SOMEONE ELSE!!!

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Fri, 03 May 2013 19:12:02 +0200

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Fri, 03 May 2013 19:06:40 +0200

Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011)

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:23:24 +0200

Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011):

Education for Socially Engaged Art is the first “Materials and Techniques” book for the emerging field of social practice. Written with a pragmatic, hands-on approach for university-level readers and those interested in real-life application of the theories and ideas around socially engaged art. The book, emphasizing the use of pedagogical strategies to address issues around social practice, addresses topics such as documentation, community engagement, dialogue and conversation, amongst many others. The book was published by Jorge Pinto Books in 2011 and can be acquired online. An interview on the subject can be found here: http://www.artpractical.com/feature/interview_with_pablo_helguera/ — “For too long Social Practice has been the notoriously flimsy flipside of market-based contemporary art: a world of hand-wringing practitioners easily satisfied with the feeling of ‘doing good’ in a community, and unaware that their quasi-activist, anti-formalist […]

Institute of Contemporary Arts : Talks : 'Who's Afraid of the Public?'

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:23:03 +0200

Institute of Contemporary Arts : Talks : 'Who's Afraid of the Public?':

Institute of Contemporary Arts. Challenging the foundations of contemporary art

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Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:16:00 +0200

Excerpts from Take The Money and Run? New guide on arts, ethics and sponsorship

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:09:01 +0200

Excerpts from Take The Money and Run? New guide on arts, ethics and sponsorship:

This week, together with Live Art Development Agency, we are launching a beautiful print and e-version of the Agency’s Study Room Guide ‘Take the money and run?

Art and the Cultural Turn: Farewell to Committed, Autonomous Art?

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:54:37 +0100

Originally in e-flux

Irmgard Emmelhainz

Nowadays, artists’ voices are thought to be important in giving shape to society, and art is considered to be useful. Moreover, the state, the private sector and society attribute to art a decisive political role as on the one hand, they invest in culture with the purpose generating political and economic surplus value. On the other hand, art and cultural practices are now part of the same network of strategies and questions as social movements are (this space is known as the “Infosphere”). In a context in which the creative, political, and mediatic fields are intrinsically linked, contemporary cultural practices point toward a new social order in which art has merged with life, privileging lived experience, collective communication and performative politics. In turn, the commodification of culture and its use as a resource—as well as the fusion of art, politics, and media—have had a significant impact in the way in which capitalist economies operate. A consequence has been the predominance of immaterial or cognitive labor over industrial production. Not to say that industrial production has ceased to exist, on the contrary, it has increased more than ever and for the most part it has been transferred to third-world countries. The prevalence of cognitive or immaterial work in contemporary capitalism implies that the main source of surplus value is the production and dissemination of signs. In other words,“creative’ work” has been injected to all areas of economic life. Immaterial labor also means the production of social life as lifestyles, and forms of life—a new form of the common at the center of which culture is located.¹

In this context, the production of contemporary art, as Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle pointed out, has been foreclosed by a network of protocols dictating the forms and means of production of art circulating in exhibitions, galleries, biennials, and fairs. And while artists may address exhibition politics as a theme in their work, they are limited in terms of producing something outside of the consensual barriers placed on exhibition politics. This is due to the existence of a systemic enclosure which extends well beyond the consensus of the art world: art is fused with political sensibilities that exploit art’s diplomatic potential, as these political sensibilities consider culture to be a form of social capital, a resource. Thus, a lot of money is put into play.² Under these conditions, is there any room left for autonomous, committed art?³

_{_{Occupy protest in front of Kassel’s documenta, summer 2012.}}

1. Politicized Contemporary Art

When considering the relationship between contemporary art and politics, it is simply assumed that art, in one way or another, can serve as a catalyst for political action or participation, as it can reveal capitalism’s “hidden” contradictions. And while the present is always dark and opaque, art is given the task of teaching us how to see or perceive things in a different way—it is considered to be training, an act of observation or exegesis. Recent exhibitions and biennials address questions that are perceived to be “political,” for example: labor, poverty, exploitation, violence, globalization, war, and exclusion.

Examples of recent exhibitions in Mexico whose titles underscore the politicization of their content include “For the Love of Dissent” and “Exercises of Resistance” (MUAC, 2012), “The Redeeming Institution” (SAPS, 2012), and “Resisting the Present” (Amparo Museum-Puebla, 2011). Last year, two exhibitions at the Modern Art and Digital Cultural Center Estela de Luz addressed the way power interferes with the flows of information and representational codes, as well as the blurring distinctions between art, action, social movements, media, and semiotic ownership. On an international level, we had Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium, the European biennial for young European art curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina entitled: “The Deep of the Modern.” The exhibition deals with the political and economical history of the city of Genk from the point of view of the heritage of its coal mines. The works in the show address the realities of the coal miners’ work, the production and business of coal mining—as well as, include an iconographic study of coal in modern art and a display of mining paraphernalia. The politicized nature of this exhibition was justified by Walter Benjamin’s dialectic materialism, insofar as the exhibition incorporated material traces of Genk’s industrial past in order to renegotiate them in the present day. In this case, the art shown illustrates a curatorial framework that signals the conditions and relations of the production of a specific historical moment—the age of industrial capitalism. Another example from last summer is the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which invited the Occupy movement to participate and camp out in the show’s most important site (Kunstwerke). A small group, also related to the Occupy movement, was welcomed by dOCUMENTA curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev after the group set up outside the Fridericianum. Occupy interventions borrowed techniques and tactics from contemporary art and offered a participatory, anti-elitist⁴cultural practice, as indicated by one of the signs hung by Occupy members in one of the Kunstwerke showrooms: “This is not our museum, this is your action space.”

Linked to the Occupy movement in terms of similar politics, there is also what has been termed “semi-autonomous” art, a manifestation that goes beyond the confines of studio practices to focus on being active in the social field. Artists working on this vein, follow an ethic of action and commitment outside of the artworld, seeking to intervene in urgent issues in the public sphere, with all its complexity. Traces of these manifestations are occasionally exhibited in museums or conducted within the framework of other cultural institutions. This melding of art and life presents new forms of collective civic experience and is based on communication and exchange. It is known as “relational art,” “participatory art,” “community art,” or “socially engaged art,” among other names. According to Claire Bishop, socially engaged art opposes, in principle, political and aesthetic “spectacles,” favoring social participation as a guiding strategy. Beginning with the premise that “contemporary capitalism produces passive subjects with very little agency or empowerment,”⁵ participatory seek to stimulate the public and turn them away from the passive, private consumption of spectacle in favor of creating a shared space for collective social engagement through constructive or symbolic gestures that have social impact and create new alternatives.⁶ These works propose solutions for short term improvement, unlike more traditionally politicized art that opposes the status quo and reveals contradictory social truths.

The past decade consolidated an alliance in the field of cultural production between the states, corporations, the art market, and private sector.enterprise. In this context, the politicization of art may imply can involve the search for openings in order to affirm the (rapidly dwindling) public character of cultural institutions defending their autonomy (which they don’t really have) from the marketplace and from corporate patrons.⁷ An heir to what’s known as “Institutional Critique,” we have, for example, a recent project by visual artist Jonathan Hernández, which was vetoed by the head of the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. Hernández’s proposed contribution to “First Act” (2012) consisted of making available to the general public information about the Museum’s remodeling costs and of the exhibition production budgets. Blurring the line between civic duty (demanding transparency) and institutional critique (revealing the hegemonic interests behind the politics of the museum’s exhibitions), interventions of this kind seek to exacerbate the tensions between institutions, public opinion, and the art world at large.

_{_{Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll, 1970.}}

2. Contemporary Art and the Democratization of Culture

Being “contemporary,” art exists in the same temporal space as culture and has therefore been integrated into it. Culture is the social process through which we communicate meaning in order to understand the world, build identities, and define our values and beliefs. In the late 1990s, theorist Fredric Jameson argued that the social space was completely saturated with the image of culture.⁸ This is because in our professional and daily activities, as well as in the various forms of entertainment we enjoy, society consumes cultural products all the time. This characterizes the postmodern “cultural turn” diagnosed by Jameson, which was further elaborated by George Yúdice upon observing (in 2003) that the uses of culture had undergone an unprecedented expansion not just in the marketplace but also along social, political, and economic lines. According to Yúdice, since the states and corporations already utilize culture as a tool as they search for economic and sociopolitical betterment—for instance,in peacefully resolving violence and crime, reconstructing the social fabric, transforming society, creating jobs, increasing civic participation, and so forth—culture has become a resource.⁹ In Mexico, for example, one of the priorities of the National Action Party (PAN) was “the development and democratization of culture.” The government invested an unprecedented amount of money in producing, disseminating, and managing culture, inviting and even facilitating the participation of corporate and private sponsors, collaborating with the art market by investing in the Zona MACO art fair, and in general implementing an official program to guide the symbolic development and satisfy the demand for cultural and creative assets.¹⁰

The notion of “democratizing culture” is inspired by the definition of culture set forth by the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. According to this declaration, culture plays a crucial role in social and economic development, since the cultural and creative industries generate jobs and income and attract investment.¹¹ The directives of the global consensus on the functionality of culture as a democratizing entity establish a link between cultural freedom, cultural promotion, and democracy, with the goal of expanding individual choices, encouraging the active participation of the people, respecting other cultures, promoting the freedom to choose one’s own identity (and to respect the identity of others), and so forth. Despite the high expectations we might have regarding the value of culture, however, the effects and benefits of showing politicized art and organizing cultural discussions and exchanges are unpredictable.

The relationship between the cultural and political spheres (that is, the instrumentalization of culture in the name of politics) is nothing new. Yet according to Yúdice, UNESCO’s cultural projects, globalized civil society, governments, NGOs, the market, cultural managers, and those who work in cultural and creative industries have brought about an unprecedented transformation in our understanding of culture and what we do on its behalf.¹² This transformation brings up a well-worn contradiction between the trivialization of cultural products to serve the mass consumer market, which is seen as something negative, and the process of cultural democratization, which is seen as something positive. In transcending this contradiction, I am interested in explicating why art (subsumed to the demands of the cultural and creative industries, subsidized by the state, market, and corporations) is considered a privileged field of politicization and even an integral part of political action and voice when it comes to anti-hegemonic practices. What are the implications of this for committed, autonomous art?

_{_{Andrea Bowers, Educate, Agitate, Organize, 2011. These three verbs evoke the title of a 1918 text by the feminist, socialist, and suffragist Dora B. Montefiore, which asserts that Marxists aim to “help the people to crystallize their scattered atoms of rebellion into intelligent, ordered, insistent demand, backed up by political and industrial action.}}

3. Art with Political Purpose: Art and Social Movements

In her 1968 essay “The Crisis in Culture,” Hannah Arendt argues that true art has no purpose and is useless and therefore not a part of political action.¹³ According to Arendt, art and politics are two separate spheres, since political action or “speaking out” necessarily implies means or ends, while art is autonomous and needs no justification. When art has political aims, it becomes propaganda (for example, socialist realism under Stalin’s regime). For Arendt, what art and politics have in common is that both are “carried out”—to use a term posterior to Arendt—in the public sphere. With the advent of industrialized culture, however, once mass society became interested in cultural values and began to monopolize culture for its own ends, transforming cultural values into exchangeable values, a fusion between art and politics occurred in the greater cultural sphere.¹⁴ From this moment on, modernism’s political project of transforming the world by means of criticism, subversion, transgression, transformation, and negativity took its place within postmodernism at the very center of society.

The fusion of art and politics in the cultural sphere takes place within the domain of the Infosphere (also referred to as the “media landscape” or the “field of perception”), which can be defined as the layers of communication that comprise the social system. These include the internet, society, culture, means of mass communication, and symbolic and affective regimes. Within the Infosphere, cultural currents flow across cultural space, changing the language and forms of self-representation and the meaning of reality.¹⁵ Culture is, therefore, a significant sphere of production that manages to multiply meanings by mobilizing a whole system of overlapping cultural references and generating, on one hand, economic surplus, and on the other, social life—its forms and styles. In the context of the Infosphere, it has been said that political activism implies spreading and sharing the desire to change lifestyles, and that social movements are the vehicles for spreading desires and implementing changes.¹⁶

Neoliberal policies tend to erode ways of life. For this reason, contemporary social movements haven’t been triggered by problems of wealth distribution or antagonism between the working and wealthy classes (as was the case in the previous century) but rather by concerns regarding the grammar of forms of life: quality of life, equality, individual self-realization, democracy (participation and transparency when it comes to both the media and the government), human rights, the environment, anti-globalization, security, and so forth.¹⁷ With this in mind, Brian Holmes observed that social movements necessarily incorporate a matrix of four convergent elements: art, scientific research and critical theory, media, and politics (self-organization). This implies that social movements are built within society’s cultural sphere. On one hand, creativity and culture lie at the heart of the struggles that social movements engage in, because their primary means are information and communication technology, which are instrumental when it comes to challenging existing power structures and creating alternative means of dialogue. On the other, we have to consider that politics has become a question of epistemology, a means of expression and a technique for making certain topics intelligible—topics which gain relevance the more visible they are in the media and sociopolitical fields, enabling them to mobilize emotions such as fear, insecurity, indignation, and anger. Political work involves not only the creation of new forms of life, but also the modification of what is visible in the Infosphere in order to shape political “forms of consciousness” (adding, deconstructing, denouncing, diverting signs, codifying and decodifying). However, while being “counter-hegemonic,” these interventions favor the power structure. How? On one hand, if we consider Jodi Dean’s a crucial distinction between politics practiced in the Infosphere and politics exercised institutionally. This distinction brings to light the abysmal disconnect between committed criticism and national strategy, between politics as a means of circulating content and politics as official policy. It could even be argued that politics as a means of circulating content benefits the power structure under the logic of repressive tolerance (freedom of expression is a sign of a healthy democracy): messages are contributions to the circulation of content, not actions seeking answers, and the exchange value of messages overtakes their use value.¹⁸ On the other hand, in terms similar to those used by Brian Holmes, Chris Kraus suggests that the consequence of fusing art with daily life is that art is the final frontier for vindicating the desire to live differently.¹⁹ Nevertheless, conceiving of social movements and politicized art as vehicles for changing forms of life is problematic because it implies the subsumption of social and economic criticism into art criticism in proposing solutions for short-term improvements. It runs the risk of reducing politicized art to a simple beautification program in gentrified neighborhoods, museological factories, and corporate parks. Changing forms of life is not about creating a reality antagonistic to the prevailing one, because it perpetuates the blockage of what could be. To modify forms ways of life instead of building a distinct reality—negating the established way of life, its institutions, its material and intellectual culture, its liberal morality, its forms of work and entertainment—is self-repression. Constructing a reality that differs from the current one, requires opening an enabling channel for society to intervene directly in political matters, the ability to veto the government’s neoliberal plans, and to offer alternatives to the current social orders of exploitation and political and economic exclusion.²⁰ The problem is that the bourgeois state of law and its institutions—which are the pillars supporting prevailing neoliberal economics and ideology—are the sacred cows which remain untouchable. What must be taken into account is that some recent social movements have been fighting to maintain their ways of life—their privileges—rather than to change them.²¹

_{_{Screening of Francis Alys’ Reel Unreel, 2011, at the ruins of the Behzad Cinema in Kabul, 2012.}}

4. For a Committed, Autonomous Art

Besides artistic production that is at the center of social movements (along with communication, critical theory, and self-organization, as we have seen), there is autonomous art—that is, art that is not created specifically to serve social movements or causes. More than other forms or expressions (with the possible exception of film and theater), art that is produced for museums or biennials occupies a privileged space of politicization, while simultaneously being intimately linked to neoliberal processes. By this I mean that today art plays the twin roles of compensating and reducing the effects of neoliberalism, while at the same time actively participating in the new forms of predatory economics and geopolitical power distribution, thus contributing to the transition to the New World Order.²² How so? By being at the center of population displacement processes in impoverished urban areas in order to renovate them and generate capital (in other words, gentrification), and by abetting speculation and urban marketing, branding, and cultural engineering. Cultural engineering embodies corporate and government interference in the design and form of living spaces, because it means developing projects with the goal of constructing realities in which culture acts as a fundamental element of innovation, dynamism, and individual and social welfare. For example, culture has been used to revive economically depressed areas, develop educational strategies, and design social spaces. By being present in every corner of the world as an instrument of intervention and improvement—and to promote liberal values—contemporary art also helps normalize neoliberal policies. A recent example of this is the extension of dOCUMENTA (13) to Kabul. In this case, “culture” came before the fighting ceased, before the NGOs and other foreign companies arrived to rebuild and install civil infrastructure, fiber optics, security and surveillance devices, among other things. This sort of thing is possible because cultural expressions are easily integrated into the global panorama of states of emergency, militarized zones, and permanent war, which have become the norm in the early twenty-first century.

When it comes to contemporary art, we must also consider that the bourgeois order that sustains the economy—along with the internal conditions of producing, exhibiting, and consuming art—are strictly taboo: untouchable by even the artists considered most radical.²³ This is because contemporary art is a playground for corrupt opportunism, speculation, and manipulation, a place where Darwinian competitiveness has created a work force that will never achieve solidarity.²⁴ In this context, the profile of the artist as an antisocial radical has softened, giving way to a new, affirmative image of an enterprising artist in and of himself, able to solve problems in a nonlinear, creative manner.²⁵ As such, the contemporary artist embodies the figure of the precarious, entrepreneurial worker, the manager of his own human capital, freelancing from project to project. We must also take into account that society disproportionally rewards A-List artists, curators, and other cultural producers in a way not unlike it rewards managers or CEOs of massive corporations, conferring on them direct membership in the new oligarchy.

To conclude, could politicized art, as Hito Steyerl argues, as art that focuses not on what it shows but on what art does and how it does it.²⁶ To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, it’s not a question of making political art or film; it’s about making art or film politically. With regard to the politics of the field of art, however, what prevails is the diluted and domesticated version of 1970s institutional critiques—for example, Jonathan Hernández’s rejected piece, or the phrase coined by the Tercerounquinto art collective: “No artist can resist a $50,000 cannon blast,” which was supposedly carved into a wall at the Museo Amparo. Another example is Adriana Lara’s 2006 work Artfilm I: Ever Present—Yet Ignored, which shows several young people meandering through an art gallery while hearing a voiceover reflecting on the conditions of producing contemporary art (it is a consumer’s market, it is not politically effective, artists today are mainly interested in their own emotions). These two works arose through the ironic self-reflexivity of the conditions of producing art, reiterating the predominance of an enlightened false consciousness and propagating the ideology of cynical reason: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.”²⁷It becomes clear that the state of contemporary art is quite different from what gave rise to institutional critique in the 1970s, which was focused on examining the subjection of art to ideological interests.²⁸ Unlike forty years ago, institutions today are more opaque, more exclusive, and they share objectives intrinsically linked to corporate, neoliberal agendas (to the point that those agendas have become invisible). Cultural institutions are the administrative organs of the dominant order, and cultural producers actively contribute to the transmission of free market ideology across all aspects of our lives.²⁹

Therefore, a genuinely radical approach within the field of art would mean going beyond politically correct art—art that’s satisfied with the system of galleries, grants, and markets, and with serving as the government’s official showcase. For example, the exhibition “A partir de mañana: todo” (“From tomorrow: everything”)—which touched on the theme of the subversion of the hegemonic contents of information as a launching pad for emancipation—took place at the Modern Art and Digital Cultural Center Estela de Luz, the controversial monument commemorating the Bicentennial (of the Mexican Independence and Revolution in 2010). The allegedly “politicized” works in the exhibition find themselves perfectly comfortable in the exhibition space hosting them.

Dissatisfied with competing under the terms laid down by the creative and cultural industries, the production of committed autonomous art would be posited as a precarious working site and would reawaken the hostility between society and culture rather than placating it with pseudo-political products for self-indulgent consumption. It would be an “undemocratic” form of art in that it would not align itself with the neoliberal ideal of political freedom. Addressing everyone, it would release itself from the circulation of content, interrupting it, communicating nothing. It would oppose the visibility of what the system declares as extant (power controls what’s heard and what’s seen, and therefore does not need to employ censorship). Politicized autonomous art would make visible that which does not exist from a different point of view, spreading the contagious attitude of those who have nothing to either gain or lose.

This text is an indirect reply to Cuauhtémoc Medina in the context of my blog Comité Invisible Jaltenco. See →.

1 Forms of life unite characteristics that are essential to a particular socioeconomic formation. For example, a form of labor is reflected in a particular form of life. The form of life produced by one’s choices is one’s “lifestyle,” which involves creating one’s own subjectivity by consuming semiotic products.

2 Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood, “Breaking the Contract,” e-flux journal 37 (September 2012). See →.

3 The term “autonomous, committed art” refers to Theodor W. Adorno’s retort to Jean-Paul Sartre’s text on the autonomy and commitment of art in his essay, “What is Literature?” in “What is Literature?” What is Literature? And Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar (Cambridge Mass. Harvard University Press, 1988) See also: Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment” (1962) New Left Review I/87-68 (September-December 1974)

4 Julian Stallabrass, “Art as Radical Camouflage” New Left Review, 77 (September–October 2012)

5 Claire Bishop, “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?” in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2001, ed. Nato Thompson (New York and Cambridge: Creative Time and MIT Press, 2012), 34–46.

6 Ibid.

7 See Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Camaradas ocultistas, escondidos, opacados (Respuesta de Cuauhtémoc Medina al CIJ),” available online at→.

8 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (Brooklyn: Verso, 1998), 111.

9 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2004).

10 Everything seems to indicate that Ernesto Peña Nieto’s government will continue with the policies of cultural engineering and management set forth by his predecessor, Felipe Calderón.

11 See “Plan Nacional de Desarrollo” from the Felipe Calderón government, 2007–2011, 3.8, Objetivo 21. Available online at →.

12 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era.

13 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 197–226.

14 Ibid.

15 Tiziana Terranova, “Communication Beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information,” Social Text 80, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Fall 2004)

16 Brian Holmes: “Eventwork: The Fourfold Matrix of Contemporary Social Movements,” in Living as Form, ed. Nato Thompson (New York: Creative Time, 2012), 73.

17 Jürgen Habermas, “New Social Movements” Telos vol. no. 49 (September 1981): 33–37. A project we can evoke here is Tania Bruguera’s “Immigrant Movement International” in Queens, New York and sponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art. It consists of a long-term project in the form of a sociopolitical movement initiated by the artist, whose venue is a community space in the largely immigrant neighborhood of Corona, Queens. Bruguera suscribes to the principle of “useful art,” which aims “to transform some spaces in society through art, transcending symbolic representation or metaphor and meeting with their activity some deficits in reality.” A complimentary project is the “Immigrant Party,” which functions as a political party. Bruguera’s problem with action—other than (provocatively) referring to art as merely utilitarian—is that the political formation of both the immigrant and the political party are obsolete forms of political representation. In this sense, I believe that the task that Brian Holmes entrusted to social movements (to propose and implement new forms of life) is more akin to the current historic and socioeconomic moment (though not unproblematic).

18 Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2005): 51–74. Available online at →.

19 Chris Kraus, Where Art Belongs (New York: Semiotext(e), 2011).

20 See Raquel Gutiérrez, “The Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Brief Reflections Regarding How We Have Come to Know Emancipatory Struggles and the Significance of the Term Social Emancipation,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111 No.1 (2012): 51–64.

21 Slavoj Zizek, “Capitalism”, Financial Times, November 2012. Available online at →. We must not, however, underestimate the predominance of “content policy,” an example of which is the use of Twitter during Israel’s recent Gaza operations. The Israeli Defense Forces have a large department dedicated to managing its own online social profiles and monitoring those of Hamas. The war against Gaza last November also took place on Twitter. One minute, the account linked to Hamas, @AlQassamBrigades, announces that it has launched a rocket. Only minutes later, the @IDFSpokesperson responds that it has been intercepted. Thousands (or perhaps millions) sent messages of support, both this way and that. See Verónica Calderón, “La propaganda militar en 140 caracteres,” El País, November 20, 2012. Available online at →.

22 Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: e-flux journal and Sternberg Press, 2012).

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Gregory Sholette, “Speaking Clown to Power: Can We Resist the Historic Compromise of Neoliberal Art?” Available online at →.

26 Slavoj Zizek, “Cynicism as a Form of Ideology” from The Sublime Object of Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1989) Available online→

27 Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy.”

28 Institutional critique in the 1970s involved the politicization of conceptual strategies in order to reveal how institutional interests—mediated by economic and ideological interests—frame and define the production, interpretation, and visual experience of the artistic object. Drawing on theories developed by the Frankfurt School and by poststructuralism, institutional critique examined the subjection of art to ideological interests, recontextualizing aesthetic practices within their own ideological backing, linking social and ideological interests with cultural practices focused on the process of masking and neutralizing culture through “repressive tolerance.” See Benjamin Buchloh, et. al, “1971,” in Art Since 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 545–549.

29 See Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies, Jakob Jakobsen, “There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate Publishing and Afterall, 2007).

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer, scholar, and translator based in Mexico City.

Intelligent Discomfort

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:24:09 +0100

Originally in Mousse #35

Graciela Carnevale, Entrapment and Escape, 1968
Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Carlos Militello

Intelligent Discomfort

by Claire Bishop and Julia Bryan-Wilson

For the last decade, art historian and critic Claire Bishop has been unafraid to court controversy—her smart, sharply written opinions about everything from installation to collaboration are widely taught, cited, and debated. Her new book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso 2012), a sweeping reassessment of participation as an ideologically diverse crux of 20th century art, is sure to generate further discussion. For this interview, I asked Claire to have a conversation with me in real-time via live chat, rather than conducting it as a series of stiff, but more controllable, email volleys. She gamely agreed, so in July 2012 we sat down at our computers (she was in Paris, I was in Oakland). What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our dialogue.

Julia Bryan-Wilson: I want to start by asking you about your writing process. How did you move from shorter, more polemical, critical pieces (like your well-known October article “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”) to this longer, more art historical book?

Claire Bishop: The “Antagonism” essay was turned around very quickly after the end of my PhD thesis; it was always intended as a free-standing polemic, which I incorporated into the installation art book. This book has its core in the “Social Turn” essay/polemic in Artforum in 2006, and I knew I had to do something longer as I got so much flak for it. I felt there was a longer, non-canonical history to write around these issues, but I didn’t know at the start that it was going to turn into a cross-20th century epic.

jbw: You draw, for me very interestingly, on theatre and performance to rewrite that history.

cb: I had often talked with friends about what it would mean to teach 20th century art through the lens of theatre, with Brecht in the place of Greenberg. It became my modest alternative to thinking 20th century art through theatre/performance, rather than through painting (the usual way it’s taught) or the ready-made.

jbw: You start with Futurism, which as you note is also where classical “performance art” texts often begin; this is meant to re-orient the history of avant-garde art by making those actions central rather than a side note.

cb: Yes, Futurism is the starting point. This is my overlap with RoseLee Goldberg, but what’s important about that first chapter on the historic avant-garde is that it shows how three totally different political positions can underpin participatory art—thereby disrupting the conventional assumption that participation is always leftist.

jbw: Those ideological differences are crucial, as you look at proto-fascist participation, communist participation, anarchist participation, etc. You also discuss Augusto Boal and other major touchstones for performance studies who are not as influential within art history as, say Brecht. For you, is there still a disciplinary divide between performance scholars trained in theatre history, and art historians working on performance art?

cb: This is the first question that Carrie Lambert-Beatty asked me at my book launch in New York!

jbw: I swear we did not plan that!

cb: Let me see if I can answer it better this time round. For me there is a lot of overlap in terms of method, but at the end of the day, the works that I privilege are by people who identify themselves firstly as visual artists; I could have included many more individuals or companies who deal with participation today, like Rimini Protokoll, but they don’t raise the same issues as those working in a visual art context.

jbw: Well, the lines between performance and visual art are becoming, institutionally, very blurry; i.e. the emphasis on performance in this year’s Whitney Biennial, and more recently its integration at the Tate Modern.
cb: I agree the lines are getting blurred. So the question for me is: why is this happening? On the one hand, I think there’s a dissatisfaction with object-based art (and this has been true across the 20th century, we’re just having another moment). On the other hand, museums have entered event culture, where performance has cachet and excitement.

jbw: It is also a way for museums to cross-promote with industries like fashion or cinema, potentially.

cb: In some institutions, definitely.

jbw: You mention the Marina Abramovic/Los Angeles MOCA stir-up from fall 2011—an expensive museum gala that featured the heads of silent performers as “centrepieces.” That was an event that crystallized, for some people, a distasteful merging of spectacle, art, and publicity on the backs of underpaid volunteers.

cb: It was clearly a dreadfully ill-conceived event, but I disagree with Yvonne Rainer’s criticism of the work. For Rainer, it was a question of payment: these performers were getting only $150 for their participation. Yet focusing on this removes attention from the fact that it’s actually just a weak work. Moreover, in the context of the art/performance world, $150 is actually not bad pay at all. The art world in general relies on unpaid interns—at any one moment, the Guggenheim New York has over 150 unpaid interns. If we want to talk finance, this is more shocking to me than Abramovic’s performers getting paid $150. The work would be no better if the artist was paying them $500—it would still be a bad idea, a self-exploitation of her reputation for the service of LA MOCA celebrity fund-raising.

jbw: I was drawn to your brief descriptions of participants who enjoy being on display, despite (or because of) being “used.” Can you say more about the “fetishized disavowal” (as you put it) of self-exploitation? It’s important to recognize, too, that many people who participate in what you call “delegated performance” get something out of their participation, something that is not necessarily financial or exceeds the dollar amounts that are transacted.

cb: Yes, on the whole I would say that people enjoy their own self-exploitation in a work of art, and this is totally overlooked in discussions of this type of performance. It’s something I only worked out by interviewing participants and organizing these projects myself. I would be constantly checking with performers to make sure they were ok, comfortable, not too bored, etc. But people love being in a work of art, especially in a gallery. It fuels a certain narcissistic recognition.

jbw: Twice you mention BDSM as an alternative paradigm for thinking through this issue. Can you say more about how you see BDSM as a framework for differently processing both pain and pleasure, and how that might extend to participatory art?

cb: Ha! Well spotted. For me, BDSM and comedy provide two other frameworks for thinking about what bodies can say/do in space. There is a lot of moralistic discussion around contemporary art, but comedy also manages to say, very sharp, poignant, transgressive, politically acute things in a way that is highly pleasurable. And in a different way, the ‘scenes’ that people get into in BDSM are also (for them) highly pleasurable, even though they have no relationship to their actual desire to be dominated (for example) in daily life. Both are areas of experience that suspend the everyday, but also participate in it—they have the double ontology that I see as crucial to participatory art.

jbw: Sure, it is about power, and a play with power inequality—this fuels both the danger and the delight.

cb: Would you agree? This is something I’m just starting to think about, which is why they are just tentative asides in the book.

jbw: It was a tantalizing suggestion, but too brief. Sometimes when academics talk about BDSM, it becomes an overly romanticized site of resistance. BDSM culture has the potential to be normative, or stultifying, but you’re talking about acknowledging the complexities of power dynamics. And to clarify, when you mean comedy, do you mean stand-up?

cb: Yes. Performa did a whole series of stand up comedy nights last year. Not totally successful, but it got me thinking.

jbw: Do you have favorites in the realm of stand-up? Lenny Bruce? Aziz Ansari?

cb: I’m not really very knowledgeable about comedy, but debates in the UK about, for example, Ricky Gervais making pedophilia jokes, have always interested me and suggested some kind of analogy with art as a legitimate space for transgression. What do you make of all these discussions around ‘useful art’? I’m thinking of Tania Bruguera, or the last Berlin Biennial by Artur Z.mijewski.

jbw: The Berlin Biennial is very easy to criticize, and so everyone is criticizing it. My main feeling was that it was, beyond all the other problems, just uninteresting to look at. Purely at the level of what there was to see, it was extremely banal.

cb: This is what happens when a desire for utility overtakes a reflection on representation. Z.mijewski’s work in the early 2000s was very successful at balancing these—so it was disappointing to see him become so evangelical about instrumentalisation and outcomes. However, I had a wonderful day there, and had perhaps a very atypical experience: I went around the Kunstwerke, then met Joanna Warsza the co-curator, who talked me through the more oblique pieces, plus all the theatre events I hadn’t seen. Then I went to the other venues and my day culminated in the Elizabeth-Kirche painting on the wall alongside Pawel Althamer as the sun set. It was perfect. It made me realise that they should have abandoned the exhibition form altogether and just stuck to the events, which (although I didn’t see any) seemed the strongest part of the program.

jbw: Your day sound lovely, which was not at all how it was for me. I went on a soggy, grey morning, and the only thing happening in the Occupy space was that a guy was taking a nap on the ground. This discrepancy between our experiences brings up a serious issue. In your book, you narrate a personal encounter with a Hirschhorn piece, with all its unruliness and rambunctious, uncontained energies. You are quite self-conscious that your writing about that work was dependent upon being there, to see how loose and challenging the events were. In hindsight, things tend to get cleaned up. I wonder if some of the participatory events you are less sympathetic to, ones that occurred in the past, were just as rangy and full of failures. In other words, all we have for some of those historical events are sanitized accounts. Some level of messiness is intrinsic to this art, and that is not always acknowledged in your book. Does that make sense?

cb: Absolutely.This is true, but I do think that the best works give a hint of that mess, or indicate something surplus to the artists’ own account. Even the fact that no one was moved to write something interesting about the work might tell us something (i.e. confirm) our suspicion that it wasn’t perhaps that interesting. For me two things come out of this: one is about historical research into the past—if no archive/response exists, can we make the audience an archive? The other is about writing in the present, as a critic—can we find other voices by which to document these works so that they don’t have to rely on yet more bad digital photographs, which fail to capture the complexity of a durational experience? This type of project-based work challenges our method as art historians and critics.

jbw: How important was it to you that this was a book about history, about digging into those archives? What do you think about the argument that there is a major divide between art historical and art critical writing?

cb: I go back and forward on this one. Most of the time I think that all good historical writing has a critical agenda, and all good critical writing has a historical agenda. Then there are flashpoints when I realise they don’t overlap so well. After the relational aesthetics article I realised that I had acted too much as a critic, and shot myself in the foot as an art historian: none of that generation of artists would talk to me for five years. Which is not great if you’re researching contemporary art.

jbw: Really? Five years?

cb: More or less. It was as if the boys ganged up on me, and I had to develop different strategies.

jbw: That brings up, tangentially, another question. Claire, are you a feminist? Or, to ask a different way, are feminist theory and feminist politics important to you? There is so little on gender in this book.
cb: I would say of course I am a feminist, and clearly one who builds on the achievements of previous generations of feminists. But I don’t think it’s that useful or interesting to make identity issues a feature of a book about participatory art in 2012. I am more interested in class, not least because this is a primary preoccupation of participatory art since its inception. I don’t want to add in female artists for the sake of it; on the other hand, I am also keen to promote those who don’t have the visibility and success of their male peers, which is why there is always a female artist on the covers of my books.

jbw: That makes sense, but it is also the case that so much participation art was pioneered via the feminist art movement.

cb: In the US; not so much in Europe, I feel.

jbw: I do recognize your strategic decision to not engage with North America. But Mary Kelly was doing projects with women workers in the UK in the 1970s, and someone like Argentine Graciela Carnevale was dealing with feminist concerns.

cb: Tell me how you see Carnevale’s work as feminist?

jbw: Issues of confinement, especially in a room situation (as in her Entrapment and Escape from 1968), for me are linked to questions of the domestic just as much as to institutional critique.

cb: In general, I confess I feel exhausted by identity politics in US academia—endless PhDs that produce an unimpeachable feminist or post-colonial reading… These were essential moments that had to take place—politically, intellectually and theoretically—but I have no desire to repeat them in my own work. I want to operate more covertly, but I’m aware that this risks not being seen at all.

jbw: But feminism is bigger than “US identity politics.”

cb: Please continue!

jbw: Feminism contains all sorts of theoretical, philosophical, and political possibilities, including a critique of how class and gender are co-articulated, and so is not limited to demanding to see more women artists in exhibitions. It’s about labor, and reproduction, and the public/private divide, and political economy…

cb: But these are not exclusively feminist issues… and I would say I am interested in all of these, just not through a feminist lens.

jbw: Fair enough. Let’s talk about something else, which is that I tracked the approving adjectives you use in Artificial Hells.

cb: Don’t tell me—compelling, troubling…

jbw: Yes. Others that come up are “difficult” and “poignant,” both of which are resonant terms, but challenging to pin down.
cb: One of the reasons why the book is called Artificial Hells is that I wanted to hold onto the value of a type of art (discussed by Breton) that is not afraid to be experimental and contradictory and which may not be recognised as important in its own time (like the Paris Dada season in spring 1921). This work might set something in motion that would be later recognised and picked up by subsequent generations… Breton refers to these experiments, if I remember rightly, as ‘delicious’ in their hellishness. Another idea I wanted to pick up on is the production of affect. Poignancy is about being touched—an affect that goes beyond commonsensical approval or disapproval (the ethical regime I am always criticising). In short, it’s an appeal for socially engaged art to be affective, and not just effective.

jbw: Failure is also a big theme in the book. How would you define failure?

cb: With this kind of work that deals with the social realm, there are clearly two types of failure: failure as a social project (failure to change a situation), and failure as a work of art.

jbw: I am curious what it means to you for a work of art to fail.

cb: At heart I’m an old-fashioned romantic, like most avant-gardists, for whom the worst thing is to be bored. Just spare me banality. For me, failure is banality, because we are surrounded by banality.

jbw: In part I agree with you, but we are also too surrounded by the “extreme.” Some pause in that frenzy can be welcome. However,
I guess I would term it modesty, not banality.

cb: Of course I love works of art that do boredom in fascinating new ways, like On Kawara or Bruce Nauman. I love economy in a work of art—concision is fantastic.
jbw: I have a funny anecdote for you. I taught your article “The Social Turn” in a class at UC Irvine, and a student asked, “So, does Claire Bishop just think good art is people getting shot?” Because he understood it to mean that you wanted Major Discomfort. And then one week later I ran into you at the Venice Biennale, and I asked you what your favorite piece so far was in the show, and you mentioned…

cb: Tania Bruguera!

jbw: Yes, and she had just played Russian roulette—perfectly confirming what my student thought.

cb: That was a terrible experience… I couldn’t talk to her for months afterwards, Tania gave a lecture on what it means to be a political artist, and at the end of every page (there were about five in total) she picked up a gun, held it to her head, and fired. Each time it was a blank, but on the last one she pointed it to the ceiling and fired, and it was a real bullet. The room was completely hysterical: I remember Rainer Ganahl and Alfredo Jaar begging the curator to make her stop. I was incapacitated with horror.

But this was not in my view a good work of art. It was too sensationalist and moreover idiotically dangerous; it was entirely about the bullets and not the content of the lecture. What good is a dead political artist? So tell your student that it has to be intelligent discomfort. It has to stimulate ideas, thoughts, feelings… not just sensationalist panic.

jbw: One final question—given the trajectory outlined in your book, what did you make of the way that dOCUMENTA (13) featured participatory pieces and performance alongside object-based works? Does this Documenta seem like a culmination of some of the trends you consider, such as outsourcing and re-skilling?

cb: This was definitely a Documenta that reflected a wide range of current trends in contemporary art: the archival impulse (old-fashioned vitrines galore), the rehabilitation of marginal modernists, high-budget video, performance, social practice, research-based art, and of course participatory art. It’s characteristic that most of the participatory work was either therapeutic in orientation (Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium, Raimundas Malašauskas’s pavilion where I got hypnotized, the And And And workshop with clay and poetry that I stumbled into at the back of the Bahnhof, even Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theatre or escapist entertainment (from the utopianism of Gareth Moore’s totalitarian hippie enclave to Michael Portnoy’s crazy futuristic game show, or the community assembling in Theaster Gates house, or even Tino Sehgal’s song and dance routines in the dark). So according to this Documenta, participation today is either therapeutic, or escapist entertainment—and fully integrated into an exhibition structure, for better or worse.

Tania Bruguera, Self- sabotage (Autosabotage), 2009
Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Cesar Delgado Wixen

Jill Magid at the Influencers Festival 2012 (CCCB, Barcelona)....

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:21:25 +0100

Jill Magid at the Influencers Festival 2012 (CCCB, Barcelona). Part 1 of 7

The Good Life (a guided tour), by Katleen Vermeir and...

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:07:29 +0100

The Good Life (a guided tour), by Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans

The Good Life (a guided tour) (2009), is a meditation on the inextricable relationship between institutions of contemporary art and the wider structure of the economy, harnessed today by the ‘creative class’. The video takes the form of a guided tour around an unspecified contemporary art institution, in a future scenario where it is selling off its building to be transformed into luxury apartments. The depicted institution – itself an uncanny ‘collage’ of four existing major European institutions -, is utilizing is assets, promising major regeneration to its host city. (Nav Haq, curator Arnolfini, Bristol).

Markus Miessen at Witte de With

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:59:03 +0100

Markus Miessen at Witte de With

Video

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:55:13 +0100

The Ghosts of Participation Past

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:03:48 +0200

The Ghosts of Participation Past:

Claire Bishop’s new book, Artificial Hells, considers the history of participation as an organising principle of avant-garde art, but also of liberal democracy. Review by Josephine Berry Slater Nearly 400 pages long, bearing an arresting title

Photo

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:34:12 +0100

Markus Miessen on The Nightmare of Participation (lecture)

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:56:59 +0100

Markus Miessen on The Nightmare of Participation (lecture)

Paradox or the element of discord, by Sonia Fernández Pan

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:24:00 +0100

Originally in A-DESK

Paradox or the element of discord

Politics, art and the surprises of their relationship

SONIA FERNÁNDEZ PAN

Politics, art, reality, discord and fiction. In a social and global context dominated by day-to-day economic and political uncertainty it is pertinent to question the role of art, its connections with politics and with the sphere of capital. What artistic practices are political? How does one define the political in art?

In thinking about the effects of the link between politics and art, as with any relation of two elements, a third enters into the conflictive relationship to grant a dose of necessary discord: the paradox. In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière already made it very clear with the explicit title of one of the chapters of this highly recommendable essay: “The paradoxes of political art”. That art and politics maintain an intimate relationship is by no means an inflammatory statement, although at times it is necessary to remember this. Equally it is by no means original to deduce that variations arise out of the ties of intimacy that are embedded within the disorder of conflict.

As Rancière summarises one of the celebrated and criticised paradigms that modernity installed was the subversive power of art. A paradigm, that fell into an apparent state of hibernation to return with force - and with some complex contradictions – to the quadrilateral of aesthetic forms. According to the French thinker, the current exercise of re-politicizing art carries with it an uncertainty that is based on two concise questions that are hard to answer: what is art? And if that wasn’t enough, what is politics? Such generic questions however won’t accept generic answers. In any case, they serve, as catalysts that lance new questions or to dust off old questions. It is true that in the last few years we have seen a revival of art as a public territory for contesting the strategies of ideological and economic domination to which the capitalist system has led us to become more or less accustomed. The first of the contradictions derived from this is that, like capitalism, art – as part of the same – assumes this acceptance and metabolization of critique, with the result that it is favourable to the democratic showcase with which it presents itself. As if both permit detraction in theory but not with any form of effective practice that might risk compromising both models. What is more, bearing in mind, the permissiveness frequently related to anything artistic (particularly by those who aren’t directly involved with it) wouldn’t the very artistic condition of art invalidate it as the territory for a politically critical aesthetic? At this point, art is like madness; everything that is pronounced is not taken seriously because irredeemably it is presented like – as well as being – art.

The usual tendency is to consider political any artistic practices whose content pertains to any order of social protest. This in passing also resuscitates the mimetic model that seemed so obsolete at this point in the history of art. In this case the paradox arises once again and knocks twice at the door. On the one hand, thinking for example of documentary photography, it is assumed erroneously by the law of cause and effect that the spectator will become indignant just because any content shown, operating with the same technology, is indignant. Frequently what happens is a formal and symbolic aestheticization of the represented tragedy is accompanied by a possible individual confusion, more than any collective commotion that transcends the exhibition rooms. On the other hand, and still with the stance of the spectator and by extension to other possible publics, another contradiction emerges which is that of the consensus of the audience. If we think of all those who turn to art with an analytical and attentive gaze fixed on their pocket, beyond the tourist dynamics of artistic productions as the motor of cultural industries and the visitors who have nothing better to do on a rainy weekend, the ideological consensus is a patent reality. To put it another way, art is not telling us anything that we don’t know or that we are not already in tacit agreement with. It is here where the political as a sphere of dissent encounters the general consent that places the artist as the ambassador of a doctrine assimilated by all as “the best of all possible arts”. Practicing an disjunctive syllogism that, in irony is worth trying out, the conclusion would be the following: in an artistic context where the content or the political perspective of the same were the dominant tendency, and where the political is understood as a form of dissent from the established, a political art, would paradoxically be that which was not explicitly tied to the representation of the political. Such a syllogism could even be applied to a real case: the photographic work of Martin Parr within the context of the Magnum Agency, who once declared that he was no less political than his companions for not capturing war conflicts through his lens.

Despite a certain disenchantment, returning to the text whose title has led to this other, “The paradoxes of political art”, we find with Jacques Rancière, as a sort of “happy ending” within a tale driven by suspicion at the time of defining the link between the political and the aesthetic, that a specific function is underlined for art: the timely and symbolic subversion of very specific social links. If we admit his proposal that the real exists as a hegemonic and arbitrary fiction and that as such art like politics are already betrothed to each other for their flair for fiction at the time of opening new rifts in the earthquake of the real, then it is true that a political art would be capable of knocking down this dominant real.

However the paradox is tricky and poses new questions: how, within a context as codified as the art world, can a dominant fiction be undermined without these other possible fictions becoming a subterfuge? How does one make the symbolic and specific power of art, become a real and extensive power? What is more is it pertinent to demand of artistic practices that they subvert codes without beginning first with the context of art itself. Who reproduces the dynamics of a system that is so critical and yet seems to forget the fact just because the visible part of museums presents a political aesthetic? That said each conceptual marriage needs a discordant third, the all-purpose paradox in this union of the political with aesthetic forms.

Claire Bishop | Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:32:45 +0100

Originally in e-flux

Claire Bishop

Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art

The rise of participatory art since the 1990s invites us to constitute a history of this practice, ideally one that reflects the global spread of this work today.¹ In charting this history, important variants appear that challenge the dominant way of thinking about participatory art in Western Europe and North America, where this work tends to be positioned as a political, constructive, and oppositional response to the spectacle’s atomization of social relations. By contrast, the participatory art of Eastern Europe and Russia from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s is frequently marked by the desire for an increasingly subjective and privatized aesthetic experience. At first glance, this seems to be an inversion of the Western model (despite Guy Debord’s observation that bureaucratic communism is no less spectacular than its capitalist variant; it is simply “concentrated” as opposed to “diffused”).² However, and crucially, the individual experiences that were the target of participatory art under really existing socialism continue to be framed as shared privatized experiences: the construction of a collective artistic space amongst mutually trusting colleagues. Rather than frame this work as “implicitly political,” as is the habit with current Western approaches to Eastern bloc art history, this essay will argue that work produced under state socialism during these decades should rather be viewed in more complex terms. Given the saturation of everyday life with ideology, Soviet artists did not regard their work as political but rather as existential and apolitical, committed to ideas of freedom and the individual imagination. At the same time, they sought an expanded—one might say democratized—horizon of artistic production, in contrast to the highly regulated and hierarchized system of the Union of Soviet Artists.

_{_{Collective Actions, Appearances, Moscow, 13 March, 1976.}}

In the present essay, I want to focus on the Collective Actions Group, active in Moscow from the mid-1970s onwards, from the perspective of Western participatory art. Unlike many recent socially-engaged artists, for whom social participation in art denotes the inclusion of the working class, marginalized communities, or at least everyday non-professionals (rather than the artists’s friends and colleagues), the political context of the Collective Actions Group rendered such distinctions redundant. The impulse to collaborate with disenfranchised communities that we see so frequently today was a somewhat alien concept in the 1970s: under Cold War socialism, every citizen was (nominally at least) equal, a co-producer of the communist state. Class difference did not exist.³ Finding participants for one’s art was therefore a question of selecting reliable colleagues who would not inform on one’s activities. In an atmosphere of near constant surveillance and insecurity, participation was an artistic and social strategy to be deployed only amongst the most trusted groups of friends. The restrictions of life under Cold War communism do more than simply affect the question of who participates in art. They also govern the appearance of these works: materially frugal and temporally brief, many of these actions and events were located in the countryside, far away from networks of surveillance. The fact that many of these actions do not look like art is less an indication of the artists’s commitment to blurring “art and life” than a deliberate strategy of self-protection, as well as a reaction to the state’s own military displays and socialist festivals as a visual reference point; these events dissuaded artists from contrived displays of collective participation even if they had the resources to emulate them.⁴

_{_{Collective Actions, Appearances, Moscow, 13 March, 1976.}}

It is useful to remind ourselves that unofficial art began in Moscow in 1964, after Khrushchev visited the thirtieth anniversary show of the Moscow Union of Artists at the Manezh Gallery, which included a display of non-figurative, abstract paintings; Khrushchev declared these to be (among other things) “private psycho-pathological distortions of the public conscience.”⁵ The extent of his reaction led to the ever-increasing domestic isolation of independent artists and their being denied the right to show their works to the public in any place or form. And yet, despite being severely criticized and censured, unofficial art continued into the mid-1970s, when the first legal exhibitions took place and a shadow union for unofficial artists was set up (the Graphics Moscow City Committee). After the controversial Bulldozer exhibition of September 1974 (in which an exhibition of unofficial art was destroyed by bulldozer), cultural authorities decided to regulate and legalize their relationships with “underground” art via the State Committee for Security (KGB). Most unofficial art was exhibited inside private apartments, forcing a convergence of art and life that surpassed what the majority of twentieth-century avant-gardists had ever intended by this term. The phenomenon of “Apt-Art” (apartment art), an initiative by Nikita Alekseev, referred to exhibitions and performances taking place in private homes for small networks of trusted friends; Apt-Art flourished in the early 1980s.

It was in this context that the most celebrated of Moscow Conceptualists, Ilya Kabakov (b.1933), developed his personal work alongside his official job as a children’s book illustrator. Kabakov’s Albums (1972–75) are illustrated narratives, each revolving around one fictional character, most of whom are isolated, lonely, idiosyncratic figures on the margins of society, cocooned in a private dream world. The first, Sitting in the Closet Primakov, is typical in that it describes the life of a boy who sits in a dark closet and refuses to come out; when he does, he sees the world in terms of modernist abstract paintings. Each Album was accompanied by drawings and general comments on the character spoken by other fictional commentators. Crucially, these Albums were not read as books but were performed by the artist for small groups of friends. Boris Groys recalls that one would make an appointment with Kabakov (rather like organizing a studio visit) and go to his home, where the artist would place the book on a music stand and read the entire text in a neutral and unexpressive tone of voice. The experience was extremely monotonous but had a ritualistic quality in which the turning of the pages became central. Most readings took an hour, although Groys recalls once undergoing an eight-hour performance.⁶ One of the key points to emerge here is the use of a neutral, descriptive, analytical language focusing on the inconspicuous, the banal, and the marginal; another is that the stories are geared more towards invented forms of survival and endurance than of criticism; and another is the repeated motif of isolated individuals negotiating the endless and uncomfortable scrutiny of the communal apartment.⁷ All of these points provide an important contextual precursor for the work discussed in the remainder of this essay.

_{_{Kabakov in his studio presenting his Albums, 1972–75.}}

It is in this literary context, with a strong reverence for textual expression, that the Collective Actions Group (CAG) (Kollektivnye Deistvia, or K/D) was formed in 1976; at its inception there were four members; by 1979 there were seven; and in 2005 there were six.⁸ The group took its lead from the first generation of Moscow Conceptualists, especially Kabakov, whose installations implied characters and viewing subjects caught between “a communal body” and “an existential individualist.”⁹ The central theorist of CAG, Andrei Monastyrsky (b.1949), has recalled that their earliest pieces were perceived as a form of poetry reading. The group continues to produce around eight performances a year, although the character of this work has changed considerably since 1989: the actions are more complex, with more references to Eastern mysticism, and frequently make use of documentation (especially tape recordings) from earlier actions. Since the focus here is on participatory art under socialism, the following discussion will concern a selection of actions produced in the first decade of the group’s existence. Most of these actions typically followed a standard format: a group of fifteen to twenty participants were invited by telephone (at a time when, of course, phone lines could be tapped) to take a train to a designated station outside Moscow; they would walk from the station to a remote field; the group would wait around (not knowing what would happen), before witnessing a minimal, perhaps mysterious, and often visually unremarkable event. On returning to Moscow, participants would write an account of the experience and offer interpretations of its meaning; these subsequently became the focus of discussion and debate amongst the artists and their circle.¹⁰

It should immediately be apparent that the intellectualism of this structure is a considerable step away from the 1960s model in both Europe and North America, in which it was regarded as sufficient simply for things to “happen,” and through which the participating subject would attain a more vivid, authentic level of reality (as seen, for example, in the work of Knížák and Kaprow). Monastyrsky complicated this paradigm by aiming to produce situations in which participants had no idea what was going to happen, to the point where they sometimes found it difficult to know if they had in fact experienced an action; when participants’s engagement finally occurred, it was never in the place where they expected it.¹¹ CAG stretched the temporality of event-based art away from pure presence and into a relationship of distance between “then” (I thought I experienced…) and “now” (I understand it to be otherwise…). It is also of central importance that this production of distance was not only temporal but social, prising open a space for modes of communicational practice otherwise absent in the rigid and monolithic ideology of Soviet collectivism. The event itself is effectively an “empty action,” designed to preclude interpretation from taking place during the performance, and thereby serving to prompt a wide range of descriptions and analyses, which were undertaken individually but shared within the group.

The first key action that crystallized this form of working was Appearance (March 13, 1976). Devised by Monastyrsky, Lev Rubinstein, Nikia Alekseev, and Georgii Kizevalter, it involved around thirty audience members as participants. Upon arriving in a remote field at Izmaylovskoe, the group was asked to wait and watch for something to appear in the distance. Eventually, a couple of the organizers became visible on the horizon, in what Monastyrsky refers to as the “zone of indistinguishability”: the moment when one can tell that something is happening but the figures are too far away for one to clarify who they are and what exactly is taking place. The figures approached the group and gave them certification of having attended the event (CAG refers to this as “factography”). Monastyrsky later explained that what had happened in the field was not that they (the organizers) had appeared for the participants, but rather, that the participants had appeared for them. This inversion of what one might expect to experience with an artistic action—an unfurling of events for the organizers rather than for an audience—was matched by the group’s preference for the banality of waiting rather than the production of a vivid and visually memorable event: Monastyrsky described the participants’s eventual appearance in the work as a “pause,” thereby reconceptualizing the waiting not as a prelude to some more specific action, but as the main event.¹² Typically, CAG’s primary focus is never on the ostensible action taking place in the snowy landscape, but rather the deferral and displacement of this action both physically (events happen where one was not prepared to see them) and semantically. The phenomenological level of immediate events was subordinated to the conceptual and linguistic activity that subsequently took place in the participants’s consciousness: in Monastyrsky’s words, the mythological or symbolic content of the action is “used only as an instrument to create that ‘inner’ level of perception” in the viewer.¹³

This technique can be seen in other early works such as Pictures (February 11, 1979), which divided the participants into two groups, one of which undertook an action in the snow, watched by the other group. Twelve sets of twelve colored envelopes (in gradually larger sizes) were distributed to twelve of the thirty participants. Inside each envelope was a description of the key components of the event: from schedule, setting, and weather to audience reaction, meaning, and interpretation. After they had read the instructions, the participants were told to fold and paste each set of envelopes on top of each other, with the largest on the bottom, to form a concentric pattern of color; these were later signed as certification of the participants’s attendance. While all this was going on, three of the participants (the organizers) crossed the field and wandered into the woods on the other side. Once again, the “zone of indistinguishability” was put into play: the participants’s preoccupation with making the pictures was a distraction from the action on the margin, namely the organizers’s disappearance into the woods. The participatory activity (finding and assembling the colored envelopes) was undermined as a central focus by the sly subtraction of the organizers’s presence, indicating that—contra the US model of the Happening—in CAG’s works there is no authentic shared experience underlying the event.

_{_{Collective Actions, Pictures, Moscow Region, February 11, 1979.}}

In his article “Seven Photographs” (1980), Monastyrsky presents seven near identical photographs of a snowy field, each of which relate to a different action by CAG, including Appearance and Pictures. The bleak similarity of the images is amusing, but drives home his point that secondary material such as photographs, instructions, descriptions, and participant recollections have a completely separate aesthetic reality to the action itself. (At best, he writes, “a familiarity with the photographs and texts can bring about a sensation of positive indeterminacy.”¹⁴) Influenced by semiotics and making frequent reference to Heidegger, Monastyrsky argues that the group’s actions result for the participants in a real experience, but not in an image of that experience. The event’s existential presence takes place in the viewer’s consciousness (as a state of “completed anticipation”) and thus cannot be represented: “The only thing that can be represented is the thing that accompanies this internal process, the thing that takes place on the field of action at the time.”¹⁵ The exquisite precision of this idea, in which documentation is conceived as a representation of what accompanied an artistic experience, explains the repetitive quality of CAG’s photographs of (apparently) nothing taking place, since they record only what seems to be a withdrawal of action. Each photograph is to be considered, Monastyrsky writes, as “a sign of a higher order, a sign of an ‘unarbitrary emptiness’ with the following meaning: ‘nothing is represented on it not because nothing happened at that given moment, but because the thing that happened is essentially unrepresentable.’”¹⁶ The highly theorized, quasi-mystical flavor of this position gives CAG a unique status within a history of performance documentation, while also being highly suggestive of an approach to documentary that is ripe for re-exploration today.

Monastyrsky’s article was written before Ten Appearances (1981) and seems to pave the way for the centrality of photography in this work. The participants in Ten Appearances were notified that everyone attending would have to participate in the work; those who were unwilling should not come.¹⁷ The action took place in a snowy field and was organized around a flat board bearing dozens of nails with bobbins, each wound with 200–300 meters of white thread. The assignment was for each of the ten participants to take a thread and walk away from the board in a different direction towards the forest that surrounded the field. Kabakov describes the minutiae of his volatile emotions as he underwent this process: from anxiety (about how long he would be standing in the cold) to fear (suspecting the organizers of sadism) to sheer joy and “mystic melancholy” on finally reaching the end of the thread, to which was affixed a piece of paper bearing the “factographic text” (the name of the organizers, time, date, and place of the action).¹⁸ At this point it was up to the participants to decide what happened next. Eight of them walked back out of the forest to rejoin the group; two did not return and got a train back to Moscow. Those who returned were given a photograph of themselves emerging from the forest in the “zone of indistinguishability,” with each image captioned “The appearance of [name] on February 1, 1981.” This simulated photographic documentation had been taken a few weeks earlier but was indistinguishable from the actual appearance of the participants as they emerged from the forest. Monastyrsky refers to these photographs as an “empty act”: a mere sign of the elapsed time between the end of the first phase of the action for the participants (receiving the factographic text) and their reappearance in the field (“the signified and culminating event in the structure of the action”).¹⁹ Both the act and the image are empty signifiers; the meaning is formulated subsequently by reflection on the totality of the events experienced.

_{_{Collective Actions, Appearances, Moscow, 13 March, 1976.}}

Of course, the poignant fact that two participants, Nekrasov and Zhigalov, didn’t return to the group did not mean that the work was a failure. Rather, Monastyrsky asserted, it showed that the participants had emerged from a “non-artistic, non-artificially-constructed space”—in other words, an everyday reality in which they were capable of acting of their own free will.²⁰ This, Monastyrsky reasoned, was why the same people kept coming back to their events over the course of fifteen years: the pretextual nature of the experiences that the group constructed ensured that participants were continually intrigued, as well as continually motivated to write descriptions and analyses. Since it was near impossible to scrutinize the events as they were happening, these hermeneutical narratives had a compensatory aspect, endlessly chasing a meaning that remained elusive, precisely because the generation of different interpretative positions was the meaning.²¹ The surfeit of texts that resulted from these actions were collected into books every three to five years, and are published in Russian and German under the title Trips to the Countryside; the group is currently at work on an eleventh volume.²² Volume two, from 1983, for example, is typical in its structure: a theoretical preface by Monastyrsky; descriptions of the events with photographs; an appendix of documentation, which includes the schema of Ten Appearances and a list of slides; texts by participants (including Kabakov on Ten Appearances); photographs and descriptions of actions by individual artists that are close to CAG’s actions, such as Monastyrsky’s Flat Cap (1983); commentaries and photographs. Later volumes also include interviews and a list of videos, produced after the German artist Sabine Hänsgen joined the group.

Boris Groys has observed how CAG’s performances were “meticulously, almost bureaucratically, documented, commented on, and archived.”²³ This textual production is one of the dominant characteristics of their practice, and positions it as the inverse of the impulse to make participatory art in Western cultures—which can broadly be summarized as positioned against the atomization of social relations under consumer spectacle. Groys has argued that Soviet society, by contrast,

was a society of production without consumption. There was no spectator and there was no consumer. Everyone was involved in a productive process. So the role of Collective Actions and some other artists of the time was to create the possibility of consumption, the possibility of an external position from which one could enjoy communism.²⁴

What CAG’s works gave rise to, then, was not unified collective presence and immediacy but its opposite: difference, dissensus, and debate; a space of privatized experience, liberal democratic indecision, and a plurality of hermeneutical speculation at a time when the dominant discourse and spectatorial regime was marshaled towards a collective and rigidly schematized apparatus of meaning. This is borne out by Monastyrsky’s observation that

in the Stalin or Brezhnev era, contemplation of an artwork involved a certain compulsion, a kind of tunnel vision. There was nothing peripheral. But when one comes to a field—when one comes there, moreover, with no sense of obligation but for private reasons of one’s own—a vast flexible space is created, in which one can look at whatever one likes. One’s under no obligation to look at what’s being presented—that freedom, in fact, is the whole idea.²⁵

The use of a field as the backdrop to so many of CAG’s works is therefore doubly salient.²⁶ It did not designate a specific rejection of the city or a conscious embrace of nature; as Sergei Sitar notes, the field is not chosen for its independent aesthetic merits, “but simply as ‘the lesser evil’—as a space that is the least occupied, the least appropriated by the dominant cultural discourse.”²⁷ For Monastyrsky, it is a space “free from any affiliation”: “the countryside, for us, isn’t the countryside tilled by peasants but that of the thinking classes’s vacation retreats.”²⁸ The fields are less about framing (in the way that Prague’s Wenceslas Square frames Jiří Kovanda’s contemporaneous actions) than unframing; the countryside’s multiple perspectives corresponded to the group’s open-ended, neutral actions that were contrived to leave room for the greatest number of hermeneutic possibilities. The result was a privatized liberal space that existed in covert parallel to official social structures. As Kabakov recalls:

From the moment I got on the train … my goals, the questions and affairs that constantly preoccupied me, my fears of myself and others, were all, as it were, taken away from me. The most remarkable thing, however, was that those who led us had no goals either! And, of course, there is something else: for the first time in my life, I was among “my own”; we had our own world, parallel to the real one, and this world had been created and compressed by the CA group until it had achieved complete materiality, or, one might say, tangibility—if this notion is at all applicable to something absolutely ethereal and elusive.²⁹

And again, in concluding his account of Ten Appearances:

This [action] actualized one of the most pleasant and practically unknown sides of the socius, the socius that is so painful in our time. Here the social is not antagonistic to you, but instead good-willed, reliable, and extremely welcoming. This feeling is so unusual, so not experienced before, that it not only recovers you, but also becomes an amazing gift compared to everyday reality.³⁰

Between Monastyrsky’s highly theoretical musings on semiotics and orientalism, and the more accessible narratives of those who participated in the works, it was this emphasis on freedom—the self-selecting construction of a self-determining social group—that formed the social core of CAG’s practice. Participation here denoted the possibility of producing individual affect and singular experience, relayed through a meditative relationship to language that in turn presupposed collective reception and debate.

_{_{Collective Actions, Appearances, Moscow, 13 March, 1976.}}

Participatory art under state socialism in the 1960s and 1970s provides an important counter-model to contemporaneous examples from Europe and North America. Rather than aspiring to create a participatory public sphere as the counterpoint to a privatized world of individual affect and consumption, artists working collaboratively under socialism sought to provide a space for nurturing individualism (of behavior, actions, interpretations) against an oppressively monolithic cultural sphere in which artistic judgments were reduced to a question of their position within Marxist-Leninist dogma. This led to a situation in which most artists wanted nothing to do with politics—and indeed even rejected the dissident position—by choosing to operate, instead, on an existential plane: making assertions of individual freedom, even in the slightest or most silent of forms.³¹ We can also contrast this approach with that taken by artists in South America, where participation was used as a means to provoke art audiences into heightened self-awareness of their social conditions and thereby (it was hoped) to impel them to take action in the social sphere. For artists living under communism, participation had no such agitationary goals. It was, rather, a means of experiencing a more authentic (because individual and self-organized) mode of collective experience than the one prescribed by the state in official parades and mass spectacles; as such it is frequently figured as escapist or celebratory, regardless of whether it took place on a physical or solely cerebral level. Today, the escapist and celebratory tend to be weak terms in contemporary art criticism, signifying a willful refusal of artists to engage in their political reality and to express a critical stance towards it. However, the example of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde under socialism reminds us that there is an unimaginably large gap between managing such contextual awareness and heroic acts of dissidence (the latter being, for the most part, a Western fantasy). The reality of daily life under these regimes necessitates a more sober understanding of the artistic gestures achieved there, and appreciation of the consummate subtlety with which so many of them were undertaken.

By Pablo Helguera

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:20:28 +0200

By Pablo Helguera

(via The Stanford Prison Experiment )

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:05:24 +0200

(via The Stanford Prison Experiment

)

ŽIŽEK/GAGA: Communism Knows No Monster

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:25:58 +0200

Originally in: Deterritorial Support Group

This Tuesday Lady Gaga and myself shall be appearing at Birkbeck in support of the UCU strike in the run up to the 26th of March. My theoretical project and, indeed, my defence of pure theory as such in contraposition to those calling for near unreflective action has reached a critical zero-point. Either we act now, or we do not act at all.

But what of my good friend Lady Gaga’s theoretical contributions? Certainly, there is a certain performance of theory in her costumes, videos and even (some of) her music. Nina Power has already noted that the infamous “meat” costume could be seen in reference, indeed, a performance of, Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a book that notes the consistent linking in the oppressive imaginary of the patriarchy of the female body and meat, of animality and the feminine. Equally, her moral support for the cause of gay rights in The States has been well documented – in an underrated piece Dan Hancox traced the spidery pathways between her work, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and the end of the “don’t ask don’t tell”. Gaga’s work as a cultural phenomena has generated its own theory. But what of her actual theoretical project? Let us turn to her one extant theoretical fragment, written at college in 2004 when she began her musical production, Assignment #4: Reckoning of Evidence by the then Stefani Germanotta.

Gaga begins by reckoning with the social construction of the body, with particular reference to the work of Spencer Tunick, a New York artist whose displays of mass public nudity, perhaps with a hint of bourgeois vulgarity, caused controversy in Guilliani’s reformed city – to the point that the artworks were only possible through mass civil disobedience. His work, for Gaga, is the movement of “freeing objects from their social significance and thus endowing them with endless possibilities of form”. Thus the naked body, seen only (and thus made controversial) from the perspective of sex, is repurposed in Tunick’s work as pure form, and thus as moves into the sphere of art, which simultaneously, and dialectically challenges that initial social signification oppositionally. Is this not entirely then the very logic of the spectacular occupations of place that have been occurring, both in student spaces, old public houses and disused Job Centres that we see today? The reduction of spaces of the social body of capital or the neoliberal university into places of pure use, in what Giorgio Agamben calls the movement of profanation – opened to the infinite possibilities of collective human creativity while standing as a direct challenge to the structures it is placed within in an oppositional mode, simultaneously inside and outside the system – both sharing communication and co-operation and antagonism – much as Antonia Birnbaum’s recent essay on communism is early Marx shows. Tunick discovered the same himself in the construction of his own pieces, in their need to find a way around New York, to take a space and fill it with naked human bodies – “The choice of location provides symbolic impact (i.e. the Brooklyn Bridge, the Dakota, the Stock Exchange), and as the models become more numerous, the compositions become progressively more abstract” – clothed, and made more permanent, this could appear as an economic blockade.

Tunick’s work brings us to a paradox: the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself, one’s direct identification with a particular culture which renders one intolerant towards other cultures. The basic opposition is thus related to the opposite between collective and individual: culture is by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while – next paradox – it is the individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as s/he extricates itself from and elevates itself above its particular culture. Since, however, every individual has to be somehow “particularized,” it has to dwell in a particular life-world, the only way to resolve this deadlock is to split the individual into universal and particular, public and private (where “private” covers both the “safe haven” of family and the non-state public sphere of civil society (economy)). In liberalism, culture survives, but as privatized: as way of life, a set of beliefs and practices, not the public network of norms and rules. Culture is thus literally transubstantiated: the same sets of beliefs and practices change from the binding power of a collective into an expression of personal and private idiosyncrasies. The task, then, of today’s revolutionary is precisely this bodily-economic blockade.

This is perhaps why then we find, like nudity in public places, the occupied space frequently objected to through in terms of abjection – squatters are dirty, they don’t wash, they don’t have jobs, they aren’t respectable – and so on. For police, protesters are dirty swampies, animals, profane. The repurposing and reduction of these spaces and their subtraction from capital is formally offensive to its systematic logic. The system react with characteristic venom. The same is true of the UCU strike itself – the press will be at pains to describe its actants as bedraggled, ugly, Trotskyite perverts, ivory tower intellectuals and so on to stress the traditional association of political opposition with ugliness – the same will be true, we predict without checking, of the right-wing reaction to Saturday. We have already seen Labour and Conservative politicians dip into their stores of insult, ‘retards’ among the most well know, to describe anti-cuts protesters disrupting council meetings. Gaga perhaps anticipates this in the closing section of the essay on the monstrous. Considering Montaigne essay on ‘deformity’ she notes that like public nudity, what is ‘deformed’ is only an effect of social constructions of the body, just as nudity is only sexual, and therefore mass nudity only problematic for the New York police due to this social formation. Emphatically Gaga notes ‘we call contrary to nature what we call contrary to custom’, ‘we only accept the regular and it is this which blinds us from seeing the prodigy of what we have never seen before’. The greatest lie of capitalism is perhaps its naturalisation – the idea that it is simply the law of nature that it is this way. The cuts cannot be helped, just as capitalism cannot be helped. Deborah Orr, at the high of the student protests displays this logic with stunning clarity. “Fiscal discipline really is necessary”, Orr opines “The truth is that they [so-called “adults” failing to protest] are too wise to waste their energy on something so silly. Protesting against the cuts is like protesting against water’s stubborn habit of flowing downwards”. My God! The bleak hand of capitalist realism! Protesting cuts is equivalent to being against the direction of the fundamental laws of the cosmos! But this is not nature, but simply custom, a custom that the ruling class have generated as an ideology that manufactures exploitation and alienation. To denaturalise capital, to subtract while remaining within to push outward, to reform spaces to pure use opposed to the commodity form, to not accept as regular what is simply custom – this is the essence of our protest. This strike can be seen as a dull churning of reaction against the telos of nature, or, placed in a global context of revolution, something ‘we have never seen before’ – just as Lady Gaga appearing in solidarity with workers, or as I have explained elsewhere, the utterly unpredicted revolutions shaking the Middle East.

Slavoj Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.