in a situation of constant paradox: with their work, these activist artists critique the conditions of the museum, but they also risk enforcing the museum’s position and being co-opted by it. As Gregory Sholette describes in Delirium and Resistance ‘the committed activist artist must contend with the paradox of producing work that is always already caught up in a system it openly opposes and deplores’ (Sholette, 2017, p. 12). The work that these collectives do and make, is a direct response to this paradox. They show that it is not enough for art to be about political change anymore, art must be the change.

The targets and tactics of the three collectives are a reaction to the crisis of austerity and insecurity I described. They providing insight into the different contexts of the Northern European and the New York art world. Liberate Tate was founded in January 2010 during a

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workshop on art activism programmed by Tate in the museum itself. When Tate tried to censor possible actions directed against its own sponsors, Liberate Tate was born (Evans, 2015, p. 118). The collective is dedicated to ‘taking creative disobedience against Tate until it drops its oil company funding’ (Liberate Tate, n.d., n.p.). Liberate Tate functions as a network; it is hard to trace who is part of the collective. They do not state this on their website and news coverage of interventions by Liberate Tate speak of 75, 80 or even a hundred members (The Guardian, 2016, n.p.). Although she is herself a publicly identified member of Liberate Tate, author and artist Mel Evans is also vague in her insightful examination of oil sponsorship of the arts (2015) when she thanks the ‘endlessly creative people of Liberate Tate – both past and present’ in the introduction of Artwash. Big oil and the arts (Evans, 2016, p. xiv). In an interview, Evans explains that staying relatively anonymous is part of Liberate Tate’s strategy to act as a collective (Anthropoce, 2016, n.p.). Some of Liberate Tate’s core members are Mel Evans, Anna Feigenbaum, Hannah Davey, Tim Ratcliffe, Darren Sutton and Hayley Newman (Evans, 2015, p. 4). The group works together with artists and activists from other collectives such as Isa Fremeaux and John Jordon from Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (a London-based art collective that was invited to host the workshop on art and activism that resulted in the founding of Liberate Tate) and Jane Trowell and Kevin Smith from Platform (a research organisation on cultural oil sponsorship) as well as many others from the Art Not Oil coalition, a wider movement against oil sponsorship (idem).

The Gulf Labor Coalition was founded in 2010 in New York by a working group that includes high-profile artists and academics: Walid Raad, Emily Jacir, Rene Gabri, Ayreen Anastas, Beth Stryker, Andrew Ross Haig Aivazian, Ayreen Anastas, Doug Ashford, Shaina Anand, Doris Bittar, Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Mariam Ghani, Hans Haacke, Brian Holmes, Rana Jaleel, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Naeem Mohaiemen, Michael Rakowitz, Ashok Sukumaran and Gregory Sholette (Gulflabor.org/faq). GLC came into existence after a panel discussion on the development of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi (Ross, 2015, p. 14). Their demand is for ‘all academic and cultural institutions building on Saadiyat Island to seek uniform and enforceable human rights protections, and better conditions than are prevalent, for the workers working on their sites’ (Gulf Labor Artis Coalition, n.p., n.d.). In contrast to Liberate Tate, these are well-known figures. The leverage that this provides is in part what differentiates their strategies (McKee, 2016, p. 173).

Occupy Museums was founded as a working group within Occupy Wall Street (OWS) through a manifesto written by Noah Fischer in 2011 (N. Fischer, 2011, n.d.). The group does

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and social injustice propagated by institutions of art and culture’ (Occupy Museums, n.d., n.p.). Members include Tal Beery, Imani Brown, Noah Fischer, Kenneth Pietrobono and Arthur Polendo and at different times the working group included Maria Byck, Alexandre Carvalho, Maureen Connor, Nitasha Dhillon, Jolanta Gora-Witta, Ben Laude, Max Liboroirn, Andrea Liu, Maraya Lopez, Cari Machet, Blithe Riley, Joulia Strauss (idem).

Some of the methods, targets and gestures of OM, LT and GLC can be traced back to earlier waves of institutional critique and artist activism. They share the same political agenda with works like Hans Haacke’s Moma Poll (1970) or Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A gallery talk (1989), though the collectives enter the museum by intrusion versus by invitation. There are also historical predecessors that share the unofficial nature of this practice. We can think of Guerilla Art Action Group’s (GAAG) Blood Bath (1969), the Art Workers’ Coalition’s (AWC) guerrilla performances inside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Group Material, and the Guerilla Girls. A comparison with these predecessors shows that political art can easily be aestheticized by a museum (Groys, 2014, p.1). As Chantal Mouffe points out, art has become a necessary part of capitalist production (2007, p.1). This can also be seen in the commodification of critique from the past. By looking into earlier examples of institutional critique, I will examine the treacherous practice of critiquing hegemonic institutions. Sholette's work Delirium and Resistance (2017) is an important source for this historical comparison, because it provides an alternative to writers that claim that activist art is a new phenomenon (Sholette, 2017, p. 17). As is the work of art historian and Occupy activist Yates McKee, who in Strike Art (2016) makes a historical comparison to argue that, like in the case of earlier moments of rupture, we can see a paradigm shift in contemporary art production that is ‘a repurposing of art as a form of collective creativity and resistance’ (McKee, 2016, p.156).

The collectives I discuss are in alliance with many artists, curators, writers, activists and museum directors who problematize the narratives that are advocated by neoliberal museums and who ‘invent new forms of instituting’ (Raunig & Ray, 2009, p. xvii). They find alternatives in exhibition-making, educational practices, and organizational structures. We can think of the institutional practice of L’internationale museum confederation, Casco’s devotion to the commons, and BAK Utrecht’s Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017-20); of exhibition-making like Disobedient Objects (2014 – 2015) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Living as Form (2012) at Creative Time in New York, Condensations of the Social (2010) at Smack Mellon, and Tania Bruguera’s alternative art school Cátedra Arte de Conducta (2002-2009). In the past decade, a wave of art critical writers has focussed explicitly on the merging of art and

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activism. Important literature on the possibilities and problems of activist practices in the art world comes from Grant Kester, Yates McKee, Carol Becker, Nato Thompson, Gregory Sholette, Claire Bishop, Brian Holmes, Suzanne Lacy, Boris Groys and many more. The assessment of the practices of the three collectives I discuss takes place on the intersection of debates on the boundaries between art and activism (Groys, 2014, Holmes, 2009), between politics and aesthetics (Rancière, 2003; 2013), radical museum practice (Bishop, 2013), privatization in the cultural sector (Wu, 2002), museum ethics (Marstine, 2011), decolonization (Lonetree, 2012) and contemporary capitalism (Boltansky & Chiapello, 2005; Mouffe 2005). By investigating the methods and potential impact of OM, GLC and LT, I hope to add something to this wider frame of debate. By approaching the global hegemony of capitalist markets through an investigation of art institutions, I aim to make visible and tangible the complex intertwining of art and money in our present economic system.

Most of my sources can be seen as forms of ‘embedded research’ (Hodkinson & Chatterton, 2006) or ‘militant research’ (Shukaitis et al., 2007). This is the case with Evans’ Artwash (2015), Ross’ The Gulf High Culture / Hard Labor (2015), McKee’s Strike Art (2016), Thompson’s Seeing Power (2015) and Delirium and Resistance by Sholette (2017). These writers are all ‘critical collaborators’ (Routledge, 2003) in the movements they study. This type of writing shows how to reconcile research and activism, and dismantles the presumed neutrality of research. This approach comes with some of the same risks that artists experience in their paradoxical position of being inside and outside at the same time. In line with Emma Mahony’s application of Simon Critchley’s theory of ‘interstitial distance’ (2007, p. 111) I will argue that precisely in this position, there is room for political change in the museum. The three collectives all do this from a slightly different position. As Evans explains: ‘Sometimes art as intervention might not have the proximity to the subject to give sufficient leverage to create a space within it, at other moments too great an intimacy and acceptance by the gallery might limit efficacy’ (2015, p. 116). Another important source to theorize the unauthorized interventions of LT, GLC and OM is Mouffe. She gives insight into how soft power is produced through a museum, and at the same time, she shows what a counter-hegemonic struggle could look like. In leaving room for ‘agonism’, there is a possibility to counter museum’s co-optation (Mouffe, 2013, p. 100). Mouffe’s focus on ‘politics of engagement’ theorizes why it is important that activist artist try to save and care for museums in lieu of just creating alternative spaces. As Raunig explains, these activist artists employ a ‘double strategy’: they conduct ‘radical social criticism, yet which do not fancy themselves in

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an imagined distance to institutions’; ‘an attempt of involvement and engagement in a process of hazardous refutation, and as self-questioning’ (Raunig, 2006, n.p.).

I will first discuss the practice of Occupy Museums because their concerns are of a broader nature and will be an insightful reference for the review of the other two collectives. Assessing their practice also gives an overall useful insight into the economic and art historical framework these collectives operate in. An exploration of earlier waves of institutional critique and an analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement will be part of this. I will then focus on the Gulf Labor Coalition, because they take up a position that gives them leverage in their disagreement with the Guggenheim that the other two collectives do not have. I will end with Liberate Tate, whose tactics are quite different than the tactics of the other two, being framed as more traditional artworks and operating in a European context. In the conclusion, I will reflect upon my findings, address limitations and look at possible future research.

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2. Occupy Museums – Dark Matter

An outbreak of occupations, infiltrations, boycotts and disruptive performances have targeted museums and other art institutions in the past years. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and the affiliated cultural production can be seen as an important moment in this wave. In fact, McKee even argues that OWS is central in a paradigm shift in contemporary art that ‘decisively changed horizons in which art is produced, received, and judged’ (McKee, 2017, p. 237). McKee’s account of the historical role of OWS has its shortcomings and might not convince readers that OWS is the very starting point of such a shift (Checa-Gismero, 2016, n.p.). However, the artistic practice of Occupy Museums, an artist collective that emerged out of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in 2011, is an interesting case study on how ‘class grievances are articulated, new subjectivities can be formed, and art practices can amplify political dissent’ (Checa-Gismero, 2016, n.p.).

Occupy Museums is an action group that repurposes the museum as a place for creative resistance against the injustice that is promoted by neoliberal institutions (McKee, 2017, p. 125). They focus, among other things, on the massive indebtedness of students and artists in the US. The group gradually developed an artistic practice out of the OWS forms of protest. Next to the OWS-style actions, like the use of posters, the human mic and the general assembly, Sholette shows that Occupy Museums reuses activist tactics from the critique on artistic institutions from the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (Sholette, 2012). A comparison with these earlier critical art practices that targeted the museum shows the difficulties of maintaining political dissent in hegemonic institutions. In analysing what tactics Occupy Museums use to resist the ongoing privatization in which the museum has become an extension of the market, I aim to show how the museum can be reclaimed as a vital institution for ‘the commons’ (Milun, 2015, n.p.).

In Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the post-Occupy condition (2016) art historian and Occupy activist Mckee goes so far as to describe OWS as a movement that is fundamentally artistic. Artists have been key players since the inception of the camp in September 2011. He writes that 'artists were not just decorative adjuncts to the real business of organizing for a movement that would otherwise exist without them. Rather (...) Occupy involved the emergence of “the artist as organizer”' (McKee, 2016, p. 26). Furthermore, ‘Occupy as a movement grounded in direct action decisively changed horizons in which art is produced, received, and judged in a manner comparable with earlier moments of rupture’ (idem, p. 238). This is an important remark since it indicates that the field of art is a contested ground,

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but that there is room in the framework for the art institution to reverse the politics of the 1% who are holding power. There is room for dissident artists to ‘reappropriate the values associated with [art] - creativity, autonomy, even beauty itself - for a new cultural commons that works against the perverse combination of elite profit and proletarian precarity that structure the art system as we know it today’ (Yates McKee, 2016, p. 26).

2.1.1 Historical background – the contradictions of institutional critique

There is an extensive body of artistic practices in direct confrontation with art institutions. This can be traced back to historic avant-garde artists and movements like Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism on the one hand (Fraser, 1985), and the Soviet avant-garde on the other McKee, 2016, p. 62). Criticizing how museums function, how they are funded, and their institutional and social function is well-known as the artistic practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s and became known as ‘Institutional Critique’. At that time, artists turned their attention from the meaning produced by the artwork, to the meaning that is imposed upon objects, bodies, spaces, and culture by institutions that mediate individual and collective engagement (Beery, 2018, n.p.). Museums became understood as framing devices that can change the way an artwork, a history, a body, or a collective is valued and understood. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists realized that the critical artist herself is a structure-bearing pillar of the art institution's framework, and that their critique was applauded and even invited by the very institutions they aimed to critique. Andrea Fraser wrote in ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’ (2005): ‘Every time we speak of “the institution” as other than “us”, we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions (Fraser, 2005, p. 283). This captures how artists became aware that their work was bringing value and capital to cultural institutions. Artists including Fraser, Renee Green and Louise Lawler broadened their criticism to the ‘lookers, buyers, dealers and makers’ that form the institution as a social field (Martha Rosler, (2004 [1979], p. 9). Artists turned inwards, through sociology and psychoanalytic theory, and outwards, through economic research, to work through the contradictions of the legitimizing discourses and the social conditions of the art world (Fraser, 2012, p. 186). Strategies are well-described by Fraser in an essay on the work of Lawler (1985). She writes: ‘Situating her practice at the margins, in the production, elaboration and critique of art’s institutional frame, Louise Lawler simultaneously reveals the place of art in a market economy and moves towards a repositioning of the artist within it’ (Fraser, 1985, p. 122). Her objective is not so much to

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uncover hidden ideological agendas, but to ‘disrupt the institutional boundaries which determine and separate the discrete identities of artist and artwork from an apparatus which supposedly merely supplements them.' (Fraser, 1985, p. 124) As the work of Lawler shows and Fraser explains in her 2005 essay, a move from inside to outside of the institution is not possible. Therefore, critique can only emerge and function within the institution because institutional determination is inescapable (Fraser, 2005, p. 282). Fraser’s writing gives an important explanation for why the practice of Occupy Museums takes place inside the museum: in every attempt to create alternative spaces for art circulation, we only bring more of the world into the art institutional framework. It opens the possibility of ‘artistic conceptualization – and commodification – of everything’ (Fraser, 2005, p. 282). Furthermore, Occupy Museums take responsibility for, and action against ‘the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship – above all, self-sensorship – which are driven by [their] interests in the field (Fraser, 2005, p. 283).

2.1.2 MoMA as a contested site

Key actions of Occupy Museums happened at the (MoMA) in New York (Adams, 2012, n.p.). This has been a contested site for many New York-based art workers from prior generations – the most relevant being the Art Workers' Coalition that formed between 1969 and 1971 (including artists and critics like Hans Haacke, Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, Vassilakis Takis, Dan Graham, Elizabeth Bear and many others) and the political art actions of the its offshoot Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), formed in 1969 (Hendricks, Toche, 2011). In the performance Blood Bath (18 November 1969) the coalition entered the Museum of Modern Art with bags of pig's blood strapped to their body. While spilling the blood in the gallery, leaflets that they threw in the air stated the group's ‘Call for the immediate resignation of all the Rockefellers from the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art’ and stated that ‘There is a group of extremely wealthy people who are using art as a form of social acceptability. By accepting soiled donations, the museum is destroying the integrity of art’ (Mel Evans, 2015, p. 159). The call for resignation of board members of the MoMA is also a topic of a 2017 action by Occupy Museums. On 27 February, protesters marched to the MoMA to demand Larry Fink to be removed from the board because of his ties to the Trump administration (Vartanian, 2017). Fink is also the founder and CEO from BlackRock Inc., one of the biggest investment firms in the world that gained its immense wealth from

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trades in debts (Hernández, 2017, n.p.). BlackRock Inc. and Fink in particular are a recurring theme in Occupy Museum’s practice.

This elaboration on earlier examples of interventions within institutions is not meant as a way to give weight to the dissident practice of contemporary activist artists that one could call a return of institutional critique, or to write this artistic ‘dark matter’ (Sholette, 2011) matter’ – or the 95% of the art world that remains unknown and unseen – into the canon by making a historical comparison. There are two reasons, the first being one of precaution: the institutionalization of well-known predecessors like Haacke, Fraser and Lawler shows that a revolutionary art practice dealing with neoliberal museums is a delicate and treacherous operation ‘brimming with risks and minor victories’ (Sholette, 2016, n.p.). Prior generations have seen how political activism and artistic dissent have been soaked up by museums; not by force or hostility but by soft and co-optive responses (Nye, 2004, p. 5). Fraser experienced this with her own critical writing existing ‘uncomfortably and often painfully in between these extremes, embodying and performing the contradictions between them and the economic and political conflicts those contradictions reflect, unable to resolve them within our own work or within ourselves, much less within our field’ (Fraser, 2012, 189). In their critique on the functioning and circulation of art between museum and market, Occupy Museums shows an awareness of how they themselves are the institution. This is what defines their practice. The second reason is well described by Bishop stressing the importance of ‘narrating the past through a diagnosis of the present, while keeping their eyes on the future’ (Bishop, 2013, p. 61). It is important to gain knowledge about the tactics and objectives of lesser-known collectives of artist that engaged in direct action, like the Art Workers' Coalition. Like Sholette explains, this ‘cultural dark is getting brighter and informing the present struggle through archival websites, teach-ins and alliances (Sholette, 2017, p. 139). Members of earlier generations take part in the recent anti-capitalist struggle. As Sholette explains, the activist collectives from the past have largely vanished from the art historical narrative and their work has little or no representation in museum collections. Now and again, artists from this dark matter are dragged up as 'official dissidents whose presence proves that the art world is not the homogenous monolith it appears to be' (Sholette, 2012, p. 171). By giving art historical status to dissident artists and collectives, their critical claims can be aestheticized, de-politicized and dismissed. However, Sholette explores this artistic dark matter also as a possible revolutionary force. It possesses 'archival agency, something that 'now and then animates the long durée of resistance from below' (Sholette, 2017, p. 136). Sholette attributes to these artists a great force of creative energy that could be the seedbed of resistance to the

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system that makes them into a surplus of amateurs, studio artists, teachers, buyers of art supplies, visitors of museums and everlasting army of volunteers that stabilizes the art world's symbolic and financial economy (Sholette, 2011, p. 3 - 4). Sholette says about this: ‘I attempt to reveal dark matter as a potentially vibrant agency already engaged in proto political processes of non-market gift giving, informal self-organizing, and in some cases, overt political resistance’ (Sholette, 2012, pp. 36 - 37).

The prior waves of institutional critique and informal organizing by artists, happened at difficult political and economic times. This is also the case with Occupy Museums as I will describe in the following.

2.2 Contemporary background: Occupy Wall Street

As Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, Occupy Museums was founded. The climate in which they came into existence was inspired by the Arab Spring, frustrated by the lack of action around the global financial crisis caused by the well-documented greed of the 1%. This resulted in spatial occupations in Barcelona and Madrid and, from 17 September until 15 November 2011, in the occupation of Zuccotti Park, just a few blocks from Wall Street (Thompson, 2015, pp. 150-151). OWS occupied public space and created an autonomous zone for protest, working groups and assemblies. From their camp, the occupiers shared free meals with the public, had a library and free medical care. The political discontent had resulted in a global occupation of space. Occupy Museums’ member Tal Beery described OWS as a feeling of utopian excitement. They were holding a site from which post-capitalist society was being plotted and rehearsed at the epicentre of global capital (personal communication, May 23 2018). Occupy Museums came into existence as the direct action group that applied the broader concerns of OWS into museum spaces. The group is committed to ‘addressing social and economic inequality in the museum world using a leaderless, radically democratic organizational structure’ (Beery, Fisher, Greenberg & Polendo, 2013, p. 230). Contemporary capitalist society is characterized by systematic crises and injustices that are reinforced by the institutions, discourses and economies of the contemporary art world. As McKee points out, the artist collectives that have grown out of Occupy aim to reconstruct a lost solidarity by negating and affirming art and its institutions at the same time (McKee, 2017, p. 23).

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2.3 Occupy Museums' strategies

Now that I have established a historical and contemporary context in which we can place the practice of Occupy Museums, I can investigate what methods the artists use to intervene in ‘Capitalist [sic] business-as-usual’ to ‘permeate the faux-public space of Neo-liberal [sic] institutions’ (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 10). Beery summarized these tactics in the following categories: direct actions, temporary autonomous zones, loopholing, hijacking, performance actions, exhibition strategies (personal communication, 23 May 2018). In discussing the actions of Occupy Museums, we will see that these different tactics are combined.

2.3.1 Direct actions – maintenance of our institutions

On 20 October 2011 Occupy Museums held their first direct action in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The activists used MoMA to ‘open up a creative discursive space about the financing of culture and its impact on people and cities’ (Blithe Riley, in interview with Adams, 2012, n.p.) Outside, they held a general assembly. They handed out and read the manifesto written by Noah Fischer, which was the starting point of Occupy Museums, to the gathering audience and people leaving the museum, and spoke together about injustices in the world of art. The group also read parts of the Arts & Culture (the OWS working group from which Occupy Museums grew) statement of non-co-optation: ‘The 1% has learned to purchase and co-opt critique rather than listen and learn from the voice of the people. Museums, you are not invited to co-opt this movement’ (website Occupy Museums, Oktober 2011); and from 'Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!' (1969) by artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles who turned maintenance work into art:

‘The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:

The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE [sic] of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.’

(Ukeles, 1969, np.)

When directors of the MoMA came to the general assembly to ask what Occupy Museums wanted, the group replied that they did not have demands but that they would continue to stage an occupation each week to open up a space for dialogue about ‘economic

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injustice and abuse of the public for the gain of the 1% in cultural institutions’ (Occupy Museums, October 2011, n.p.). This first action was widely criticized because of the lack of demands of the group (N. Fischer, 2014, pp. 22-23). As art critic Jerry Salz replied to a critical reporter3_{present at the first action of OM who asked him about the demands of Occupy}

Museums: ‘It isn't about putting forward a statement. The minute they ask you “what do you want?” do not answer! The minute you answer somebody else's questions you are accepting somebody’s test.’ (Munk, 2011).

Another critique that Occupy Museums (and other activists targeting cultural institutions) received was that targeting museums is not constructive since it holds the wrong place accountable for economic injustice (Vartanian, 2011, n.p.). Critics said that instead of museums, the group should have stayed with Wall Street or focused on art schools or auction houses (online discussion published by Mira Schor, October 2011). However, many art institutions are important tools in the production of neoliberal ideology, so it is of vital importance to challenge these contested spaces to ‘challenge normalized economic inequality’ (N. Fischer, 2015, p. 19). Furthermore, when all public institutions are in a state of crisis, artists will focus on the place that they know, in which they have leverage. Noah Fischer even argues that the convergence of the global financial crisis and the boom of the art market, shows that the visual arts are ‘central, not tangential to this crisis’ (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 11).

Similarly, the reference to Ukeles’ maintenance manifesto gives an interesting insight into why it is important to target museums and not occupy art galleries or present alternative spaces, as Hrag Vartanian (critic and co-founder of Hyperallergic) suggested Occupy Museums to do (Vartanian, 2011, n.p.). The manifesto promotes a system of maintenance as an important opposition to the system of ‘development’ that is funded on ‘pure individual creation and the belief in “the new” “change” and “progress” (Ukeles, 1969, n.p.). Maintenance is something that goes against the logics and work ethics of neoliberalism. A system of maintenance is not about substituting the museum with a different institution but taking care of what we already have. In Bourdieu’s field of cultural production, hegemonic power is produced by the struggle between artists to gain a spot in the limelight (Pels, pp. 267-268). In the essay ‘Against Competition’, (2006) artist Marc Fischer explains how the pressure to compete with other artists is not naturally given, but a result of a market-driven field of cultural production (M. Fischer, 2006, p. 16). Since it is not naturally given, there are ways of

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existing together and growing together without competing: ‘In the process they learn to write, organize, publish, create, educate and do anything necessary to bolster support and dialogue for the ideas they value’ (Fischer, 2006, p. 18). This is what Occupy Museums does when they take the time and energy to organize and do unpaid maintenance for a institutions that they hold dear. From their unpaid labour actually speaks love. In the words of Ukeles: ‘Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)’ (Ukeles, 1969, p.). It is not about replacing the museum with another institution (which fits capitalist logic) but instead ‘contesting the very principle of Value, i. e. power, lack, life as process of production and work itself’ (Kristeva, 2002, p. 26).

2.3.2 Alliances – workers unite

This first action was very much in line with OWS methods of protest but the group realised that they would need different tactics and partners to gain legitimacy. After the first action, Occupy Museums formed alliances with Teamsters Local 814, an art handlers union that was being locked out from their jobs at Sotheby’s over stalled contract negotiations. The art handlers wouldn’t stand for lower wages and the dissolution of their union. While Sotheby's made a record profit of $3.4 billion in the first half of 2011, they refused to pay the art handlers a raise to a starting wage of $17.50 per hour (ArtNet, 2011, n.p.). When the art handlers went on strike, Sotheby's replaced them with replacement workers (Sholette, 2017, p. 64). This is exemplary of how the economic crisis puts nations and individual workers in deep recessions and debt, but the art market flourishes with record breaking sales (Sholette, 2017, pp. 240 - 241). Blithe Riley, a member of Occupy Museums, said that teaming up with Teamsters Local 814 was a key moment for Occupy Museums because it was an 'extremely unifying effort.' (Adams, 2012, n.p.) Furthermore, it gave them a clear and tangible object: the division of artistic labour and class privilege in the art field. And the MoMA is a relevant place for this critique since it has a corporate relationship with Sotheby's. Two board members of the museum at that time, James Niven and Richard E. Oldenburg, are involved as vice chairman and consultant at Sotheby's. Beery called this ‘an obvious conflict of interest’ (personal communication, 23 May).

Upon arrival at MoMA on 27 November 2011 for a ‘Bring Your Own Manifesto’ assembly, the group was met by police. The police demanded that the protesters move away from the entrance of the museum into a steel pen (website Occupy Museums, n.d.). The group refused to talk to the police unless the police would follow the rules of the general

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assembly. After reading manifestos, singing and performing a ballet, the group headed to Sotheby’s to join the picket line of Teamsters Local 814 (website Occupy Museums, n.d.). The police refused to comply to the rules of the general assembly, but did not arrest the artists.

2.3.3 January 2012 actions – a repurpose of free public hours

On January 13 2012, Occupy Museums held one of their ‘seminal actions’ at the MoMA (Adams, 2012, n.p.). In describing this action I will show how Occupy Museums forms alliances with other workers, both contemporary and historically, to emphasize the importance of their work. The action took place on one of MoMA’s 'UNIQLO Free Fridays'. This is historically significant since free public hours at MoMA are a direct result of demands of the Art Workers’ Coalition (Sholette, 2017, p. 19). Like them, Occupy Museums pressures the Museum of Modern Art to reform their policy and make the museum more democratic and more accessible, both to the public, and to underrepresented groups of artists like women and artists of colour (Elligott, 2016, n.p.). The evolvement of the MoMA free admission hours into The UNIQLO Free Fridays is a telling example of how critique is co-opted by the museum. The first free Monday in February 1970 was launched after more than a year of actions and demonstrations by the Art Workers' Coalition. The free admission day attracted three times as many visitors as a normal Monday and a crowd that was ‘younger and less white’ than usual (Museum's attendance triples on free day, 1970, n.p.). Since 2004, free opening hours are branded by retail giants Target and UNIQLO as Target Free Fridays and UNIQLO Free Fridays respectively. This gives the visitor the illusion that museums cannot function without corporate funding, and that the elitist museum charging $25 a ticket is brought to the common people by big business. Occupy Museums make it one of the terms for the staged acquisition negotiation with MoMA (which I will discuss) that ‘“Target Free Fridays” are never publicized by MoMA without citing the Artist Workers Coalition whose protests led to free museum days in the early 1970s’ (Vartanian, 2012, n.p.). Hereby current activist groups show they recognise the importance of prior struggle.

The public art intervention by Occupy Museums consisted of a few different stages and lasted for two hours. A big group of artists, with representatives of the Arts & Labor Group of OWS, 16 Beaver, and Occupy Sotheby’s (Thompson, 2015, p. 57) entered the MoMA individually, hiding banners and leaflets under their clothing. The artists all came together in the exhibition ‘Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art’ in front of

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Rivera's mural The Uprising (1931). This work depicts a woman in red carrying a baby, keeping off an attack by a uniformed soldier on a man in blue overalls. Behind them, a chaotic crowd clashes with more soldiers, who force demonstrators to the ground. According to MoMA's website, this work can be seen as ‘a potent symbol of universal class struggle’ (‘The Uprising’, n.d.). In front of this work someone started with the Occupy ‘mic check’ and the activists started a group discussion about art, capitalism and class struggle, reading from the manifesto ‘For an independent revolutionary art’ (1938) signed by Rivera and André Breton. This manifesto warns artists, who are ‘the natural ally of the revolution’ for the subordination of their art to propaganda (Breton & Rivera, 1995, p. 31). Thompson sees a comparable tendency in MoMa's exhibition of Rivera. He says about this: ‘Rivera can be abstracted from the present. Would he really want us to passively enjoy his murals? If you really love this show you’ll get off your ass and overthrow your boss!’ (Boucher, 2012, np.).

After the general assembly, the protesters broke out in groups to discuss the question Rene Gabri suggested: ‘What kind of resistance will be necessary to alter the trend of corporatization of public institutions, including art institutions?’ (Boucher, idem). The Novads, an artist group from OWS, dropped a banner that said:

‘MoMA: When Art is Just a Luxury/Art is a Lie. Sotheby’s: Hang Art Not Workers. End Your Lockout.’

The large banner was confiscated by MoMA security guards minutes after it was put up (Beery et al. 2013, p. 233). Occupy Museums decided to use this confiscation to their advantage and loophole the museum's procedures. In an open letter to the Acquisitions Committee of MoMA, which they published through several media, Occupy Museums framed the confiscation as a ‘unilateral acquisition’ a ‘hostile appropriation of our art by your museum’ (Vartanian, 2012, n.p.). They demanded a ‘proper negotiation platform and acquisition-process’ (idem). This acquisition tactic makes use of the rule of speculation (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 18). Value is attached to an object when it is collected by a museum. Collections of a museum act as value-giving hallmarks of cultural capital. But it also gives the artist leverage: since being in the collection comes with a kind of permission, a collected artist becomes a diplomat for the institutional brand (N. Fischer, 2014, p19). By presenting themselves as a collective of artists and the banner as a work of art, they hacked into the museum by using its own processes of acquisition negotiations (Beery et al., 2013, p. 234). This is a telling example of Occupy Museums strategy of ‘loopholing’. Loopholing means taking the institutional logic, and using it against the institution (Beery, personal

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communication, May 23). The importance of loopholing as a strategy lies in the fact that it makes use of the system it aims to subvert but from within the institution. This is something Occupy Museums also did in other actions like their third action, which took place in the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing of the American Museum of Natural History. They mimicked the form of the guided tour to critique the role of philanthropist David Koch, who supports the Tea Party, anti-climate change initiatives and right wing think tanks (Occupy Museums, November 2011).

In the staged acquisition, Occupy Musems combines this technique of loopholing with a tactic of visibility. They used the media to make visible a process that usually happens behind closed doors. Furthermore, by stating that the confiscation was in fact an acquisition, they referenced the colonial practice of stealing objects that formed many museum collections worldwide.

On Friday, 27 January 2012, Occupy Museums infiltrated the museum again to demand a reaction to their terms. Their goal was to either collect the banner, or for MoMA to keep the banner and thereby express their solidarity with the Sotheby's art handlers. To the disappointment of Occupy Museums, a museum representative silently returned the banner without answering questions or giving a statement on MoMA's stance in the lockout of the Teamsters (Reiley, 2012, n.p.).

When the murals of Rivera are exhibited in a museum whose board members are involved in breaking up unionization of art workers, when a call for inclusivity by activist artists who successfully achieved an admission-free night becomes a way for polluting and human rights-threatening companies to ‘artwash’ their name, it becomes evident that political art can lose all its revolutionary potential in a corporate environment. And that museums, indeed, are such corporate environments. Through this action, Occupy Museums realized that they could operate with impunity in the museum space. Guards kept their distance and did not intervene; the police were called but stayed outside the museum. By invoking the publicness of museums, and by making sure the artworks in the museum were not threatened by their actions, the activists could do things that would not have been possible in the streets. They created a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (Beery, personal communication, May 23). Hakim Bey's definition of a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) describes a place where otherness can exist and hierarchy is challenged. A mini-revolution can happen without directly confronting the state. Bey defines a TAZ as ‘an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of

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imagination) and then dissolves itself, to re-form elsewhere / elsewhen, before the state can crush it’ (Bey, 2002, p. 99).

Paradoxically, by making the MoMA the target of their critique, Occupy Museums was re-inscribing MoMA's central position in art history. When artists do something new in a museum space, it is written about. For the MoMA, this critique can become a commodity. This can be seen with the actions of the Art Workers Coalition when Bates Lowry, director of the MoMA at that time, even had signs placed at the museum entrance that read ‘The Demonstration is in the Garden. Please Enter by the 54th Street Gate’. It can also be seen with the murals Rivera made for the MoMA in 1931. Although Rivera was an outspoken communist, he was the second artist given a solo show in the MoMA. Five of these frescoes were back at MoMA for the first time, just a few days before the OWS camp was cleared by the police and more than 700 protesters were arrested in a confrontation with the police on the Brooklyn Bridge. In a review of the 2012 exhibition of Diego Rivera, Hal Foster draws a parallel between the subjects in Rivera’s murals and the economic and political situation in 1931, and the violent clashes with authorities during OWS protests. Furthermore, Foster states, ‘OWS demonstrates that the politics of appearance by actual people in real space still counts; it suggests that public art might too’ (Foster, 2012, p. 31). The Occupy Museums action of 13 January 2012 is an exemplification of this. In a collective viewership – a reason for Rivera to choose murals over bourgeois paintings as his medium – and public discussion, the activists countered the regular individual consumption of masterpieces as promoted by the museum environment. They redefine what ‘public art’ is, not by style, but by assembling in the museum to reclaim art as part of the commons. Occupy Museums may not have succeeded in their goals to end the Sotheby's lockout, and they realised that their critique also did MoMA some good, but they were applauded by museum staff who became their allies (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 14). The actions at the MoMA showed that the highly visible sites of privatized culture can be used for unsanctioned experiment and can thereby be reclaimed as public institutions: the occupied museum.

2.3.4 The 7th Berlin Biennale – the exhibition of protest

Another tactic of Occupy Museums came at a moment that they were invited in by museums. They lost their position of relative outsiders when Occupy Museums was officially invited in by the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) and later, the Whitney Biennale of 2017. Holding an autonomous position proved symbolically effective, would it be possible

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to actualize an ethical museum from a position of insider? In discussion of Occupy Museums’ participation in the 7th Berlin Biennale, I will show some of the critique and problems their official status brought them.

Occupy Museums was invited to participate in the 7th Berlin Biennale by curators Joanna Warsza and Artur Zmijewski who were present at the Occupy Museums action at the David Koch dinosaur wing 3 November 2011 (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 25). As Beery, explained in a workshop, the moment he, Jolanta Gora-Witta, Max Libroin, Arthur Polendo, Carey Machet, Ben Laude, Nitasha Dhillon, Noah Fischer, Blithe Riley, Maria Byck, Maraya Lopez, and Jim Costanzo walked into the courtyard of the biennial, they immediately realized they walked into a trap (personal communication, May 23, 2018). The ground-floor space functioned as a ‘human zoo [’ (Noah Fischer, 2015, p. 20). Architecturally it was a sunken pit and visitors could enter and stand on an elevated viewing platform to observe the occupiers doing their activism. Unaware of the institutional frame within which they were viewed, the occupiers who had organized and decorated the space painted the walls with slogans and hung banners to create a kind of ‘Occupy amusement park’ (Occupy Museums, June 2012, n.p.).

However, this trap did not mean that the art institution automatically aestheticizes activism as Sebastian Loewe argues in an essay in Field (2015) on the participation of Occupy Museums in the 7th Berlin Biennale and Documenta 13. According to Loewe, the collaboration of Occupy Museums with the Berlin Biennale signed the death warrant of the whole Occupy movement (Loewe, 2015, p. 186). When looking at the state violence that was inflicted upon the Occupy movement in tearing down the camps, it seems inappropriate to single out Occupy Museums' participation in the Berlin Biennale and the Documenta for the decline of the Occupy movement. Although Loewe's critique seems to be in line with Beery's remark, Beery explained that the lived reality of being there in the space of the 7th Berlin Biennale was more complex than Loewe paints it (personal communication, May 23, 2018). Loewe argues:

Once the camp is perceived as a work of art and not just a political occupation, it is connected to a longing for sensuous perception and the “satisfaction to higher spiritual interests”, as Hegel puts it. All initially political aspects of the Occupy camp are then bound to aesthetic pleasure, which means they are bound to the personal taste and mental stimulation of the viewer. Potential political activists

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Still, Occupy Museums sought ways to resist de-politicization of their actions and to show that a museum can be a possible site for activism. Occupy Museums recognized, like Fraser, Rosler and their contemporaries before them, that in order to move forward, they needed to address their own role within the institutional frame (Occupy Museums, june 2012, np.). The Occupy Museums movement sees the museum as a contested site, as a grey zone. It is possible to activate revolutionary potential in the logic of display by reversing the politics of defunctionalisation to the icons of those in power by activating a revolutionary potential in the logic of display (N. Fischer, 2015, p. 26). Museums hold a democratic function (or at least a promise of this function) of providing space for reflection on political power. This promise of non-censorship might have become ceremonial, as museums dependent on corporate sponsors can no longer afford to protect their democratic legacies. However, it provides leverage to activist artists that know how to use these symbols for their alternative meaning-making, as we can see in the strategies of Occupy Museums.

With the statement ‘You cannot curate a movement’ Occupy Museums proposed to the 7th Berlin Biennale and the Kunst-Werke (KW) to adopt a horizontal organization structure (N. Fischer, 2015, p. 31). They challenged the curatorial team to let them take over the museum and run it as a collection of working groups open to the public with full curatorial discretion and access to the budgets and website (N. Fischer, 2015, pp. 31 - 32). The curators, Żmijewski and Warsza, would become the former curators, to be replaced by working groups operating within a consensus-based process. Hereby, Occupy Museums proposed to change the 7th Berlin Biennale from a biennale containing some activism in a special zone designated by the curators, into a biennale that completely followed the logic of how Occupy Museums is organised.

As Beery points out, their demands were not completely met; however, they did manage to secure a pay raise for security guards of the biennial by 15% (personal conversation, May 23, 2018). Noah Fisher, one of the other artists present calls their occupation of the 7th Berlin Bienale a successful experiment. In reaction to Loewe he argues: ‘The end goal of these high-profile actions and campaigns from a movement standpoint are not only to enact reform on specific issues but rather to bring a movement horizon which is a post-capitalist horizon, into the art world’ (Fisher, 2015, p. 33). There is no border between a world inside and a world outside of market based control and the aim to horizontalize the biennale’s organization is also in solidarity with a larger network of precarious workers. The occupation of the 7th Berlin Biennale might not have been completely successful in

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implementing a horizontal power structure but they did experiment with new exhibition strategies to counter the corporate logic of cultural institutions and secure subtle shifts in power, to effectively re-politicize the biennial by performed politics (N. Fischer, 2015, p. 32). It is also important to keep in mind that Occupy Museums is not so much about reaching concrete goals. Much effective resistance is essentially performance, visibly attempting the impossible and in so doing, making power relations obvious and therefore malleable (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 16).

2.3.5 Exhibition Strategy - Debtfair

It is interesting to look at Occupy Museums' participation in the Whitney Biennial of 2017 because this project, like their participation in BB7, was also an official part of the exhibition. Furthermore, it is interesting to compare the two because Occupy Museums had to rethink their strategy. According to Beery, they have struggled for years with being invited for official museum or biennial programs after their participation in the Berlin Biennale (Beery, personal communication, 23 May).

After the biennale in 2012, they developed new exhibition strategies. 'Debtfair' is a series of proposals to art fairs and commercial galleries for how to tell the story of artist debt. It functions both as a physical exhibition and as an online organizing mechanism. Debtfair aims to expose the relationship between global economic inequity and artists’ growing debt burdens (I.J. Brown, 2016, n.p.). Obtaining a master degree in fine arts in the US particularly, but also at academic art institutions in Europe, comes at great financial cost. Occupy Museums writes: ‘debt is the key to seeing American art today.’ (Occupy Museums, 2016, n.p.).

For the 2017 Whitney Biennale Occupy Museums (at that moment consisting of Arthur Polendo, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fischer, and Tal Beery) released an open call to artists posing the question: ‘how does your economic reality affect your art?’ (Greenberger, 2016, n.p.). The non-juried application asked artists to submit images of their work and to answer a questionnaire that delved into the relationship between the artists’ creative aspirations and their economic realities (‘How do you support your artistic practice?’ ‘What emotions does thinking about your debt elicit?’). The results are made publicly available. This has multiple purposes. On the one hand it shows artists in debt that although they might feel isolated by their economic situation, they have relations to each other: ‘Debtfair works to build solidarity and community around our shared economic

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conditions’ (N. Fischer, 2015, n.p.). On the other hand, Occupy Museums presents a new way to look at art-objects. Not only to see the shapes and colours of an object, but also the economic realities that frame the practice of art today. They found that personal debt (student debt, mortgages, credit card debt) plays an important role in the lives artist can lead and ultimately, what their work looks like (I.J. Brown, 2016, n.p.).

For the Whitney Biennale, OM selected artists that could be categorized into three different bundles of debt: Puerto Rico (artists with debt to Banco Popular and other Puerto Rican institutions affected by the debt crisis), Navient (student loan debt), and JP Morgan Chase (credit card debt and mortgage debt) (I.J. Brown, 2016, n.p.). Blackrock Inc., the largest financial company in the world, owns these companies by majority and invests in debt. They profit from artists that are unable to pay back their debts.

For the Whitney Biennale, Occupy Museums made a slash in the museum wall, by two stock graphics on the edges that show art market profits over time, creating a rift in which thirty selected artworks are bundled. The works relate to each other, not by formal or aesthetic semblance but by who these artists owed money to. The works were hung close together (Salon-style) under the surface of the wall, between exposed beams. According to I. J. Brown, this installation strategy ‘depicts how all spaces within Capitalism [sic] function with a layer of Occupy Museums, Debtfair. 2017. Image: Noah Fischer.

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extraction just below the surface’ (I.J. Brown, 2016, n.p.). By showing how personal debts are interconnected, Debtfair makes financial relationships visual, and shows possibilities for solidarity in a global struggle, because we have collective power as debtors. Each of the bundles of art works was for sale as one collective unit and priced so that each of the artists in the bundle would get $2,296.14. The work of the other 500 artists that responded to the Debtfair open call appeared in the Whitney Biennial through a slideshow.

The wall in which the artworks were positioned, showed a prominent quote from Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, advisor of the Trump administration and Trustee of the MoMA and New York University, saying: ‘The two greatest stores of wealth internationally today [are] contemporary art [...and] apartments in Manhattan’ (Corcoran, 2017, n.p.). With this exhibition strategy, Occupy Museums found a way to visualize the economic realities of artist and illutrate how an art institution is built on financial extraction. Occupy Museums accompanied their official part in de Whitney Biennial with direct actions, directed at Larry Fink, and a ‘counter-commencement debtors ceremony’ (Boucher, 2017, n.p.).

The counter-commencement was a mock graduation ceremony of ‘the class of 2017’ in traditional graduation caps and gowns. Museum staff did not intervene, and permitted the participating artists to hold the floor (Schwietert Collazo, 2017, n.p). It is questionable if such an action remains as disruptive as other unsanctioned actions by Occupy Museums. When their work is an official part of the biennial’s program, why would this part have a different status? Would the meaning be different if this was an official performance, announced by the Whitney?

2.4 Conclusion

By describing the actions of Occupy Museums, I have shown that they encounter some of the same difficulties their predecessors had.

In occupying space in museums from a position of outsider/insider without demands, they created temporary autonomous zones that functioned as testing grounds for further actions. They partly escaped co-optation by insisting on a horizontal, collective organization, by not stating their demands, and by not framing their actions as works of art as we will see in the case of Liberate Tate. In addition, Occupy Museums resist co-optation by acting collectively. In interviews, they speak individually but ask their comments to be attributed to the collective. They are famous and unknown artists, ‘guards who paint, academics, curators and lawyers, debtors, all with a personal stake in changing the existing order’ (N. Fischer, 2014,

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p.8). Occupy Museums does not name their actions, like Liberate Tate does, to escape being labelled as works of art and thereby co-opted. They combine tactics like loopholing, creating temporary autonomous zones and hijacking. Their most important means is the direct action. While the official participation in the Berlin Biennale proved to be problematic, it created a network of different activists that are still in contact. This coalition building is very important in the practice of Occupy Museums, reflected in the ‘Debtfair’ exhibition strategy that shows individual artists feeling isolated by their debt that they are not alone; that they, on the contrary are a strong collective force. Occupy Museums did not frame their actions as works of art as we will see in the case of Liberate Tate, and their actions originated from, and resembled, the OWS tactics. This allowed them to move quickly and to mobilize many people who were dedicated to showing up regularly. Now the Occupy days are over, they have evolved into something new, as the Debtfair shows. They created a visible network of people suffering from the conditions of neoliberalism – but who, once they have realized they are part of a network, are strong enough to become a movement. By embedding art in radical, collective movements and reinventing it as direct action, we have seen that Occupy Museums works towards reconstructing art for the ‘99% – art for the commons’ (McKee, 2017, p. 26). This challenge of the structures of inequality need a ‘rewiring [of] embedded social assumptions such as contemporary art’s default to luxury asset and a widespread obedience to the professional aura of Neoliberal [sic] institutions.’ (N. Fischer, 2014, p. 7). The tactics of Occupy Museums consist of a ‘search for effective hacks, cracks, and hidden political potentialities, which might be hiding in plain sight’ (p. 25). They have done this through direct actions, the creation of temporary autonomous zones, loopholing the museum’s logic, performance actions, exhibition strategies. The part of their practice that was uninvited proved to be the best tool for turning the museum into a site for political action because it avoided any debt to the institution. Furthermore, Occupy Museums used the visibility of high-profile museums and politicized it. Due to the spectacular nature of their actions, they got media coverage of mainstream media that more bureaucratic parts of activism (like the hijacking of institutional logic) could not.

The occupied museum. Dissident art practices of artist collectives Occupy Museums, Gulf Labor Coalition and Liberate Tate.