JULIA BRYAN-WILSON
In Oakland, where I live, and at UC Berkeley, where I teach, Occupy has
been defiant, fractious, exhausting, exhilarating. The zone of possibilities it
promised was threatened by ruthlessly violent state and administrative pushback
and the repressive criminalization of dissent. Cops wielding batons, rubber bul-
lets, and pepper spray: these are searing images. But other scenes persist—a port
closed by thousands of anti-capitalist demonstrators; tents set afloat in sly compli-
ance of a campus “no encampment” decree.
Which imaginings do we privilege? One Occupy Oakland poster placed
DREAM OF THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN BUT SOMEDAY WILL BE above a
large blank space, extending an invitation for you to fill its void. Here I take my
cue from that multivocal, open-ended impulse. Instead of using this special issue
as my own platform, I asked two Berkeley students—an undergraduate and a
Doctor. candidate, both feminists, art historians, and activists involved in Occupy
Oakland and Occupy Cal—to share these pages.
Ariella Aronstam-Powers, senior:
“Hey, Mom? I’m about to get arrested.” I gripped my cell phone as police
kettled my body with hundreds of other Occupy protesters outside the façade
of downtown Oakland’s YMCA. The apparent chaos transformed into solidarity
as friends, occupiers, and comrades tightly clustered together. As Oakland
police cuffed my wrists, I recalled the word “LIBERATED” from a wheat-pasted
poster in West Oakland that helped mobilize marchers to that day of action.
Screen-print posters and political graffiti in public spaces play a vital role
in the Occupy movement by spreading information about events and visually
communicating critical themes, including questions of student debt, commu-
nity access to social services, and corporate greed. Since the inception of
Occupy Oakland in October and my subsequent arrest on January 28, 2012, para
“remaining at the scene of a riot,” intertextual street-based word/image motifs
have consumed my academic and personal inquires. My senior thesis investigates
Oakland’s legacy of radical art by examining the work of the Black Panther
Party’s Minister of Culture Emory Douglas and his continued influence on and
engagement with contemporary Oakland print and graffiti artists. Considering
local circumstances of racism, radical organizing, and graphic arts since the
1960s, I ask how regional modes of making foster political mobility through the
use of polemical imagery.
My Occupy experiences drive an analysis of the reconfiguration of public spaces
as a fundamental component of the Occupy movement and of street art. Mi
understanding of “space” is both geographical (like Occupy encampments or
police kettling) and discursive (like political posters). Spatial relations operate as
OCTUBRE 142, Caer 2012, páginas. 37–39. © 2012 Revista Octubre, Limitado. y el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts.
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Miriam Klein Stahl and Gabby Miller.
Dream of Things That Have Never
Been but Someday Will Be. 2011.
Questionnaire: Bryan-Wilson
39
a context and a product for the interrelated conditions in which Occupy has
arisen. Given the increasing privatization of my city and university, I am interested
in what constitutes the “public.” How has the interpenetration of public and pri-
vate spheres had an impact on cultural production? And what blockages and
opportunities exist in these spaces for visual resistance and, al final, justice?
Joni Spigler, graduate student:
I was teaching an undergraduate research writing class at Berkeley in the fall
de 2011 organized around the paintings of Edgar Degas. But the illusory division
between the concerns of the public university and those of the world outside were
colapsando, and seemed to demand a rethinking of pedagogy. By November 10, nosotros
had witnessed the razing of the Occupy Oakland encampment by thousands of
cops in militarized riot gear, a general strike that shut down the port of Oakland,
strikes on campus against tuition hikes, austerity measures, and privatization, y,
just the day before, Berkeley students and professors being viciously attacked by
police for defending a few Occupy Cal tents in front of Sproul Hall.
Students were as stunned as I by what was happening, so we took time to talk
about it in class. About what it all meant. How the concerns of those people in
tents were their concerns too, with tuition increases and the shifting priorities of
the University of California. One day a student asked if they could write about
these issues.
I had chosen Degas because he was both a remarkable artist who engaged
with the artistic issues of his time but also because the scholarship on him con-
fronted issues of gender, carrera, class, ciencia, visión, and sex. If students were going
to write about resistance and revolution instead, I wanted those essays to be
grounded in images and to engage with equally compelling texts. And I wanted to
allow the choice to write about Degas or about Occupy, which meant I had to
teach t wo classes at once. We read about the siege of Par is and the Par is
Commune (though in 1871, Degas was in Orne, recovering from the Franco-
Prussian War before journeying to New Orleans). These reading s were
supplemented with articles about the Occupy movement.
The final papers could not have been more diverse: uncontrolled nature in
Degas’s horse-racing paintings; police violence at Occupy Cal; Degas’s Bathers and
the gaze; barriers that keep Mexican-American students from participating in
Occupy Cal; alienation in Degas’s family scenes; photojournalism and the Occupy
movimiento; Degas, the nude, and feminism. If teaching, like direct action, involves
some measure of risk, this was a risk that paid off.
JULIA BRYAN-WILSON is an associate professor of art history at the University of
California, berkeley.
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