THOMAS BEARD - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

THOMAS BEARD

It was a st range coincidence. My arraignment for an Occupy Wall
Street–related arrest was scheduled for the same day as the opening of the 2012
Whitney Biennial, for which I’d co-curated the film program. On December 17 de
last year, the three-month anniversary of OWS, I participated in a demonstration
at Duarte Square, a small park on the western end of Canal Street that was directly
adjacent to a large empty lot owned by Trinity Church, one of the largest land-
holders in the city. The original occupation at Zuccotti Park had been forcibly
evicted a month prior, and many in the movement, particularly religious leaders
who saw Occupy’s goals as directly in line with the moral imperatives of the
church, had called upon Trinity to donate the unused property as a new base of
operaciones.

Though it had been supportive of OWS’s efforts early on, unfortunately
Trinity had no interest in granting these appeals for sanctuary (No Trespassing
signs were displayed quite prominently). So when the crowd gathered in Duarte, él
became clear that civil disobedience of some sort was about to take place. A march
through the neighborhood evolved into an encirclement around the lot’s perime-
ter, and suddenly two giant wooden ladders, previously hidden underneath a
banner, were set up to scale the property’s fencing in mock-medieval fashion. I
soon joined dozens of others, including Artforum editor Carly Busta and several
vestment-clad priests, as protesters poured into the lot. The NYPD presence that
day was substantial, and before long we were all in handcuffs.

Chatting with the retired bishop sitting next to me in the police van, I came
to appreciate the ways in which Occupy Wall Street had transformed my political
vida, the ways in which, through exchanges like these, so many different and unex-
pected perspectives were being brought to bear on my own ideas about the
rampant corporate malfeasance and rising inequality in this country. The situa-
tion I’d found myself in—encumbered with tens of thousands of dollars of
student-loan debt, uninsured, precariously employed—was not uncommon, él
turned out, and indeed was the new normal for many of my generation. Tomando
part in actions like these meant striking a blow against some of the nation’s most
enduring and insidious myths, the myth of ample opportunity, the myth of a class-
less society. We weren’t alone in our hardships, and here, in Duarte Square, era
the proof.

Since I first became involved with OWS, a key issue that I’ve grappled with
was how I might contribute to the movement through my work. The challenge
that the other Biennial curators and I faced at the Whitney was how an exhibition
that had to be planned out many months in advance could somehow account for a
cultural phenomenon that seemed to be changing week to week. In the end, cómo-

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OCTUBRE

alguna vez, the central themes of Occupy Wall Street had already been present in a num-
ber of the works selected, and found a form in subtle ways throughout the show,
from LaToya Ruby Frazier’s pieces in the galleries to Kelly Reichardt’s screenings
in the cinema. Andrea Fraser’s catalog essay confronted the topic head-on, reveal-
ing the contradictions between the dispiriting reality of contemporary art’s social
and economic functions and the claims made on its behalf by artists, critics, y
curators. The fact that the Biennial’s main sponsors were Sotheby’s and Deutsche
Bank did not go unnoticed.

At Light Industry, the venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn that I run
with Ed Halter, the circumstances were somewhat different. Though the organiza-
tion operates with a tiny fraction of a museum’s resources, its scale allows for a
comparative agility in terms of its schedule, enabling us to quickly adapt our pro-
gram to the events of the day. Like other alternative cinemas in New York, we’ve
organized screenings that resonated with the ongoing discussions surrounding
OWS, like Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera (1977) and Shinsuke Ogawa’s Narita: El
Peasants of the Second Fortress (1971). The former, one of the great if underappreci-
ated postrevolutionary Cuban films, is concerned not with an insurrectionary
rupture in the standing social order but rather with what comes afterward, the myr-
iad conflicts encountered in the struggle toward a society based on true equality.
The latter documents farmers in the process of defending their land against seizure
by the Japanese government after the area was selected as the site of a new airport
for Tokyo. Featuring phalanxes of riot police squaring off in a protracted battle
against armed student activists, as well as villagers chaining themselves to their
improvised encampments or constructing elaborate networks of underground tun-
nels, Ogawa’s film is a timely and troubling record of contested land rights and the
violent imposition of state authority.

Related screenings will undoubtedly follow in the months to come, but by
the time this writing is published in the fall, it’s difficult to say where OWS will be.
Whither Occupy Wall Street? This question, or some variation thereof, is con-
stantly being asked, but instead of wondering where it’s going, perhaps it’s worth
reconsidering what it’s already been: a realignment of popular political discourse,
an antidote to cynicism, a flowering of radical will. Thinking back on this first
wave of the Occupy movement, I find myself returning to a bit of tactical advice
put forward by the filmmaker Pegg y Ahwesh (which she borrowed from
Napoleon): “The purpose of the avant-garde is not to advance, but to maneuver.”

THOMAS BEARD is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and elec-
tronic art in Brooklyn, Nueva York.