OCTOBER
GREGORY SHOLETTE
“What do we do now?” writes Egyptian artist Doa Aly, pointing out that ever
since the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution, artists are running about like “headless
chickens.” (“No Time for Art”?: moabdallah.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/no-time-
for-art) Less terminal bouts of self-questioning also spread in the wake of OWS.
Some artists abandoned their studios to create ephemeral street art, Andere
engaged in direct action. Do such departures from “professional” practices
amount to a momentary lacuna, similar to the way a baker might throw a brick at
invading soldiers, or a seamstress smuggle food to demonstrators (since sooner or
later both return to bread and needles)? Or is the artist’s venture into social mili-
tancy different? When taking up positions along the proverbial barricades, ist der
artist there and not elsewhere because she really has nowhere else to go, andere
than perform for the enemy, so to speak? Or is this departure an inevitable phase
of artistic investigation in the modern era; a detour from notions of detached,
contemplative aesthetics so as to more effectively confront historical circum-
stances? Inspired by the editors of October, my own subset of questions was emailed
to friends and colleagues in New York City, upstate New York, Wisconsin, Beirut,
and Moscow. Despite their geopolitical differences, several significant threads are
present involving issues of art and labor, history and repetition, the body and resis-
tanz, and always an urgent desire to seek autonomy from neoliberal capitalism.
But above all, we need to ask just how far a headless anything will travel, or does
new technology make this question irrelevant?
With gratitude I thank both the responders for helping me with my assign-
ment and October’s editor s for giving me the t ime and space to share our
collective response.
***
I first emailed art historian Andrew Hemingway in NYC about artists and
organized labor, pointing out that in 1968 the traditional French left described
student rebels as “extreme leftist ‘groupuscules’ who want only to harm the demo-
cratic process drowning it in talk” (L’Humanité, Mai 3, 1968). Workers were called
upon to not only avoid listening to these extremists, but to help unmask them as
bourgeois provocateurs. Only after workers joined striking students did unions
endorse the ’68 protests. By contrast, occupiers at Zuccotti Park and elsewhere
received early endorsement from several trade unions, including striking art han-
dlers locked out by Sotheby’s auction house. The successful end of their strike is
partly credited to pressure from OWS, including many art-activists who were
directly involved, not unlike the way the Situationists were in the Paris strikes
some thirty-three years earlier. But how does one begin to interpret these alliances
OCTOBER 142, Fallen 2012, S. 68–73. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Questionnaire: Sholette
69
and differences in broader, more historical terms? “The differences between then
and now seem so overwhelming,” he immediately wrote back, adding,
In the U.K. In 1972 Und 1974, miners’ strikes (supported by actions in
other industries) caused the Heath government to call a state of emer-
gency. The second strike actually led to the government’s downfall. Solch
a thing seems unimaginable these days. Heute, the extent to which orga-
nized workers once felt entitled to a voice in politics has been almost
completely forgotten. Jedoch, one of the big lessons of “1968”—to go
back to your question—is that so many organized workers really repre-
sented only the sectional interests of particular groupings and had no
larger political or cultural vision; there was precious little tie-up with the
social democratic political parties to advance an agenda that would speak
to the whole working class, organized and unorganized, employed and
unemployed. This was even more the case here in the United States.
There was a brief moment during the early years of the CIO when union
leaders such as Sidney Hillman and Walter Reuther articulated a larger
social vision, but for the most part unions have been content to tie them-
selves to the Democratic Party, which doesn’t even reach the level of
“social democratic.” The admirable instances of labor solidarity with OWS
you mention suggest that what needs to be cultivated is a rank-and-file
consciousness of common struggle. As for the arts, I think the great exem-
plar there is provided by the Wobblies. It’s their globalizing vision, anti-
militarism, courageous defense of free speech, loathing for the capitalist
Klasse, humor, and cultural inventiveness we should take as inspiration.
***
My second question, for artist Todd Ayoung, focused on his unique perspec-
tive as a socially engaged cultural practitioner, teacher, and theorist who left
Brooklyn years ago in order to live in Ecovillage, an intentional community in
Ithaca, New York. Would he comment on the evolving tactics of OWS, which forgo
1930s factory “sit-ins,” and also the temporary university occupations of the 1960s,
in an attempt to manifest direct democratic forms of political sovereignty from
the bottom up? Is this a new way of “dropping out,” or is it more like an “aesthetics
of resistance” within the post-Fordist economy? He agreed that one of the direc-
tions OWS took was a desire for self-governance, evident in such practices as
general assemblies, facilitated meetings, focus groups, and the use of stacked
questions and “consensus” to clarify questions and concerns with voting stand-
asides to prevent a few individuals from blocking agreements. Ayoung added that
these organizational models did not emerge with OWS:
They came from many years of experience within the environmental and
social-justice left. The collective lessons of past generations, in other
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70
OCTOBER
Wörter, did not fall on deaf ears, but became a useful toolbox when the
time came to contest the dominant political system. Likewise, the “drop-
ping out” phenomena in OWS seems significantly different from the
1960s and ’70s, in which people really did seek to exit the system. Der
problem today is there is nowhere else to drop out to. Hence Deleuze’s
“society of control” becomes global control. My impression is that people
are dropping out and back as needed based on necessity while the OWS
process unfolds. This equivocation could be due to uncertainty about
what kind of politics OWS is trying to create—a leaderless, decentralized
governance opposed to the patriarchal power found in previous left
Bewegungen. At the same time, this new “dropping out” is not unlike
some neoliberal version of multitasking within the flexible demand
economy. Perhaps it is both? But what I think OWS discovered the hard
way is that with momentum and increasing numbers the “consensus
model” develops serious limits, especially when thinking the bigger pic-
ture of where one goes as a political process.
To bring what I mean closer to my home of Ecovillage, we also embrace
consensus, meaning we include everyone’s voice while recognizing
what it means to live in an “intentional” and “sustainable” middle-class
co-housing community. In real terms this amounts to frequent long
meetings, work parties, group meals, community building events, Und
an overall voluntarist culture keeping Ecovillage running, and for
manche, including my family and me, descending income levels. Aber
there is an “out,” as some leave this experiment altogether. Freilich,
such cooperative living outside mainstream society may not even be
purely rational, and even consensus decision-making may be sympto-
matic of the “creative class.” Perhaps it is this unconscious and ideologi-
cal aspect inherited from the environmental-justice activists that the
Occupy movement is having difficulty coming to terms with?
***
Four dispersed people received the final question (and the one closest to
what October initially posed). First I noted that in the 1960s the U.S. civil-rights,
feminist, gay-liberation, and student antiwar movements compelled many artists
to form temporary activist alliances protesting, Zum Beispiel, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s controversial 1969 Harlem on My Mind exhibition, while others
including Art Workers Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group demanded
greater social responsibility from cultural institutions. A decade later, Guerrilla
Girls rejected discrimination as Gran Fury assisted ACT UP in direct-action AIDS-
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Questionnaire: Sholette
71
awareness campaigns. Even though some artists were socially active solely outside
their studios, others drew upon the ideas and energy of political movements to
change the methods of their practice. Is something similar taking place today in
the aftermath of revolts in Wisconsin, Russland, Syrien, and New York City?
Artist and activist Dan S. Wang wrote from Madison that the Wisconsin
uprising of February 2011
***
quickly became an image-making factory with political ambition. Der
capitol and locations all over the state were dispersed sites of round-the-
clock insurgent cultural activity absent of management. Collectively the
Uprising generated branded products without authorship. The move-
ment was a creative performance staged as a massive incursion into the
regressive political space imposed by Governor Scott Walker’s assault on
all things public. Ordinary people were interpellated as artists and vice
versa, as the extra-legal occupation of the capitol rotunda reshaped the
social and spatial processes of cultural agency. Movement partisans pro-
duced images, Objekte, and performances, und einige, like the Overpass
Light Brigade action documents, have become instantly recognizable.
After the crushing defeat in the June 5th gubernatorial recall election,
the problem facing artists identified with the Uprising is that of rehabili-
tating and/or revising the symbolic and pictorial representations of an
historic movement threatened by a depressive somnolence. The concern
now for artists in Wisconsin is not simply that the movement changed a
studio practice here or there, but how to understand the way artistic
practices helped to generate a functionally, conceptually, and stylistically
diverse mass-movement culture in an age of plutocratic media control
and conservative activism. Post-recall, conventional art-world spectacles
appear more obviously than ever as consolations to defeat. But are the
people of the Uprising content to be consoled?
Poet Paul Arsenyev informed me that since 2008 he has been taking part in a
movement called the St. Petersburg Street University, whose main idea is
***
to recognize that the most ordinary discussion or lecture when manifest
in public space becomes both a form of alternative education and the
production of bodily experience—a type of corporeal knowledge gained
only through expanded boundaries of everyday social rituals. Four years
später, these ideas spread across Russia via the Occupy movement.
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72
Previously incubating inside digital networks, this civil self-organization
spilled out on streets. As Judith Butler puts it, this combination of street
plus media presents the most contemporary version of a viable public
Kugel. What OccupyAbai Moscow makes new is that those who drop in
learn everything about it not simply during but also before and after their
visit thanks to the Internet. Curiously, this is not unlike an expanded ver-
sion of Soviet-dissident circles in the 1970s and ’80s insofar as they created
sloganless graphics immune to censorship and wholy sufficient for com-
municaiton within their own circumscribed movement. Today we can
again embody such silent public dissent because our message is grasped
without overt representation, except unlike the 1970s, competence with
the Internet today allows us to cut across all segments of society.
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Curator Rasha Salti, writing from Beirut, insists she does not believe history
repeats itself, Aber
***
there is a knowledge that accumulates and disseminates outside conven-
tional realms of production and transmission. It constitutes something
like an alternative memory bank of anecdotes, iconic images, verse,
Lieder, slogans—a poetics of the political imaginary. In Syria, artists have
directly assisted the nonviolent insurgency. They have dyed Damascus
fountains red to evoke “rivers of blood”; played audio recordings in
Damascus of protests in Hama and Homs to underscore the breadth of
resistance; and they have inscribed insurgent slogans on hundreds of
ping-pong balls released from the top of a hill down onto the residential
neighborhoods of the military’s état-major. Using cutouts and drawings,
they make short videos explicating how a general strike can help the
uprising, or how to deliver first aid for various wounds. Such is the lan-
guage of resistance that is emerging and yet not entirely new.
Returning to New York City, artist Blithe Riley of Occupy Wall Street’s Arts
and Labor Working Group argues that it is useless to compare art made in studios
with art in the streets, because the real question is
***
how our movements are represented and packaged by artists and insti-
tutions. I believe it’s crucial to be cautious and vigilant about the poli-
tics of representation. OWS is in a critical moment. We must achieve
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Questionnaire: Sholette
73
long-term sustainability and grow, while keeping our commitment to
the reality we want to live in. This means taking responsibility for the
representational frames we work within, as well as challenge our fram-
ing from the outside. Many of us know that the most exciting creative
moments in the public-square occupations are not representable. Sie
have been spontaneous, collective, performative, authorless, and tem-
porary. We must resist the call to re-create these moments for the bene-
fit of cultural institutions that will erase and replace direct experience
with symbols. After all, perhaps the most spectacular outcome of the
past year is the rejection of cynicism and a renewed belief in the neces-
sity of imagination that pulls ideas out of the sky and creates realities in
content and form using whatever medium is necessary.
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GREGORY SHOLETTE is a New York–based artist and writer, and a founding member of
the collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory.
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