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THE ART STRIKE PAPERS
The Art Strike Papers is a substantial collection of
material produced in response to the Art Strike 1990-93.
It is made up entirely of pieces which have appeared
since the publication of The Art Strike Handbook in April
1989.
"The Art Strike is surely the proverbial last word in the
sorry saga of anti-artism. It has the dubious virtue of
providing for its own supersession by being a conscious
simulation a veritable mockery of itself. As pure
negation, however, it would surely be more valuable if it
were only a little more obviously insincere" Mike
Peters and Steve Bushell 'Concluding Unartistic
Postscript'
"The importance of the Art Strike lies not in its
feasibility but in the possibilities it opens up for
intensifying the class war. The Art Strike addresses a
series of issues: most important amongst these is the
fact that the socially imposed hierarchy of the arts can
be actively and aggressively challenged... The organisers
of the Art Strike have quite consciously exploited the
fact that within this society what is simulated tends to
become real." Stewart Home 'Art Strike 1990-1993'
"Making the Art Strike (quasi) real is a series of
documents that discuss the act of negation, of not doing
art... the texts serve as the simulated reality of an
organised strike" Anon 'Strike Out On Your Own: A
Reader's Guide to Simulated Reality in the Years Without
Art'
"The Strikers quote Jean Baudrillard's statement: 'Art no
longer contests anything, if it ever did.' But does
refusing to make art contest anything? If only it did."
C. Carr 'The End of Everything'
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Home, Stewart 1962
Neoist manifestos.
I. Arts
I. Title II. Mannox, James III. The Art strike
papers
700
ISBN 1-873176-15-5
The following was previously published by AK Press, 22
Lutton Place, Edinburgh, Scotland EH8 9PE in 1991 back to
back with Neoist Manifestos by Stewart Home. This is only
a very small sample of Art Strike material and doesn't
include any of the vast number of graphics. Apart from
this, the most readily available stuff is contained in
the 38 issues of YAWN published by the Drawing Legion, PO
Box 227, Iowa City, IA 52244, USA, send an SAE or IRC for
details of availability of back issues and prices. More
information will be available soon in Neosim, Plagiarism
and Praxis by Stewart Home forthcoming from AK Press. The
National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
South Kensington, London SW7 2RL holds a substantial
collection of press cuttings on Stewart Home including
much about the Art Strike. Stewart Home can be contacted
by post at BM Senior, London WC1N 3XX, UK (full address).
INTRODUCTION
Late in the autumn of 1988, Stewart Home and Mark Pawson
were prowling East London in search of Art Strike
recruits. They came to visit me in Beck Road, Hackney. We
discussed the social and political role of art, it's
effects on society and how this related to the issue of
class. Having done time as an art student, my stand-point
was clear, all creative action conscious or otherwise
was by definition artistic. The concept of art should be
transformed, so that all distinctions between artists and
the rest of society are eradicated.
I was in favour of the Art Strike and we talked about
ways in which we could promote the concept, such as
picketing art openings and other forms of direct action.
Stewart and Mark told me about the Art Strike Action
Committee in California and proposed that we form a
British branch. I agreed to this and the ASAC (UK) was
formed on the spot. I felt that bombing galleries would
provide us with a dramatic way of stating our position.
However, the most provocative action we undertook was
leafleting sections of London's art community. The ASAC
(UK) neglected direct action in favour of propaganda
activities. Vive la revolution!
For a while, there was intense international activity.
British, Irish, German and three strategically located
American Art Strike groups produced and distributed
thousands of propaganda leaflets, posters, comics,
pamphlets, T-shirts, balloons, stickers and badges.
However, despite all this activity as far as I am aware
Stewart, Tony Lowes and John Berndt were the only
individuals to strike. The ASAC (California) had always
said that 'Art Strike was the worst idea ever' and yet
it was much more attractive than the 'realistic' ideas it
opposed.
Minimal involvement in most of the theoretical
discussions weakened the Art Strike's relevance to my
everyday life. Of course, the value of any theory will
fluctuate over a period of time. Many Art Strikers burned
out on discussion after a while and lost their natural
grasp of the issues involved. Nevertheless, I hope this
book will lift its readers to heights of revolutionary
ecstasy and the only efficient act of dissension
suicide. Read and destroy...
* * * *
Spellings and punctuation have been standardised
throughout the text: e.g. in the case of US and Canadian
writers, what was originally 'labor' has been rendered
'labour', 'ize' spellings are rendered 'ise' etc.
Otherwise nothing has been altered. Factual inaccuracies
have been left unfootnoted and as they stand a careful
reading of the whole text will clarify most of these.
James Mannox, London Summer 1991
for the Art Strike Action Committee (UK)
ABOUT THE ART STRIKE
While the Art Strike was not conceived as a Mail Art
project, many of the fifty or so individuals who've been
engaged in propagating it have close ties with the
Eternal Network. As such, it raises issues which are of
pertinence to Mail Artists and points to ways in which
international networking can be used to give voice to
radical social perspectives.
THE CONCEPT
The 1990 Art Strike was called as a means of encouraging
critical debate around the concept of art. While certain
individuals will put down their tools and cease to make,
distribute, sell, exhibit or discuss their cultural work
for a three year period beginning on January 1st 1990,
the numbers involved will be so small that the strike is
unlikely to force the closure of any galleries or art
institutions. It will, however, demonstrate that the
socially imposed hierarchy of the arts can be
aggressively challenged.
Art as a category must be distinguished from music,
painting, writing &c.. Current usage of the term art
treats it as a sub-category of these disciplines, one
which differentiates between parts of them on the basis
of 'perceived values.' Thus the music of John Cage is
considered art, while that of Madonna is not. Therefore,
when we use the term art, we're invoking a distinction
between different musics, paintings, works of fiction
&c., one which ranks the items to be found within these
categories into a hierarchy.
Given the diversity of objects, texts, compositions &c.,
which are said to be art, it seems reasonable to conclude
that there is no common denominator among these 'art
works' which can be used as a criterion for deciding what
should or should not be considered art. What
distinguishes the art object is the particular set of
social and institutional relationships which are to be
found around it. Put another way, art is whatever those
in a position of cultural power say is art.
One of the purposes of the Art Strike is to draw
attention to the process by which works of art are
legitimated. Those artists and administrators who are in
the privileged position of deciding what is and is not
art constitute a specific faction of the ruling class.
They promote art as a superior form of knowledge and
simultaneously use it as a means of celebrating the
'objective superiority' of their own way of life on the
basis that they are committed to art. Appreciation of art
is generally used as a mark of distinction, privilege and
taste.
THE PRECEDENTS
The earliest use I've found of the term Art Strike is in
Alain Jouffroy's essay "What's To Be Done About Art?"
(included in "Art and Confrontation," New York Graphic
Society 1968):
"_The abolition of art can really occur in the actual
time and space of a pre-revolutionary situation like that
of May 1968. It is essential that the minority advocate
the necessity of going on an 'active art strike' using
the machines of the culture industry to set it in total
contradiction to itself. The intention is not to end the
rule of production, but to change the most adventurous
part of 'artistic' production into the production of
revolutionary ideas, forms and techniques."
The problem with this proposal is that without ending the
rule of production, avant-garde artists would simply swap
one privileged role for another. Instead of providing
entertainment for a privileged audience, artists are to
form themselves into a vanguard providing ideas, forms
and techniques for the masses. While such a role may be
attractive to the artist, it does nothing to alter the
oppressive domination of a so called creative elite over
the rest of society.
The New York Art Strike Against War, Repression and
Racism was a coalition of artists, dealers, museum
officials and other members of the art community. Among
other things, it called for a one day closure of
galleries and museums on 5/22/70, with optional
continuance for two weeks. On that day the Whitney, the
Jewish Museum and a number of galleries closed, while the
museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim suspended their
admission charges. While some of the aims of the New York
Art Strike were laudable (such as protesting against the
war in Vietnam), its supporters also used it as a vehicle
for strengthening the privileged position artists occupy
within contemporary society. However, the New York Art
Strikers soon broke into dissenting factions and their
movement was moribund before the end of 1970.
The next proposal for an Art Strike came from Gustav
Metzger. Writing in the catalogue accompanying the
exhibition "Art Into Society/Society Into Art" (ICA,
London 1974), he called upon artists to support a three
year Art Strike which was to run between 1977 and 1980.
The idea was to attack the way in which the art world was
organised rather than to question the status of art.
However, Metzger was unable to rally support for his
plan, presumably because most artists lack any sense of
the mutual self-interest which would enable them to act
in solidarity with others.
In February 1979, Goran Dordevic mailed a circular asking
a variety of Yugoslavian and English speaking artists if
they would take part in an International Art Strike to
protest against repression and the fact that artists were
alienated from the fruits of their labour. Dordevic
received forty replies, the majority of which expressed
doubts about the possibility of putting the International
Art Strike into practice. Because so few artists were
prepared to pledge their support, Dordevic abandoned his
plan for an International Art Strike.
In Eastern Europe, where cultural work is totally
professionalised, there have been successful strike
actions by artists. During martial law in Poland, artists
refused to exhibit work in state galleries, leaving the
ruling class without an official culture. More recently
in Prague, 500 actors, theatre managers and stage
directors were among those who announced a week long
strike to protest against state violence. Instead of
giving performances, actors proposed to lead audiences in
discussions of the situation (see "New Protest In Prague
Follows Beating Death," New York Times 19/11/89).
However, the fact that artists are sometimes prepared to
use their privileged position for what many would view as
laudable ends does not place them above criticism.
NETWORKING THE 1990 ART STRIKE
The 1990 Art Strike was publicly announced in a flyer I
issued during the summer of 1985. Further information
appeared in issues of 'Smile' magazine and a succession
of texts, flyers and pamphlets. The idea was pumped by
John Berndt in Baltimore and myself in London. One of the
earliest responses to our propaganda was a pack of "Give
Up Art/Save The Starving" stickers, badges and balloons
from Eire based Tony Lowes.
The Art Strike virus spread as John, Tony and I
energetically promoted the concept. And so, by the end of
1988, the idea had caused something of a stir in Mail Art
and other circles, but we were still lacking an
organisational form with which to implement the strike.
At this point, Steve Perkins, Scott MacLeod, Aaron Noble
and others decided to form an Art Strike Action Committee
(ASAC) in San Francisco. Fired by the initiative of these
activists, I formed a UK ASAC with Mark Pawson and James
Mannox. Other ASACs soon sprang up in Baltimore, Eire and
Latin America.
January 1989 saw the California ASAC organise an Art
Strike Mobilisation Week in San Francisco. The UK and USA
East Coast ASACs then attempted saturation leafleting of
art institutions and artists' housing in London and
Baltimore. This tactic worked very effectively in
Baltimore and led to the formation of an anti-Art Strike
group. The larger and more confident art community in
London was not so easily intimidated provocative
actions such as leafleting a party to mark the closure of
a gallery, led to earnest discussion rather than howls of
outrage.
The year continued with propaganda posters made during
the San Francisco Art Strike Mobilisation Week being
exhibited at two community art venues in London and then
during the Fifth International Festival Of Plagiarism in
Glasgow. Lectures and debates were held in various art
schools and institutes both in the UK and the US. All
this activity caught the attention of the media and ASAC
representatives made appearances on national radio in
both Britain and Eire. There was also a brief Art Strike
feature on a London TV station. Written coverage of the
Art Strike was more extensive with features and news
stories being carried in everything from underground
magazines to the New York Village Voice.
NO THEORETICAL SUMMING UP
Since the Art Strike is located in opposition to closure,
there can be no theoretical summing up of the issues
involved. The time for theorising the Art Strike will be
after it has taken place. Here and now, it is not
possible to resolve the contradictions of a group of
'militants' many of whom do not consider themselves
artists 'striking' against art. For the time being, the
Art Strike must be understood simply as a propaganda
tactic, as a means of raising the visibility and
intensity of the class war within the cultural sphere.
Stewart Home, London 27/12/89. Originally commissioned by
Chuck Welch for his book "The Eternal Network: a mail art
anthology."
WHEN BLOWING THE STRIKE IS STRIKING THE BLOW
"Those whose identity is based on 'their opposition' to
the world as it is, have a vested interest in maintaining
the status quo -" Stewart Home.
There's a lot to be said for the Art Strike, which is
just as well, since between 1990 and 1993 nothing can be
written or painted or performed in its support. There's
something to be said against it too no time limit here
and plenty of room of dissent.
Art Strike propaganda claims that the artists' strike
will have the effect of bringing the class struggle to
the artistic realm. It argues that the most radical art
and the most critical artists are actually supporting
capitalist social relations even when they purport to
subvert them; artistic practice must therefore cease
since it stabilises and nourishes the social relations
its more oppositional forms claim to contest.
This argument is akin to a wider challenge made by
postmodern philosophers such as Baudrillard, who argue
that criticism is no longer possible and that the only
efficient way of dissenting from capitalist society is to
commit suicide. The "Art Strike Handbook" quotes
Baudrillard:
"Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative
and a perpetual surpassing, as well as immediately (or
almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One
must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contests
anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the
malediction consumed."(1)
Any active dissent can be commodified, turned into a
product useful for the maintenance of capitalism. The
slogans of revolutionary politics are used to sell bank
accounts, the painting that challenges beauty and form is
placed in the gallery where its beauty and form are
admired and valued and bought and sold; the biting poem
is read on the radio to accompany the liberal critics'
display of sorrow at the state of the world. Whatever is
said against can be made to speak for, like any weapon,
art can be turned against those who use it.
The art strikers have emerged out of a tradition of
avant-garde culture which has recognised these problems
and continually agitates against what it has defined as
the recuperation of criticism. In different ways, the
Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists, all realised
that anything they produced could be integrated into the
structures they opposed.
"Whatever doesn't kill power is killed by it."(2)
Thus the Dadaists watched their anti-art works being
categorised as works of art, and aimed their whole
project at the evasion of this recuperation. After five
years of agitation against capital, war and morality,
they reached an impasse of suicide or silence. Everything
they made or said or wrote was turned against its
critical purpose and used against them. So they scrapped
the whole project. In effect, like the cultural workers
of the 1980s, they decided to go on strike.
The Dadaists left a legacy which has indeed been
recuperated in the form of commodified works of art, the
use of their techniques of collage and photomontage in
advertisements, and the presentation of their work in
coffee table books and university seminars. They were
right to believe that this was inevitable as long as they
were merely producing, and not controlling the means of
production. But on the way, they did constitute a
challenge to bourgeois morality, the philosophical
assumptions on which it was based and the propaganda of
the First World War which legitimated its brutality. In
the end they felt that their subversions of established
values were merely contributing to the culture they
wished to destroy. The question became one of whether
their participation outweighed their silence as the most
effective weapon. It was not a matter of giving up the
struggle, but the use of giving up as a means of
struggle.
Like the art strikers, the Dadaists recognised that both
art and the artist are as guilty in their participation
as any other commodity or worker. This perspective has
far more validity than that adopted by Marcuse and
Adorno, who argued that the Dadaist project was misguided
in its attacks on conventional art. They considered that
art has an autonomy and distance from capitalist
relations which must be preserved rather than undermined;
art bears an essential negativity derived from its
peculiar Form; its rearrangements of reality are
conducted on principles of order quite alien to those of
capitalism. This Form renders art a:
"refuge and a vantage point from which to denounce the
reality established through domination."(3)
Although Adorno and Marcuse criticised the anti-artists
for attacking artistic Form, they concurred with the
avant-garde aim of ending the distinction between art and
the rest of reality. Indeed, Marcuse wished to see a
society organised according to the aesthetic principles
he saw preserved in art. But they both argued that the
achievement of this integration was not a task in which
artists can participate. Art must remain in a realm in
which calm reflection can remind us of the truths of an
authentic life which will be achieved after the
revolution.
Expressing their rejection of this view in different
ways, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists, worked
for the collapse of the distinction between art and the
rest of life in the here and now. Rather than waiting
until after the revolution, they argued that the
integration of art and life was fundamental to the
achievement of revolution, which is possible only because
of the subjection of capitalism to continual assault on
all fronts: ideological, cultural and economic.
If art is an area of contestation like any other, it is
also an area of integration and recuperation. The Art
Strike is a recognition of this double role: it brings
industrial struggle to art, challenges artist to
jeopardise their careers and identities in the same way
as other striking workers, and demands that those who
continue to work justify their lack of solidarity. It
also presupposes that art is integral to capitalist
relations, and that the recuperation of critical or
radical art is an inevitable attribute of this society.
But the Art Strike is merely one way of tackling this
situation, and can only be effective if it is regarded as
a tactic in the struggle against capitalism rather than
the end of tactics. By enlisting Baudrillard in the
defence of the strike, its protagonists are in danger of
confusing these roles.
Baudrillard argues that the history of criticism,
including the Dada experience, shows that recuperation is
inevitable, and that a belief in the possibility of
critical art or any other discourse is naive. This
renders criticism pointless, and places the critic in an
unjustifiable position. Participation in the networks of
power it attacks will always be supportive of them, and
silence, apathy, and the refusal to contribute or
participate in the debate are the only valid responses to
existing society. So Baudrillard says nothing? Far from
it. He produces books, articles and academic papers by
the dozen, most of which are couched in mystified and
complex terminology which makes them inaccessible to all
those without the opportunity to study them. The
disengagement he proposes is strictly for other people,
the masses express their dissent through passivity while
the philosophers continue to profit from and, by their
own arguments, support the capitalist system of relations
they purport to be attacking.
Anyone who does refuse to be creative for the three years
of the Art Strike will be less hypocritical than
Baudrillard but not necessarily more critical. At the
logical extreme of Dada's suicide, Baudrillard's
philosophy, or today's Art Strike, is the view that it
would have been more damaging to capitalism if nothing
had ever been created. Then there would be no ideas or
art works to recuperate, and capitalism would have been
deprived of a part of its cultural support. But where
there is nothing to be recuperated, there is nothing to
fight with: the capitalist establishment might be
disarmed, but so would its opponents.
If there is one characteristic of capitalism we may be
sure of, it is that nothing can escape it. But faced with
an impossible situation, the loud and active search for
possibilities is an alternative to silent passivity.
Nothing can escape the saboteur either, and the legacy
left by Dada and others is part of an armoury which can
be plundered by the subversives as well as the
establishment. The culture of the past must not be
destroyed or abandoned, but superseded in its use of
'partisan propaganda purposes'(4) in the present. This
can easily be attacked as a form of liberal reformism,
changing from within, etc. But we do live within
capitalism, and there is no such thing as change from
without. The question becomes one of how the change from
within must be pursued. The strike is one answer, but it
is just as likely that the most effective anti-capitalist
artists are those who work as saboteurs. Their awareness
of the recuperation of their work does not petrify them,
instead, they use this recognition to sidestep and expose
the mechanisms, recuperation amongst them, which
perpetuate capitalism.
The value of the Art Strike is in its proposal of
silence, rather than silence itself, the propaganda
rather than the deed. The Art Strike must be seen as a
means of exposing, rather than escaping recuperation. Art
Strike propaganda reveals the extent of recuperation and
proposes an action which cannot be recuperated. But
anything which is totally invulnerable to recuperation
cannot be used in contestation either. Although the Art
Strike propaganda is meaningless without the Art Strike,
the strike is also useless without the propaganda.
Inaction must first be justified and explained through
action, you have to say why you're going to be silent.
The art strikers claim that the tactics of industrial
struggle are being brought to art, but the strike is not
the only industrial weapon, and artists have always taken
their techniques of sabotage and subversion from workers.
Disputes vary according to the nature of the work in
question: although car workers might well stop making
cars, printers might prefer to print their own propaganda
rather than stop printing.
The Art Strike is a valid response to the problems of
criticism, but it is not the only one. It is a good thing
only insofar as it produces more radical art, of which
its own propaganda is a perfect example. Consequently it
is a good thing only in its failure, and since this is
inevitable, the Art Strike is necessarily a good thing.
Once put into the world, tactics such as this can be used
by anyone for any ends. So long may such active
resistance continue! Here's to the saboteurs, the double
agents, those who turn the world around! Don't strike,
occupy!
Sadie Plant, first published in Here and Now 10, Leeds
Spring 1990.
1. Art Strike Handbook, p. 38.
2. Mustapha Khyati, 'Captive Words.' Ken Knabb (ed)
Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public
Secrets, Berkely, 1981), p. 171.
3. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Macmillan,
London, 1979), p. 18
4. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, 'Methods of
Detournement,' Situationist International Anthology, p.
9.
STRIKING AT THE HEART OF ART
At the age of twenty-seven Stewart Home went on strike.
Previously active as artist, organiser, writer and
publisher, Home had been a provocative presence on the
arts scene. Renowned for his disregard for the
conventions of the art circuit and with a determination
to subvert the dogma of both left and right politics,
Home had come to art after a background in punk bands and
involvement with groups like Class War.
As a writer and publisher, Home frequently blurred the
definitions between pulp fiction and high art theory. In
his gallery based work Home similarly undercut the
standard practice of culture.
Late in 1989 Home was preparing to go on Art Strike. The
idea, imported from America, is that all artists,
curators, critics should refuse involvement in cultural
production from January 1990 to January 1993. The
intention is to 'Dismantle the cultural apparatus.' Home
has said he realises he is perhaps the only UK Art
Striker. 'I don't expect a huge response,' he states,
'but what's important are the questions something like
this posses. Hopefully it is as much about triggering
doubts as anything else.'
Home's hard-core disavowal of an art system he sees as
corrupt and in support of the state is perhaps the most
radical of strategies. Elsewhere, other artists and
activists have sought to subvert existing definitions in
other ways(_)
Nik Houghton first published in Artists Newsletter,
December 1990.
STRIKE FOR STRIKES SAKE?
"Cluster round the juke box for some songs you've
probably heard before,
It's nothing if it isn't pure."
Yeah Yeah Noh, "Stealing in the Name of the Lord."
"The art strike (_) is a good thing only insofar as it
produces more radical art, of which its own propaganda is
a perfect example."
Sadie Plant, "Here and Now 10."
The success or failure of Karen Home's 'Art Strike'
propaganda can clearly not be judged in terms of how many
artists do in fact down tools from now until 1990 that
would be too cruel. However, I cannot accept Plant's
alternative evaluation, a political failure is not
necessarily an artistic triumph. I would argue, on the
contrary, that Home's enterprise is a bad thing all
round, reactionary both in what it says (politics) and in
how it says it (art). The Art Strike is a good thing only
insofar as it is ignored completely(1): any 'success'
will be a bad thing. Its importance lies in the
weaknesses which its success has highlighted. This is
most obvious in the area of concepts of art, where the
Art Strike has succeeded in popularising a peculiarly
banal and ill-thought out version of what art is and what
'good art' is or might be. It is about time we got our
own ideas on the subjected sorted out. As Mike Peters'
article in "Here and Now 10" began to suggest, it is not
enough simply to advocate 'more radical art.' We must
first identify what art actually is and does; then we can
consider how it might be capable of being 'radical.'
My position, briefly, is as follows. Jean-Pierre Voyer
wrote, "Whether the subject sinks into madness, practices
art or participates in an uprising (_) the two poles of
daily life contact with a narrow and separate reality
on the one hand and spectacular contact with the totality
on the other are simultaneously abolished, opening the
way for the unity of individual life." ("Reich how to
use"). Well, no he didn't for 'art' read 'theory' but
the description holds good. Finding the language for real
communication, as opposed to both a spectacular
understanding of the totality and the meaninglessness of
everyday 'life'(2); going beyond individual isolation and
spectacular collectivity into a genuine commonality; this
is the process of making theory, but also that of making
art. Voyer's emphasis on the subjective experience of
making theory, its effects on the theorist's character
armour as well as on her view of the world, apply here
also. Art, just as much as theory, is a process of
'making common meanings:' to the extent that those
meanings are 'radical' this will be a taxing activity,
for the artist as much as the theorist. Contented
artists, as well as contented theorists, should be
avoided: they are clearly engaged in reiterating meanings
which are already common. Tortured artists, on the other
hand, should be sought out and encouraged.
Now, it has for a long time been assumed that art and
theory are in fact not comparable, and that anyone
involved in the former owes it to the global proletarian
struggle to jack it in and concentrate on the latter.
(Ironically, much of the suspicion with which Karen Home
is now regarded arose for precisely this reason). Like so
much else that affects us today, this goes back to the
fifth conference of the SI (Goteborg, 1961). On that
occasion Attila Kotanyi stated that situationist art was
impossible under 'the dominant conditions of artistic
authenticity;' any art produced by situationists would
promptly be recuperated. By way of solution, Kotanyi
proposed that members of the SI continue to produce art,
but that all such work be referred to as
'antisituationist.' "While various confused artists
nostalgic for a positive art call themselves
situationist, antisituationist art will be the mark of
the best artists."
Whether this could have been, or was intended as, a
serious solution is unclear; its actual effect was the
exclusion of several members, the redirection of the SI's
activities onto the plane of theory, and the long-
standing bias against art which was eventually to enable
Karen Home to impress the hell out of a lot of people by
dropping names like Gustav Metzger. (OK, OK, I'd never
heard of him either). Whether it was justified in its own
terms is equally unclear. While one sympathises with
Raoul Vaneigem's call for the SI to cease its involvement
in 'the spectacle of refusal;' it's hard to share
Vaneigem's confidence that the (predictable) alternative
'the refusal of the spectacle'(3) can be embarked on
by the simple expedient of producing theory to the
exclusion of art. Indeed, the situationists could only
maintain their own faith in theory as a spectacle-free
zone by continually contrasting 'theory' (hoooray) with
'ideology' (boo, hiss!): a distinction which does little
to illuminate the actual relations of the production of
theory, and which is in any case difficult to make with
any consistency. However we describe the process of
recuperation (and Kotanyi's statement that situationist
art 'will be recuperated by society and used against us,'
contains too much paranoia and too little politics to be
really useful) we need to be clear that it can be applied
to everything. Kotanyi's fear, a school of art called
'situationism,' never came true(4); but the political
ideology of 'situationism' appeared in 1968 and has never
gone away.
My contention, then, is that the situationists were
mistaken in labeling art as spectacular and theory as
authentic. The reason why no art exists which can be
guaranteed free of the taint of the spectacle (or of
'bourgeois culture') is that there are no such
guarantees, for art or for anything else; there is no
'this side' of the spectacle. Theory is not the
situationists' pure negative, nor is art a tool of the
commodity economy. Rather, both art and theory are means
of communication languages of common meanings. Both
come in new, old, subversive and spectacular varieties;
both, if found threatening, will swiftly be recuperated;
both can be plagiarised (or detourned, as we pro-situs
used to say) and the plagiarisms themselves may be
useful or useless, radical or reactionary.
The more attentive reader will by now have realised that
I am not in sympathy with the Art Strike. I can best
explain my reasons by referring the reader once again to
that historic meeting in Goteborg: more specifically to
Karen Home's view of the matter, as given in her "The
Assault On Culture: utopian currents from lettrisme to
class war." (Is there any justification for that 'e' on
the end of 'lettrisme?' I think we should be told). Home
rejects the SI's verdict in favour of theory and against
art, siding with the Scandinavian and German
situationists who were excluded following the
'antisituationist art' proposal and who later formed a
second Situationist International. (For the sake of
clarity I have adopted the real SI's term of abuse for
this group, which I will refer to as the Nashist SI).
Home speaks approvingly of these artists, who shared 'a
belief in the collective, and non-competitive production
of art.' However, we're not actually talking about 'art'
here: "Overt and conscious use of collective practices to
make 'cultural artifacts' do not really fit the
description 'art' at least if one is using the term to
describe the high culture of the ruling class in
capitalist societies." Nor, indeed, if one is using the
term to describe pig farming. The SI's valuation of
theory rested on two oppositions: between theory and art,
and between theory and ideology. Having reversed the
terms of the first opposition, Home echoes the second
with an equally mythical dichotomy: all art is either
'high culture' (boo) or collective cultural artifact
production (hoooray!). Like its counterpart, this is not
an easy position to maintain empirically.
The significance of all this for the Art Strike is
twofold. Firstly, the terms become blurred: should all
'art' cease, or only identifiably 'high culture' forms?
Or should art be allowed to continue only if it passes
the Home test ('overt and conscious use of collective
practices')? This last interpretation might explain why
issue 8 of the paper "Anti-Clock-Wise" contains both
anti-culture material and an article in praise of Mail
Art by Mark Lawson.(5) But material from the Mail Art
networks has appeared in galleries before now, which
presumably means that too is now an ornament of the
ruling class; and in any case Home is currently
advocating a complete 'refusal of creativity.' Problems,
problems! More importantly, if one rejects the picture of
art as a sea of ruling class culture with a few islands
of subversive practice dotted about in it, the whole
thing collapses. The entire 'struggle against the
received culture of the reigning society' which Home has
been conducting since 1985(6) is built on the idea that
'received culture' disseminates the values of 'the
reigning society,' with art in particular representing
'the high culture of the ruling class in capitalist
societies.' This image of culture as a conveyor belt,
carrying the values of the ruling class into everyday
consciousness, is necessitated only by Home's a priori
decision to divide art into sheep and goats. It's
certainly not necessitated by the facts. True, art is a
material process within society; true, art is never
innocent of the existing social order, and is always
under pressure to promote it within the artist's mind
as much as anywhere. This, though, only adds up to saying
that art and 'culture' is a means of communication
and therefore a space of contestation, or a battleground
as we say in English. The task is not to combat received
culture but to go to work on it: embracing parts of it,
emphatically rejecting others but above all diverting(7)
it to our own purposes.
In fairness, it must be said that there is more to the
Art Strike than that. There is also an argument about
artists as people, alleging that their status as pseudo-
radical high-cultural merchants gives them elitist
delusions about 'the superiority of their 'creativity'
over the leisure and work pursuits of the social
majority.' Without the prop of the anti-'culture'
argument, though, this looks less like radicalism and
more like guilt-tripping. Elitism is a disfigurement of
the character: it's almost as bad as spots. If artists
are worried about it, though, the answer is simple: go
away and get it cleaned up. We don't want them moaning to
the rest of us about how ugly they are and all the
parties they're missing ("I couldn't go out looking like
this what would all those beautiful workers say?"). In
any case, elitism is a sign of incipient co-option: and
co-option means that your work is being misappropriated.
Don't give up take it back! Just say no!
So much for the overt political meanings of the Art
Strike. There is, however, more to it than that: there is
a sense, as Sadie Plant implied, in which the Art Strike
is an art work. This can best be appreciated by looking
again at the question of success or failure, our
assessment of which depends entirely on how we interpret
the Art Strike itself. Taken straight, it's clearly a
miserable failure. It is unimaginable that an actual Art
Strike will materialise: even the idea has made very
little headway outside the pages of "Smile" and none at
all outside the anarchist milieu. Talking about 'the Art
Strike' at all is doing it a fairly large favour: what
exists is a campaign for an Art Strike, or more precisely
propaganda in favour of a campaign for an Art Strike.
That propaganda has no more popular support than the
calls for a General Strike that issue from time to time
from the organs of the corpse of Leninism, and as such
deserves the same oblivion. Alternatively, we can take
the whole thing as a rather deadpan joke at the expense
of 'political artists' (if you're so radical let's see
you on the picket line), but this doesn't improve matters
much: hardly anyone has either got the joke or fallen for
it.
These, however, are not the only possibilities. In
between lies the whole terrain of irony, of saying one
thing and meaning two or three others: the terrain where
meanings split and proliferate, where the distinction
between 'theory' and 'art' ceases to make sense. This,
clearly, is the area where Home's promotion of the Art
Strike(8) operates; this, too, is one of the areas where
really new meanings get made,(9) and an area where "Here
and Now"(10) has squatters rights. In other words,
despite Home's post-situationist attachment to a rigid
division between art and theory, the disjuncture between
the Art Strike's apparent meaning and its real impact
mean that it works, if it works at all, as a combination
of art and theory; or rather, as a demonstration of the
impossibility of separating the two.
It makes sense, then, to refer to the Art Strike's
propaganda as 'radical art,' at least in the sense of
'unprecedented art.' This though, is not the only
consideration: not all new meanings are good ones. What,
then, is the Art Strike really 'saying?' Two main themes
are apparent: a complete abandonment of politics,
associated with an impression of a kind of ultimate and
unsurpassable radicalism. The first can best be
approached by considering the hypothetical political
impact of a realised Art Strike. Industrial action works
to counteract the isolation and passivity which are
endemic in this society: strikes are a collective
rejection of the strikers' role as workforce and an
affirmation that they're worth more than that. A strike
by artists, though, would actually promote passivity and
isolation: the strikers would not be a group refusing
work but a scattering of individuals doing nothing. To
this picture we must add the facts that an art strike
will not happen, and that very few people either know or
care about what artists do with their time anyway. A call
for inaction, which is bound to be ignored, and which is
addressed to people whose actions nobody notices: what is
this but an elaborate demonstration of the futility of
politics? The Marxists aspired to change the world: the
point, it would appear, is to withdraw from it.
This relates closely to the second point. Home has made
an easy reputation out of radicals' tendency to confuse
the concepts of 'qualitative supersession' and 'reductio
ad absurdum:' that is, to assume that all previous
radical practice can be superseded simply by 'taking it
further.' This generally takes fairly sophisticated
forms: talking about 'situationist ideology,' for
example, or alleging that radical art is part of ruling
class culture. Latterly, though, Karen Home has
specialised in the most radical-looking strategy of all:
negate everything. The tendency of the Art Strike is to
argue that, outside itself, there is no authentic
opposition: that all oppositional activity, radical art
included, is a form of social integration. The empirical
difficulties here are obvious and major: it is hard to
see how anyone other than Karen Home could ever prove
that they were actually 'opposing' existing society, and
not merely indulging in 'oppositionalism' except
perhaps by supporting the Art Strike, reading Richard
Allen and slagging off the SI_ The strategy which Home
has 'taken further' here is the division between the SI
and all other 'theorists,' between the artists of the
Nashist SI and all other 'artists,' and for that matter
between the Seventh Day Adventists and all other
'Christians.' What is even more important is the end
result. So complete a negation results in a politics not
of negation but of abstention: if nothing is authentic
'nothing can be done.'
This is the true message of the Art Strike. Ultimately
Home, like Baudrillard, is advocating silence and
inaction,(11) is promoting as the ultimate negation,
alienation from one's own capacity to act. This has its
own interest for theory-collectors and the terminally
disillusioned;(12) its main interest for the rest of us
is that it marks Home out as a practitioner of theory for
theory's sake, political activity taken up in the belief
that it is pointless. To describe this as radical would
do violence to the meaning of the word: the word
'reactionary' fits much better. 'Boring' does quite
nicely too.(13) As with the theory of Baudrillard, as
with the 'art for art's sake' espoused by aesthetes from
Walter Peter to the Neoists,(14) the Art Strike's only
real achievement will be the entertainment it gives its
audience and, of course, the careers it makes.
Mr Jones (aka Phil Edwards), first published in Here &
Now 11, Glasgow Summer 1991. This is the version
circulated in typescript by Mike Peters prior to
publication of the piece, it varies very slightly from
the version carried in Here & Now.
1. Damn!
2. 'Life's about as wonderful as a cold' Mark Perry,
1977. Perry is not known to have been familiar with the
situationists' theses on the banalisation of everyday
life, but being a 'punk' he was doubtless influenced by
them anyway.
3. Cf. the following comment on the Unification Church
mass wedding of a few year back: "A spectacle of pairs,
assuredly. Let us not forget, however, that this was also
'a pair of spectacles.'" Taken from Alec Douglas H.'s
"The End of Finality" (Improbable Books, 1989). The
situationists, we must conclude, never got much beyond
the reversal of terms. It will be for others to create
the 'terms of reversal.'
4. Partial disproof: "Before Pop and after Abstract
Expressionism there was a still-born movement, based in
continental Europe_ Called 'Situationism,' this movement
expressed a rebellious need to counterpose the creative
and irreverent with the anticipated (sic) homogeneity of
media society. Essentially a non-starter as art per se
the movement had, nonetheless, an influence on French
cinema and architecture" Philip Core reviewing an
exhibition at the ICA in "New Statesman and Society,"
30th June 1989. Of course, the curators invited this kind
of misinterpretation by staging the exhibition in an art
gallery, rather than simply getting out and creating
situations.
5. Sorry 'Pawson.' Apologies all round!
6. Not single-handedly, of course! Home's struggles have
been shared with the PRAXIS group, a guy called Tony from
Cork and numerous magazines around the world all called
'Smile.' In addition many interesting uses have been made
of that famous general-purpose pseudonym or 'multiple
identity,' 'George Eliot.'
7. Or 'detourning' it. Next week: 'deriving' for
beginners.
8. My knowledge of the originators of the Art Strike
the PRAXIS group is woefully inadequate: however, I
suspect that they actually took the Art Strike seriously
(but that's Americans for you). Only on its arrival in
England was it transformed by Karen Home's creative
genius into the polyvalent multi-media event that we now
know so well.
9. Burroughs half-realised this when he asserted that
cut-ups foretold the future: simply rearrange some words
to make an unknown phrase or saying and 'the future leaks
through.' Certainly, new meanings could be created by
this method: it's a kind of automatic writing. I don't
know, though call me old-fashioned, but I prefer
meanings which have been consciously made to the kind
that leak out of the end of a random process. You can't
beat a good work of art, that's what I say.
10. A magazine of radical types.
11. Articles in 'Smile' have advocated 'sensuous
inactivity' for the duration of the Art Strike. Idle
buggers.
12. At the ICA exhibition, a couple of copies of 'Smile'
were shown, exhibited under glass so that we could
appreciate the witty and amusing cover art. Those
responsible are believed to fall into both categories.
13. Though, to be fair, this is a difficulty encountered
from time to time by the greatest of theorists. "If the
element of boredom I have experienced in writing this
finds an echo in the reader, what else is this but one
more proof of our failure to live?" as Raoul Vaneigem
asked in his foreward to "The Kids Book of How to Do It,"
or "The Revolution of Everyday Life" as it's sometimes
known. How true that is, how very true. And what a cop-
out.
14. Home once described a reference to 'situationist
ideology' as a 'calculated insult.' To judge from Home's
account of their activities, describing the Neoists as
artists is more in the nature of a calculated compliment.
ON THE ART STRIKE
Art abstracts from life. Abstraction is deletion. When
the first artist painted an aurochs on a cave wall, the
first critic saw it and said, "That's an aurochs!" But it
wasn't an aurochs, it was a painting. It's been downhill
for art criticism ever since. Art, like science, is
illumination through elimination. Artists remove in order
to improve. In this sense, minimalism is not just another
school of art, but its evolving essence, and all of
modern art can be seen as a process of progressive self-
destruction. Artists often destroy themselves,
occasionally each other, but it was left to a relatively
unknown German artist, Gustav Metzger, to give this
artistic impulse its most succinct articulation when in
1959 he announced his theory of 'auto-destructive art.'
It's not surprising, then that Metzger also anticipated
the proposed Art Strike 1990-93.
On January 1, 1990 if they comply with the directives
of the PRAXIS Group all artists will put down their
tools for three years. There will be no openings, no
showings, no readings. 'Cultural workers,' unless they
scab, will also walk out. Galleries, museums and
'alternative spaces' will shut down or be converted to
serve more practical purposes. According to the Art
Strike leadership, everybody benefits. The artists, by
stepping out from under their burden of specialised
creativity, get not only a breather but a chance to get a
life. And the plebian masses, no longer cowed by
'talented bullies,' are in turn expected to rush into art
like fresh air into a vacuum.
Although appearing at first as the suppression of art,
the Art Strike is in essence its realisation the
ultimate work of art, the culmination of its telos. In
the Art Strike, artistic abnegation achieves its final
expression: art, having become nothing becomes
everything. If art is what artists don't do, what isn't
art now? The Art Strike thus becomes an exercise in
imperialism. After all, everyone else has been on an Art
Strike all along. With the Art Strike, the leaders are
given a chance to catch up with their followers, who
weren't previously aware they had leaders, let alone
needed any.
Ostentatious renunciation is greed in its most warped and
insidious form. By their noisy refusal of art, the Art
Strikers affirm its importance and thus their own, not
unlike alcoholics whose AA meetings testify to the power
of the drug and thus to their own power in collectively
renouncing it. But there the analogy ends. The Art
Strikers liken their strike to the syndicalist General
Strike so as to appropriate the glamour of this obsolete
tactic. But a Particular Strike is not a General Strike;
and the Art Strike, since it doesn't include the refusal
of work by waged or salaried workers (artists generally
being self-employed freelancers or independent
contractors), is not a strike at all.
What remains after artists forswear art? Artists, of
course. The Art Strike magnifies the importance of
artists even as it eliminates their toil. Disencumbered
of the obligation to create, the artist no longer must
try to inform or agitate or even entertain. All pretence
to be useful to other people can be dropped. But that's
not to say artists are about to disappear into the crowd
if they did, nobody would ever notice there even was an
Art Strike. No, artists must instead make a production
out of their refusal to produce, they must clamour for
attention over what they don't do, even though their
credentials for inactivity are precisely their previous
art. This is what makes the refusal of art elitist. The
Art Strike is a vanguardist notion: only artists can
refuse art, and only artists can flatter themselves that
they stand in the way of an outburst of popular
creativity.
Actually, the reason the hoi-poloi don't create art is
not because they're intimidated by 'talented bullies,'
but because their creative power has been so suppressed
above all by work that they devote their leisure hours
to consumption, not creation. School, work, the family,
religion, rightism and leftism these thwart creativity.
The sort of 'art' created by the Art Strike leadership,
its various predictions and pronouncements, is much more
opaque to the proles than the representational art of
pre-modern times, and no less so that modern art, which
is too remote from everyday experience for anybody to be
bullied by it, unless by its reputation, which of course,
will grow during the Years Without Art.
Art Strike theorists are ambiguous about the scope of the
strike. If it represents the refusal of 'creativity' by
specialists, it is only for artists. But if the Art
Strike seeks to close down museums, libraries and
galleries, it must include the workers for whom it would
then be a real strike, the employees of the cultural
apparatus unable to refuse their creativity since nobody
has ever called for it in the first place. The janitor
would as soon mop up the museum as a nuclear power plant,
especially since the intellectuals will hound him out of
there too if they can. Such workers already know
firsthand what artists require outlandish antics to
comprehend working for the cultural industry is still
working. Only for the artist is the Art Strike a work of
art. Others who get involved would be but the paint the
striking artists apply to the canvas, props in a
performance-art piece. Human lives and livelihoods as the
stuff of art. What artist in his or her deepest
inwardness hasn't longed to echo Nero's cry, What an
artist dies in me!
Since the Years Without Income hold no appeal for the art
industry proletariat or its bureaucracy, they will no
doubt remain on the job. The impact of the strike will be
very uneven. Curators and librarians will be glad to be
rid of the hardest part of their task keeping abreast
of new artworks and conjecturing which ones will pass the
test of time. Art has been piling up since before the
Bronze Age, three years will not be time enough to
reassess and rearrange and redistribute the existing
inventory. Still, budget pressures may ease. Music,
already all but given over to 'classic hits,' will be
living in the past too. In lieu of live music, disco will
come back it pretty much already has. Most people watch
TV, not stage plays now; now everybody will. Are the
artists going on strike so that, after three years, we
beg them to come back? If theirs was a place of privilege
before, how high then will their seat be in 1993? The
real inspiration for the Art Strike is not, as is
pretended, the General Strike of the proletariat, but
rather something already depicted in a work of art the
General Strike of capitalism in Ayn Rand's Atlas
Shrugged.
But artists won't have to wait three years to profit from
the Art Strike. Returns will be immediate and they will
increase like compound interest. The Art Strike cunningly
acts upon supply, not demand. Existing art will
appreciate in value since there won't be anything coming
into the market to compete with it. In addition, there's
the surcharge conferred by the mystique of extinction;
subsequently, recent art will lead the price rise as the
last of its kind. In fact, it will stand not as the last
but as the culmination, since the ideology of progress so
sways the Western mind that it regularly mistakes the
latest of anything for the final form of a supposed
evolutionary process. The last shall be made first, or at
least it'll be priced that way. No wonder some of the
less commercially successful contemporary artists are
leading the Art Strike, and no wonder others follow them.
They don't propose to destroy artworks (although, if done
selectively, that would have nearly the same effect as
the Art Strike). The Years Without Art will include
nothing of the kind, even if everybody joins the strike.
Instead, the Art Strike will create a cartel its
inspiration isn't the IWW or the CNT, but rather OPEC.
The Art Strike is not, for all its proletarian posturing,
in any way indebted to the workers movement, except in
the theft of what you'd expect artists to steal its
imagery. It enables artists to invest their exhaustion
with importance. The refusal of art only certifies
artists as the expert interpreters of what nobody but
artists do. The art of refusal, on the other hand, acts
against what everybody does but nobody once did, against
work and submission to the state. The art of refusal is
the art of living, which begins with the general strike
which never ends.
Bob Black, first published in Artpaper, Vol 9, No. 4,
December 1989, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
TEXTS GENERATED BY AN ART STRIKE ACTION IN ALBANY
LETTER FROM NEAL KEATING TO GOVERNOR MARIO CUOMO
Dear Governor Cuomo
Recently we have issued public commendations to both you
and Commissioner Egan of OGS (Office of General Services)
for your apparent participation in the noble, and global,
Art Strike.
Obviously, you are more well-read than I had previously
given you credit for. As things stand, precious few
people seem to have any idea of what this Art Strike is
all about. I am curious as to how you first became
acquainted with the ideas and theories that have since
come to represent the Art Strike in all its criticAL
(albeit unknown) glory).
Do you intend to issue a public statement of alliance
with the Art Strike? Would such a statement include a
thorough denunciation of the elitist manipulation of
humanity's creative energies as practiced by the
cultural arbitrageurs known as "artists"?
As part of observing the Art Strike will you postpone the
return of Art in the ESP (Empire State Plaza) concourse
until January 1, 1993?
If not, can you tell me why?
Sincerely,
Neal Keating, for the AASAC (Albany Art Strike Action
Committee).
NEWSFRONT: OFF THE WALL
Part curmudgeonly pranksters, part dead earnest activists
against the intrusion of right-wing values on the art
scene, those participating in the nine-month old Art
Strike have had a hard time "enforcing" their call for a
three year moratorium on art.
But earlier this month, the Albany Art Strike Action
Committee garnered the support of the state Office of
General Services (OGS) and Gov. M. Cuomo, however
unknowingly this support may have been given.
When OGS removed and covered up the art collection in the
Empire State Plaza (ESP) concourse, Art Strike moved in,
postering the plaza and surrounding communities with a
handbill declaring:
"All of the art that lined the walls of the ESP
underground concourse has been removed or covered up (and
hopefully soon to be destroyed) to call into question the
blank emptiness of history that was previously hidden by
so many bright colours and squiggly lines."
Actually, the art was removed to install a new security
system, and OGS was not amused by the posters. Tom Tubbs,
an OGS spokesman said he was "awestruck" upon receiving a
copy of the poster. He dubbed the poster a "terrorist
note_ an absurdity, filled with typographical errors and
irrational charges."
Tubbs wouldn't go into the specifics of the new-and-
improved security system, but did say that it would
involve "all kinds of camera surveillance, and several
other devices." He also said that he had never even heard
of the Art Strike, nor did Dennis Anderson, curator of
the plaza art collection.
All in good fun, said Neal Keating, one of three local
Art Strike dis-organisers. "The intent was to suggest
something so wild that, even for one moment, it would
shatter the silent drone of constant alienation that
permeates every aspect of life today," he said in a
prepared statement.
Keating, a writer who has recently relocated to Albany
from Woodstock, said that "even people in high places,
whether conscious of it or not, are supporting the Art
Strike." Keating challenged Cuomo to "go one step
further, and never put the art back up."
Tom Gogola, METROLAND, Albany, New York State, 20-26
September 1990.
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE RE: ESP CONCOURSE ACTION OF OCTOBER
1990
1. We are a group of sensual creatures who occasionally
embark on acts of poetic terrorism for the purpose of
liberating the wondrous and propagating the
extraordinary. We encourage fully conscious orgiastic
participation in life.
2. In particular, the ESP Concourse action was directly
targeted at the walls of boredom both in and out of
people's minds as they zombie their way through the
monotonous underground cavern. The intent was to suggest
something so wild that, even for one moment, it would
shatter the silent drone of constant alienation that
permeates every aspect of life today, and perhaps drive
the beholder to seek out some more intense mode of
existence.
3. The Empire State Plaza, like the Pyramids of Egypt, is
the mausoleum of a ruling class with a taste for death.
Part shopping mall, part warren for state workers, the
Plaza is the marriage of commerce and power and naturally
shows us baby pictures of their offspring: Art Art
which returns to us for a look, (don't touch), the
creative power we have only to reach out and wrest away
in order to remake life as an adventure in fellowship,
pleasure and play. By flaunting art, especially this
collection of Art by the plutocrat Rockerfeller's
cocktail party cronies, the ESP mocks and insults
everyone whose life is eviscerated by obedience and work.
The Empire State Plaza, with its outdated modern
architecture, already looks as if it were built to be
excavated, truly, as the Parisian revolutionaries said in
1968, "soon to be picturesque ruins" and the sooner the
better.
4. That a successful Governor and probable presidential
candidate would ever attempt to address the overwhelming
horror the ghastly totality of civilisation, in any
kind of honest and critical appraisal is, for the most
part, beyond the scope of normal speculation. To put
forth in a public manner such a suggestion is almost like
declaring the existence of a parallel universe, only in
much more human terms.
Thus we have acted. For the Art Strike.
Neal Keating.
Bob Black.
Pir Fez Hafez Ad-Dajjil.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR, METROLAND
To the Editor,
There is no cause to speak, as Tom Gogola does, of the
Albany Art Strike Action Committee "enforcing" the Art
Strike. In a city boasting a combination art gallery and
real estate office, the mask has already slipped. Even
before our Empire State Plaza action, voluntary
compliance with the strike was almost universal. Our
ideas are in everyone's heads.
Nor do we care to protect art against intruding "right-
wing values." Right-wing, left-wing or art-for-art's-
sake, all art is a source of social separation and serves
a control function. Everything that was directly lived
has moved away into representation.
If (unhappy day) the art returns to the plaza, swept by
cameras and laced with censors, the class war will have
returned on the electronic battlefield. The curator will
be dismissed he doesn't know his stuff anyway if he
hasn't heard of the Art Strike and replaced by an
electronics technician with a military background from
the upper ranks of the Capital Police who have already
paid us a visit. Henceforth we will visit museums to be
looked at by the art.
Our challenge to Gov. Cuomo stands. Get rid of the art.
Without such fantasies and distractions, the concourse
architecture will quickly become unbearable. The empty
walls will be so irritating as to require their immediate
removal as well. After the art is gone, after the walls
themselves have been removed, comes the concrete
construction of momentary ambiences of life and their
transformation into a superior passional quality. This is
our entire programme, which is essentially transitory.
Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future:
passageways. The permanence of art or anything else does
not enter into our considerations, which are serious.
Bob Black.
Neal Keating.
(AASAC).
Tom Gogola replies: I don't know how Keating and Black
can claim that "voluntary compliance with the Strike was
almost universal," when Keating himself told me in an
interview that "the Art Strike has pretty much been a
failure." When I said "enforcing" it was meant as irony,
to illuminate the failure of Art Strike to achieve its
aim of an artless world.
METROLAND, 4-10 October 1990.
JUST SAY NO
In a display of anachronistic cultural militance, artists
and activists in London, Baltimore and San Francisco are
planning an 'Art Strike' to last three years beginning
January 1, 1990. "We call on all cultural workers to put
down their tools and cease to make, distribute, sell,
exhibit, or discuss their work from January 1st 1990 to
January 1st 1993," begins a 40-page Art Strike Handbook,
published last spring.
"We call for all galleries, museums, agencies,
'alternative' spaces, periodicals, theatres, art schools
&c., to cease all operations during the same period."
While it's unlikely that the luxury market called art
will collapse from lack of product early next year, the
importance of the Art Strike lies in the nobility of its
gesture a calmly strategic 'no' that Herbert Marcuse
called 'the great refusal.'
Though the strikers claim to have fellow travellers as
far dispersed as Uruguay and Ireland, none to date have
stepped forward in New York. Here in the capital and
Babylon of artistic ambition, artists won't sabotage
their future by abstaining from the race toward the big
time.
Stewart Home, a member of the London committee says that
on January 1, "I will stop doing things publicly that
will make people think of me as a creative person." Home
has published a novel and a book of essays, plays in a
punk band called King Mob, organises conferences, and
teaches occasionally at London Polytechnic all of which
activities he will cease. For three years, he plans to
sell his labour 'in ways that no one would normally
interpret as my individual creative act,' for example as
a clerk or in construction work.
The art strikers believe that art is not the residue of
some enchanted crusade, but merely another product of
human labour, like meals or computer chips. Their flat
mercantilism places the refusenik activists oddly in sync
with current standards, by which all aesthetic objects
are commodities, plain and simple. By their (in)action,
the strikers seek to force the recognition of artists as
labourers who can, if they choose, shut down the
production line that serves the senses.
'The Art Strike has a Zen quality of tearing down a
logic, but leaving nothing in its place,' says John
Berndt of the Baltimore Art Strike Action Committee of
100, which has a handful of members. Berndt has helped
stage Art Strike pickets at the Maryland Institute of
Art, and Baltimore art openings, and has disseminated
10,000 strike flyers. In January, he plans to stop his
work as an experimental musician and performance artist.
'I believe in helping institutions to self-destruct and
trying to get as much information out of that process as
possible.'
'Any way that I can sabotage commodity culture attracts
me,' says an art striker in San Francisco who, in the
venerable spirit of the anonymous collective, declined to
be identified. According to another striker, when top-
selling New York minimalist Carl Andre apparently heard
word of their actions he wrote the Bay Area group to
denounce them as 'reactionaries.' The 10-member San
Francisco committee is planning a New Year's Eve action
at Artists' Television Access Gallery to inaugurate the
strike.
Recently, the editors of Photostatic, a marginal art
magazine in Iowa City, stated their intention to stop
publication in January as an Art Strike action. Stewart
Home recently spoke about the work stoppage at the
prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, an
appearance that might be likened to an atheist lecturing
a convent. 'It's not important to have hundreds of people
stop work,' he says, 'but to disturb and demoralise those
who endorse the system of artistic production and
distribution.'
No well-known artists have aligned themselves with the
strike, and cultural work will go forward largely
unperturbed, but to look for names is certainly to miss
the point. New York is full of artists who are also
waiters. By canceling their personae as creative
individuals, those who strike are choosing a real and
immeasurable sacrifice. The art strikers seem to have
studied the old modernist history of epater les
bourgeois, espoused by such ace propagandists as Richard
Huelsenbeck. In 1920, the German Dadaist wrote, 'The
bourgeois must be deprived of the opportunity to buy up
art for his justification.' But it remains to be seen
whether the Art Strike is truly a work stoppage or merely
another piece of performance more art, or less.
Edward Ball, first published in the Village Voice, New
York 14/11/89.
ADDING MORE FUEL TO THE ART STRIKE FIRE
"To speak of the Art Strike means to speak of the
unknown, to speak of a door to a new world, to speak of a
desire to discover what one does not know. For how can
one know a desire without satisfying it?"
ATA Gallery hosted the Art Strike Mobilisation Week
January 3-8 with a variety of events: discussion,
performances, propaganda-making, dialogue, testimonial,
poetry, direct action, etc. Art Strike, as a polemic,
proposes artists give up making art for three years,
(1990-1993, The Years Without Art), is an effort to free
the artist and the artist's product from the chain of
commodity in which it is currently entrenched,
challenging the hegemony of an elite art market and
freeing the artists' time up for other, more important
activities, like saving the world. It proposes that such
action, or non-action, will help artists get to the
'real' issues (of which art is not one), such as starving
children, flooded villages, earthquake victims. T. Marvin
Lowes, initial proponent of Art Strike and ardent
polemicist, says:
"_Art has provided us with fantasy worlds, escapes from
reality_ Art is the glamorous escape, the transformation
that shields us from the world_ Art has replaced religion
as the opiate of the people_ But art has sold out to
chase its own tail. A self-perpetuating elite market art
as a commodity for the wealthy who have everything while
making artists themselves rich_ Art is money_ Artists are
murderers! Without art, life would be unendurable! We
would have to transform this world_ but we do not seize
power because we are enchanted by art. Forbid art and
revolution will follow the withholding of creative
action is man's (sic) only remaining weapon_"
Which is all very nice. But what went on at ATA this past
week could more honestly be called a dialogue about
aesthetics, or a week-long performance piece, than a
direct political action. Then again, that's part of the
question the strike ultimately raises: what's the
difference? And what is Art Strike? That was the question
asked from Monday to Sunday at ATA, generating not one,
but many answers. The following is not simply a review,
wanting to avoid the slings and arrows of sincere artists
tracking toward the truth about Art Strike though I'll
tell you right off, I'm getting paid by the inch here,
enough to make me feel legitimised in my own pursuit of
an identity, and little enough to hide from Uncle Sam. It
is interpretation,, collage, all views are not
represented; I take a poetic license whenever I can, I
say "Art Strike is" a lot because Art Strike is something
unto itself, separate from and part of the individual
activities that transpired, as well as the collective
gathering of what was said/done over the course of the
week. It exists in both the past and present tense. Art
Strike is a dialogue, a layering, a piling on of words
and action. It is what it is: changing, vital, alive.
Art Strike is an aesthetic dialogue aiming to blur
further the distinctions between Art and Life. Art Strike
is not a cocktail party. Art Strike advocates a
performance approach to life, going to a gallery not to
see art, but going to a gallery to be art. Art Strike is
a provocative declaration of aesthetic value and a
condemnation of mainstream 'high' art, the potential of
the artist to sell out for big bucks, the cheapening of
art through commodification. Art Strike is a political
statement about a) the art world, b) capitalism, c)
commodity culture, d) our inability to care for one
another as human beings. Art Strike is the final leap of
the visual artist out of the frame. Art Strike is an
excuse for polemical outbursts. A lot of people get
belligerent about Art Strike and what it advocates. Art
Strike is still unsure of its terminology. Art Strike is
a community effort. Art Strike is a good joke. Art Strike
is a really bad idea. Art Strike was a good excuse for a
good party.
Art Strike wishes people thought of art the way they
think of potatoes. Art Strike takes an anti-art stance
denoting art just as atheism denotes God (Duchamp). Art
Strike is, quite simply, an artistic statement. It is a
call for greater creativity in all aspects of one's life.
"The whole point is that life during the strike is going
to be more creative not less." Art Strike is primarily
about artists. The focus of Art Strike on stopping
production takes the attention off the artist, which is
where it belongs. Art Strike supports the development of
the artist into a whole person. Art Strike recognises the
primacy of the artist's desire to create and communicate
meaningful truths. None of the artists at ATA really
wanted to give up making art for three years. Some people
thought a good replacement for making art during the
strike would be a band. Art Strike is useful for
stretching the mind, but not necessarily as a habit of
action. Art Strike could be for artists what AA is for
alcoholics. Art Strike takes the lid off all that's
false.
Art Strike was perhaps the most lively event ever staged
at ATA Gallery. Art Strike was a supportive environment
for performance. Art Strike provoked a dialogue and
performance deserving of note in some critical journal,
by some critical critic, somewhere. Art Strike remains
unattached to product. Art Strike exists because its less
taxing to make personas than it is to make art. Yet Art
Strike forbids public personas during The Years Without
Art. Art Strike is not about style, and specifically, it
is not about being cool. Art Strike is going to fail. Art
Strike condemns the easy way out. No one necessarily
agrees about what Art Strike is.
Art Strike aims to liberate artists and non-artists from
the rigidity of labels and postures limiting our
creativity and attentiveness. As such, Art Strike is a
communist plot. Art Strike is a self-righteous
redetermination by people who produce art of little merit
and are resentful about it. Art Strike invests the art
object with a peculiar lucidity and cultural mobility
that it may or may not possess. The polemic of Art Strike
makes some unfathomable leaps: Give up art = Save the
starving. Art Strike advocates a deeper relationship to
art while at the same time condemning the label 'artist.'
There were more boys than girls at Art Strike. Art Strike
is about the possibilities of union inherent in our
meeting. Art Strike is about personal spectacle. Art
Strike is a good place to be seen wearing blue and white
polka-dotted suits. Art Strike did not address the issue
of beauty.
Art Strike is not about God, but it could be. Art Strike
advocates the negation of art as the last frontier. Art
Strike purports to be new, radical, a frontier, but anti-
art's been on the books since the turn of the century.
Art Strike has no qualms about plagiarism. Art Strike
exists in the Twilight of the Raw, in the belief that
there is nothing new to be done in art except to
relinquish it. Art Strike is about the intimacy of not
knowing. Art Strike is a perpetual challenge. Art Strike
never authoritively defined Art, Strike, Aesthetics, or
really any other word of import. Art Strike created a
forum to talk about all these important words, though.
Art Strike was neither subtle nor metaphoric. Art Strike
is a critical act and critical inquiry. Art Strike is an
intellectual discourse without intellectual rigour. Art
Strike is an intellectual discussion obfuscating any
commitment to the life of the mind. Art Strike is
somewhat self-important. Anti-intellectualism is big at
Art Strike. Art Strike is unformed in its lexical
considerations. It is not always possible to tell whether
or not Art Strike is taking itself at all seriously. Art
Strike has a good sense of humour.
Art Strike never even heard of cellular consciousness.
Art Strike is committed to a regenerative process of
change. Art Strike cries out for the beauty of the
person, not the beauty of the art object. Art Strike made
it easier for me to go into the studio this morning
without worrying if I would have anything to show for it
when I left. Art Strike believes in the ultimate power of
the artist as an active force in her (sic) environment.
Art Strike is primarily about life-style choices. Art
Strike is not a replacement for Catholicism. Art Strike
is about making New Year's resolutions not to talk to
people about your work. Art Strike is the pursuit of
polyester and paisley. Art Strike was not about the
spirituality inherent in the process of making Art. But
it could be.
Art Strike is about how much we love our identities as
artists and how much we love contradicting ourselves at
the same time. Art Strike comes about because art is
contradictory. Art Strike is all about communication and
change. Changing is such good art-making. This idea is to
be applied in infinite permutations to just about
everything. But it is not so much a matter of realising
the Art Strike, or even of building on every level of
life everything that could only be an Art Strike memory,
or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. The
Art Strike can only be realised by being suppressed.
Rachel Kaplan, first published in Coming Up!, San
Francisco, February 1989.
EXTRACTS FROM YAWN
LETTERS FROM YAWN'S READERS
Dear Yawn
_here's some info pertaining to the Boston Institute of
Contemporary Arts' panel discussion of the Situationist
International_ (I) challenged Greil Marcus (art critic
NYC Village Voice) and read the Art Strike flyer. He
interrupted, 'I don't believe artists are murderers_'
Oddly, no applause. He continued, 'The Neoists and
Stewart Home are only using the Art Strike to call
attention to themselves.' He concluded, 'Art Strike will
fail!' I countered, 'Of course it will fail, but you've
lost the entire point of why Art Strike must happen.'
Lebanon, New Hampshire.
_I've been thinking about this Art Strike thang after
reading a pamphlet about it, and this is how I see it.
I'm not going to go along w/ any Art Strike because
what's in it for me. Little ol' me is supposed to stop
doing my measly art books with no thanks from anyone
while the people who put out 'Art Strike' pamphlets and
manifestos are going to go right on doing it, keeping
right on going with their conceptual art project! Forget
it!
San Francisco, California.
ART STRIKE AS ART
It's amusing to think that 'Art Strikers' could so value
their work that they imagine its cessation would change
the economic topography of our country. If they actually
saw Art Strike as a practical solution to the problem of
the artist's contribution to the perpetuation of an
oppressive system, they would be guilty of the egotism
and elitism they deplore. They would be elevated to the
status of tragic heroes, like the lost Olympians, who
sacrificed personal glory to the dream of a greater good.
The participants have no delusions about their
(non)action and yet, in the imagination the ramifications
of Art Strike are exhilarating. If cultural workers
suddenly shut up and could no longer view themselves as
superior beings, humanity would truly have the chance to
create itself anew. What would this new humanity rising
like a Phoenix from the ashes of its own culture be like?
Art Strike is a brilliant gesture.
Art Strike is symbolic, merely provocative. It is meant
to provoke conversation among artists, like all the other
insulated works it rails against. It is a piece of
performance art that will break down the boundaries
between art and non-art to focus on life.
Since Art Strike is art, during Art Strike, Art Strike
itself won't be possible. Conceptual art in the wake of
Art Strike would be redundant and superficial. No single
work of art could approach the brilliant
simplicity/complexity of Art Strike. I imagine artists
spilling out of the ship of culture like so many
bewildered rats, only to drown.
Since art will be irrelevant after the strike, the strike
will have accomplished its mission, even though by
definition this is impossible.
Art Strike is the sound of one hand clapping.
Therefore it is the most important art of this century
make that this millenium.
Karen Eliot.
REACTION TO THE ART STRIKE
Jean-Rene Lassalle, student, Berlin, 24/12/89: 'This Art
Strike is hysterical really_ One might say that it's like
the graffiti of May '68;
sentences_ which were made up to provoke (thought among
other things) while perhaps their immediate significance
is not so very important. The mystique of the Artist
bothers me some. On the other hand, if one creates, he
gives of himself_ and this is worthy of some
recognition.' (Translated from the French).
Jacques Abeille, novelist, Bordeaux 31/12/89: 'What a
silly idea, this Art Strike_ it's a logical paradox; that
is to say, a statement which involves a contradiction, a
proposition which negates itself. To choose to do this
strike assumes in the first place that you are what you
pretend to end: one must first be an artist in order to
quit being one. It follows from this that all who during
these three years present themselves as non-artists will
be artists, and that all those who present themselves as
artists won't be_(1)
By this formal logic one will allege that its proposals
are universals that do not pertain: the Art Strike
doesn't apply to everyone, but only to those who are
already manifested as artists.. One should not say 'all
who_,' but instead only 'those who_,' or 'certain_' So
the proposal of an Art Strike doesn't entail the
advancement of a universal proposition, therefore it
holds to the official and mercantile distinctions between
artists and the rest of the human population. In other
words, to subvert this distinction, you accept the basis
of what you're trying to subvert, and end up prolonging
it by adding on a new criterion: from now on the artists
will be the ones participating in the Art Strike during
these three years_(2).
STATEMENT REGARDING THE ART STRIKE 1990-1993
Now that I have learned the reasons for the international
Art Strike 1990-1993 I declare that I will support it,
but in Yugoslavia, the country where I am living and
making art, an Art Strike would have no sense because:
1. There is no art market here yet.
2. Prices of art works are so low that you don't sell at
all. You make art for pleasure, philosophical and
creative reasons.
3. We have only a few art critics and curators, and they
have no power or influence upon artists.
4. You don't have to pay the galleries for having your
own exhibition, but galleries pay you for that. Shows are
not commercial at all, so alternative artists can exhibit
in official gallery spaces.
5. The serious culture hardly exists here, it is
repressed by the primitive, peasant culture, so our aim
is to develop and support culture here.
So I am suggesting all art strikers to come and settle in
Yugoslavia during the period 1990-1993 and continue
making art and exhibitions.
(Andrej Tisma, Novi Sad, 11 December 1989)
A PERSONAL STATEMENT BY PHILIPPE BILLE
I would like to criticise several points in this Art
Strike (1990-1993) project. First, I disagree with some
of the opinions formulated in its promoters' texts. For
example, I do not believe that various forms of
mischievousness, as greed, might be suppressed with the
only and hypothetical abolition of the 'capitalist
system' of production; nor that the 'unendurable' aspects
of the human condition, that art would help us to bear,
depend on our economic organisation; nor that it is
unjust to designate with a particular word 'artist,'
those who manifest certain particular talents; nor that
it is deplorable the fact that 'creativity' is unequally
spread among the people. Moreover, it is impossible for
me to consider, in the private sphere of my 'artistic
creation' activity, any idea of prohibition (just as I
reject the idea of any obligation to create, such as it
often appears in the activity of the professional artists
and of the apprentices who aim at becoming so).
Nevertheless, there is without doubt much to deplore, and
so to criticise, in the present state of arts, culture
and civilisation: at least enough, I think, to make it
possible to consider this unrealistic idea of the Art
Strike (1990-1993) as opportune, even if only as a curse,
or an invitation to reflection. Because the point is,
first of all, to ascertain and to assert the notable
distance which separates us pretty distinctly from the
'art world.' So, with the same meaning with which I
declared in last June, at my 33rd birthday, that I wanted
to 'retire' as an artist, I accept to follow this
(in)action movement by refusing in advance, for this
period, any new exhibition project, by limiting my
publications to the minimum; by associating to it my
collection, lately begun of unopened mail, which gathers
postal objects coming from the official, associational or
commercial institutions, so as various letters of shabby
canvassing; by studying the evolution of the debates
raised in the American, free and anonymous newsletter
YAWN. One will allege against me that this is too easy.
This is partly right. And then?
(Translated by Ph. Bille, reprinted from Lettre
Documentaire, Bordeaux, December 1989)
LET'S GO BOWLING WITH ART STRIKE!
Perhaps years of neglect can produce dictatorial desires
in even the most stalwart of the usually egalitarian
underground. Somebody out there (in here) came up with
the idea that for the next three years (1990-1993)
artists refrain from producing art. The idea, known as
Art Strike, has been discussed in a surprising number of
journals, considering its impossibility, authoritarian
high-handedness and ultimate disposability as ideas go.
In fact it was one notion that should have been disposed
of, but wasn't. And so we will be doing without the work
of avowed strikers for three years.
The issue touches me in a sensitive spot and deserves to
be exhumed, because it goes well beyond just 'fun and
games' in the artistic underground. If Art Strike be not
a whispered vicious trick of some swift-tongued
disembodied enemy of creativity, let us assume it has
developed out of the sense of despair and powerlessness
which grips those of us in the midst of creative working
in a world of recycled artistic idolatry.
Art Strike is a negative power feeding on the despair
experienced from time to time by those who have chosen
not to join the ready-made bandwagon of success in a very
unsane surface world. This despair is a burden which is,
as we speak, slowing down the progress of a thing which
could become far more real and far more strong. To adopt
a pose of cynicism or nihilism is an understandable
response to the great beast of mass-produced culture, but
it is an uneducated and unproductive response.
I certainly congratulate the perpetrator of this idea
virus called Art Strike. As a meme it has gone very far.
It has changed peoples' plans; stopped their progress
dead in its tracks: it demonstrates the power a well
placed idea can have, even coming from the 'powerless'
underground. Some would say that that is precisely the
point of Art Strike. If so, let's start planting seeds of
artistic fecundity instead of spraying herbicides or
exponentially increasing barrenness. The harnessing of
this power of ideas (verbal and non-verbal) is,
ultimately, the greatest responsibility an artist will
ever have.
There is an alchemy where art and daily life meet, are
one, are sweet, effortless and closer to the existential
bone than thirteen billion printed words on Art Strike
(or, for that matter, thirteen billion scatological album
titles, misanthropic song lyrics, or other by-products of
despair). There is a realisation, which can be
cultivated, wherein one can calculate the effect of Good
one's creation will have upon the planet. Perhaps these
intangibles present a vast and uncharted challenge, but
their reward is sweeter than upsetting a corporate board
meeting with free jazz. There is a realm where one is
shown the truth (transitional or penultimate though it
may be) in statements like, 'God is a foot, Magic is
alive' (and art is footwork proper placement of one's
'dogs' and a minimum of howling at the moon footwork
and fortuitous event). Divorce the shamanistic function
of the artist and you get artifice: the glamour we know
all too well which dominates the media (Garfield vs.
Zippy). We need good art. Better, far better than we're
getting. And you Art Strikers are urging voluntary
lobotomy for three years? My bardic muse writes,
'Methinks you have been quelled by mutant forms who, from
the spirit world, cast a pointless dare your way in order
to destabilise a Goodness.'
With these words beyond me, let me resume my usual cheery
countenance and wish well to all participants or even
semi-participants in the great Art Strike 1990-1993. I do
see the whimsy and the irony in your flurry of non-
activity. Enjoy your vacation, and choose your bowling
ball carefully. It's all in the heft.
(Reprinted from The Void-Post 6)
CRITIQUE OF THE ART STRIKE
The Bible narrates that the Jews conquered Jericho by
playing the trumpets with such an intensity that the
walls tumbled. Today, a group of artists have repeated
this story with a certain difference. They want to
destroy the walls of powerful art institutions by means
of radical silence: by the refusal of all activities of
art.
A total Art Strike has been suggested by Stewart Home and
the PRAXIS Group for the three-year period of 1990-1993.
This Art Strike is being organised by Art Strike Action
Committees residing mostly in America and England.
Several months after the start of the Art Strike, I
received documents of the following kinds: statements and
letters from artists, declarations by magazine editors
active in the strike, and pages of discussion from the
underground and serious press alike. These reactions
portrayed a frustrated group of people. Major
institutions did not take much notice of this strike,
which was being directed against them. Furthermore, a
debate raged among the organisers and other artists
concerned with the Art Strike: does such a strike make
any sense at all?
I took all the Art Strike documents available to me since
the start of this action, and I tried to find out the
reasons for this disturbance and frustration.
Stewart Home's reference to the successful 'strike' of
Polish artists in the period after 1981 was an error and
a starting point for a number of later mistakes.
A strike is A) an organised extortion; B) for a concrete
purpose; C) by people who stand in opposition to their
employer. There was not any artists' strike in Poland
because A) it arose spontaneously and amorphously; B) for
no concrete result; C) by independent careerists who took
part in a general boycott against a military takeover. It
was part of a national resistance in a desperate
situation and it was an attempt to demoralise the
authorities. It was combat; that is, a revolutionary act
completely in the spirit of classical history.
The other action, Metzger's Art Strike (1977-1980), was
planned as an economic strike, however, it failed because
the individual producers failed to organise. Their
personal intents vary so greatly that every member of
such a social group became scabs (even in the situations
where some large institutions are acting as 'employers').
Furthermore, Metzger could not offer any concrete agenda
to the individual participants in his strike, and no
concrete organisation was brought forth to formulate and
administer possible individual declarations.
In contrast, the current (second) Art Strike was planned
as a political resistance and not as an economic strike.
But a resistance is a general movement supported by a
whole population, and its precondition is a kind of
extreme emergency; that is to say, a 'revolutionary
situation' is required. To imagine that intellectuals or
artists would take part in such a resistance at any time
(like a walk-out) because of their unique problems (as an
attempt to break the monopoly of the institutions of the
arts or to destroy the present cultural hierarchy) is
simply not realistic. It is possible to build an
administration corps for this job and propaganda can be
distributed, as well; but one cannot create a
revolutionary situation complete with the required
general 'desperation.' Therefore, this attempt remains
simply an advertisement, a campaign for something 'like a
strike' with the usual mixed echoes that normally goes
with a campaign among the intellectual elite (indeed,
such internal affairs are always hysterical and
turbulent, but the culture generally has trouble taking
it seriously).
However there is another important fact of this strike.
This is the very 'metaphysical' nature of the attempt:
the strike was thought to be the refusal of all kinds of
creative activity; that is, a radical form of silence.
Let us say no more about the difficult question of
reaching an audience with this silence, an audience
that's been ignoring you all along anyway. We still have
another question: how should artists who stop their
activity act? What should they do?
The human being who goes on strike interrupts his
professional activity. But the creative work of an artist
doesn't work that way. Creativity can take different
forms (not just artistic, but also such forms as being a
mother, a politician, a gambler, for example) but it is
never a profession. Instead, it is an existential
question for each individual.
The artist can be forced to fulfil their work as a 'job,'
but it will only last if one can succeed in 'changing
their identity' as well. It's evident that the result
would be enormous resistance against the attempt. An
atmosphere similar to general desperation would need to
be created, only it is not in favour of the idea but
against it. All energy would be turned against it. The
prevailing mood would be characterised by uncooperative
aggressiveness, caused by the fear of losing one's
identity.
In an optimum state it can have a very useful effect. The
Polish resistance after the declaration of the state of
war in 1981 had the following interesting result: the
artists produced more art than before but this art was
explicitly samizdat art, an aggressive expression turned
against the ruling elite. These artists would lose their
identity only if they continued their earlier
professional work in the style of 'fine art' (a highly
interesting situation).
I visited some artist friends in Kracow and Wroclaw a
year and a half after the takeover, and this underground
activity had at that time just reached its peak. Some
older 'constructivist' artists real 'museum' artists
left behind their abstract style and made small graphics
and text designs in the form of leaflets, sometimes in a
brutal realistic style. It was not the expression of a
culture but of a primary demand of vital interests. This
was a very strange form for an agitative 'postmodernism'
to take, considering it came after a very aesthetic
abstract art period.
I think this feature of the human being and the nature of
creativity wasn't taken into consideration in the present
Art Strike. The ASAC in California treated it in a better
way: it took up in its programme the idea that artists
whose art was turned against serious culture and elite
institutions should expand their activity. Also other
publications emphasised that creativity should grow and
not decrease during the strike. These concepts should
function as a resistance and could ensure that the
coherence of the network remains intact, no matter if the
strike has any success or not.
But anyway this notion collapsed at the start. A
different concept took its place, one which I attribute
to the initiator of the strike, Stewart Home. He calls
for the total refusal of all kinds of creativity during
the strike. Some activists took this call so seriously
that they decided to stop their political and review
activities and all kinds of public interventions, as
well.
One might talk about the possibility that this
rigorousness was a manifestation of a strong radicalism
in the spirit of class struggle. There is no reason to
deny it. But we can also consider another, more personal
motivation with a philosophical background.
It seems that for Stewart Home, the feasibility of a
strike is of minor importance. He postulates the use of
underground culture as a testing ground for his idea.
This programme is the strategic negation of all creative
forms, seen as the current strategy of the artistic
individual and art activity.
The various forms for such a negation that Home proposes
(Multiple Names, Plagiarism, Art Strike) are all
excellently conceived and deserve appreciation. Following
from these ideas, I can see an opposition to the
monopolistic nature of art institutions, which was caused
by making the underground reflect upon these issues. This
philosophy had exerted a great influence on the
underground and the alternative art scene long before the
Art Strike became current. Of course, such concepts,
built with such virtuosity, have little to do with a
political programme. It is a rather ordinary cultural
accomplishment.
To combine it with politics is dangerous. Since a few
people have adopted the opinion that only active negation
can be the strategy of true creativity, the import of
this highly abstract philosophy into the arena of the
strike resulted in the strike (which was hopeless anyway)
losing its creative energy from the start.
Another question is: to what extent was Home aware of the
fact that he himself with this conception had brought
into being an instrument which could be suitable for
buttressing authority? This authority would be able to
discipline a part of the artistic subculture. (It is in
fact much easier to control a negation than a
production). Home was very narrow-minded concerning
productive activity in general and the forms of
independent art activity in the alternative scene in
particular (see the recent issue of Smile magazine or his
book, The Assault On Culture).
Home had the enormous gall to postulate a general
validity for his own ideas. I don't know if he realised
at all that in the case of the total participation of the
underground in a strike which lasted three years, the
whole network would decay. Or is there not much to
regret? (Maybe this egomania is an element taken from
Neoism. But Stewart Home had this mentality before his
Neoist period began: his first known project was a band
he was in called White Colours. His aim was to have all
bands in England call themselves White Colours).
Even when I pay respect to the expression of Home's
opinions, I must say: this is not an explicitly leftist
mentality, and as political activity, it has nothing at
all to do with the emancipation of humanity. It is much
more an aristocratic phenomenon or in the microcosm of
the alternative scene a standardising of all opinions
according to the model of totalitarianism.
We can also say that we have to face the problem of
difference between intellectual abstraction and practical
though. We can thank Stewart Home that the second Art
Strike was begun at all, but in reality the views and
ambitions which initiated the strike were major causes
for frustration,. as well. But, the first months of the
strike demonstrated that a lot of problems could not be
solved without this crisis. What these problems are
beings to become clearer now, and this is a positive
result. But good motives need better and more
professional instruments. Maybe because of this lesson
the Art Strike was worth the trouble.
(Geza Perneczky).
RESPONSES TO QUESTION AND OPINIONS ABOUT THE ART STRIKE
1. How can one participate in the Art Strike (1990-1993)?
Sure, such a distressing perspective is disorienting to
some. As for the Art Strikers, their tactics vary.
Stewart Home in London (who though up the Art Strike),
seems to have chosen a total strike of creativity, which
includes all activity related to the Art Strike (1990-
1993). He is limiting his activity to dispatching only
documents concerning the Art Strike that were produced
before January 1, 1990, to whomever asks for them. He
explains (in a letter dated November 8, 1989): '_Setting
up an ASAC simply means providing the public with an
address from which they can get information about the Art
Strike and organising any other activities which you
think might help spread the idea_'
In Iowa, Lloyd Dunn has interrupted the publication of
his magazine PhotoStatic for three years. Instead, he
publishes the sporadic and quasi-anonymous newsletter
YAWN, almost totally dedicated to the Art Strike (1990-
1993). I have found certain of the proposals advanced
therein to be excessive, such as its characterisation of
'The Artist as a Victim of Tourette Syndrome,' which
suggests that the artist is pathologically dependent on
their need to create, like a nervous tic (issue 7,
31/12/89). On the other hand, I notice this declaration:
'There is no Art Strike dogma as such. Instead, it is
essential that each Art Strike participant construct
their own set of activities in support of the Art
Strike.' (issue 6 24/11/89).
2. It consists of a paradox..
Sure, the proposition of an Art Strike (1990-1993) is
paradoxical, incredible, illogical, bizarre, incoherent,
extremist, masochistic, unrealistic and pretentious, but
it is a social action that has as its primary goal the
deliberate provocation of annoyance.
3. Isn't this pious Art Strike (1990-1993) doomed to
failure by lack of impact?
Sure, this is a possibility. In YAWN it says, 'the Art
Strike (1990-1993) can only affect those people who
choose to be affected by it_' (issue 11, 1/3/90). But in
Cicero it says: '_Even if the goodness (that we seek)
were not recognised, it would still be good; for whatever
we can say in all truth is commended by its own good
nature, even if not approved by any man living.' (On
Moral Obligation, I.4.14).
4. Art is already a strike.
Sure, there is something to this. On this subject, Lloyd
Dunn proposed in the 40th and last issue of PhotoStatic
(December 1989): '_the Art Strike is not so much a call
for doing nothing as it is a call for doing something
else. Now, it is quite plausible, according to my
interpretation of the intent of the Art Strike, for a
person (whether they think they are doing 'art' or not)
to participate in the Art Strike and yet continue to do
what they were doing before! As far as I can tell, the
Art Strike lashes out at a set of attitudes about art;
not 'art' as such. To clarify my position on this, it is
perhaps necessary for us to have two definitions for the
word 'art,' 1. art: virtually any creative activity,
definable by the user of the term themself; and 2) Art: a
class and gender-specific activity devoted to the
creation of marketable objects_ The Art Strike
simultaneously calls for a rejection of Art, and a re-
evaluation of art. To be effective, the Art Strike must
demoralise Artists, and encourage artists.
(Reprinted from Lettre Documentaire No. 9, 25/4/90).
STOP THE ART STRIKE
The 1990-1993 Art Strike, which is currently being
proposed by an international consortium of petty
egomaniacs, needs to be shot dead, summarily executed
without delay. The reasons for this conclusion are
perfectly clear, as Richard Nixon would say, and I shall
outline them in this brief paper.
The theoretical Marxist gobbyallygooke (Middle English
spelling) that is the fountain from which this proposal
ejaculates is logically unsound, although fascinating in
its dire lack of intelligence. This is clearly evident
when one examines the main Art Strike argument, which is
that somehow Art is a tool, a 'commodity' used by an
elite to 'repress' the masses. I hereby challenge the
organisers of this mess to find ten seriously
impoverished people willing to sign an affidavit to the
effect that their condition is due to the business
practices of Art galleries. Imagine Geraldo Rivera
crawling through the streets of East Oakland, asking
street philosophers to recount personal episodes of
terror at the hands of Piedmontian curators! Of course
the outcome would be that of an empty televisional well,
with a greasily handsome Geraldo wringing his hands. He
would be lucky to even find a downtrodden person who
gives an Albanian hoot about Art, or Artists, or their
picayune opinions. Art simply doesn't matter to the vast
majority of individuals. But to this, the smug Marxist
would retort: 'But the masses have yet to be enlightened
as to the cause of their condition!' What sanctimonious,
pig-headed borscht! The man pushing a shopping cart down
the street would much rather have a T-bone steak
marinated with Narsai's Special Sauce than a thousand
tickets to performances at Artist's Television Access (a
San Francisco establishment that sponsored an Art Strike
event)! And rightly so, for his survival is, and should
be, paramount. Whether or not there are Art geniuses has
bugger all to do with the immediacy of his condition. If
the self-satisfied organisers of this bird-brainish
strike were really interested in helping the masses,
they'd be proposing a TV-dinner round-up for the
homeless! They'd be putting their money where their fat
mouths are, so to speak.
It is also clear that the instigators of this foolishness
are bent on being famous, and that they are insanely
jealous of financially successful artists. This is a case
of sour Bulgarian grapes, under the guise of proletarian
revolt. It is usually the case that when revolutionaries
seize power, they become just as repressive as their
former masters; if the organisers of this effort were
actually to stop Art production, they would be in the
best position in terms of financial gain. Fortunately, I
feel confident that this little temper tantrum by a
collective of spoiled artistic brats can be nipped in the
bud, castrated from the consciousness of creativity. But
only if you follow my instructions, and act now. If you
agree with this analysis, you'll do the following:
1. Mail the letter (below) to:
Artists' Television Access
922 Valencia Street
San Francisco CA 94103
2. Refuse to participate in the strike, if it ever really
materialises.
3. Encourage others to create works of Art. Creativity is
good for people.
(Text of letter.) "Dear ATA:
"I refuse to participate in the 1990-1993 Artists'
Strike. As a matter of fact, I pledge to do everything in
my power to encourage more Art production.
"I also think that the organisers of this effort are just
a bunch of cry-babies trying to feather their nests and
make a mess on the floor." (Signed.)
Anatoly Zyyxx.
ART NO MORE EXTRACTS
(_) Maybe it's worth investigating The Fifth
International Festival of Plagiarism. Organised by
Transmission's William Clark and the prolific London
based writer of texts, Stewart Home, it brings together a
loose association of artists whose work is in some way
participatory and proudly unoriginal.
Home is a veteran of previous Festivals, a number of
exhibitions, including 1987's Desire In Ruins at the
Transmission, and is one of the key figures in expressing
the role of plagiarism in art.
Art itself, he argues, is chained to bourgeois values
which shackle us all, not only by promoting the tastes
and ideals of the dominant culture, but directly
upholding capitalism by doing so. The claims for some art
to be a vehicle for social change are therefore bogus,
since the perception of art and artists and the
structures of the art world will inevitably support the
status quo.
Plagiarists oppose art's elitism, the praise heaped upon
artists in direct proportion to their incomprehensibility
to the general public and the process by which works of
art become commodities to be dealt with like stocks and
shares. Central among their concerns is the elitist myth
(popular among artists themselves) of the artist as a
genius with unique insights. (_)
To draw attention to what art has become, the plagiarist
group PRAXIS has called for an Art Strike, basically a
withdrawal of labour like any other industrial action.
The idea was first proposed by Gustav Metzger, who in
1974 called for artists to cease producing, selling or
discussing their work between the years 1977-80. Despite
Metzger's lack of impact, the plagiarists are calling for
another three-year Art Strike beginning in 1990.
Metzger's vision was of galleries and art magazines
folding and artists, unable to stop creating, being
coerced into camps where their work would be destroyed as
it was produced. The PRAXIS idea of the strike is less
ambitious, and focused on the role of the artist and how
he or she engages with the surrounding culture. It's
crucial to their view to disrupt the myth of 'the artist
as someone who has these uncontrollable creative urges,
and to show that you can stop and start at will.' But a
great deal of its meaning, according to one of Home's
pamphlets, 'lies not in its feasibility but in the
possibilities it opens up for intensifying the class
war.'
And where does the art of plagiarism feature in this?
Liberally borrowing from the writings of Roland Barthes,
it emphasises the productive role that the audience has
to play, 'Rather than passively receiving a work, they
recreate it when they read a book or look at a picture,'
explains Stewart Home. 'In the pure sense it's not
plagiarism at all because that would entail taking ideas
and claiming them as your own. It's a polemical use of
the word to focus attention on the problems in the area.
We're drawing attention to the fact that we're using
other peoples' ideas.'
"The Festival of Plagiarism is partly just to show a lot
of the things that are going on around the world and also
to deal with the whole issue of copyright laws, which
seem a little ridiculous in the light of all the
machinery we've got right now. Videos, xerox machines
it's actually impossible to enforce the laws that are
there. So it's making a point about that, and obviously
ownership in relation to that. Also it's interesting that
the idea of the ownership of ideas is quite a recent
phenomenon, since the 18th century.'
With every succeeding plagiarism a new layer of meaning
is added. This, says Home, makes it a highly creative
process. And anyone can do it. That it subverts accepted
notions of artistic value, linked in this society with
ethics about labour time and production makes it a worthy
snub of capitalist dogma, or at least that's the idea.
But to the observer, what is really the difference
between a plagiarist event and one of the avant-garde
works they rail against for being 'tainted by the avant-
garde fraction of the bourgeoisie?'
'It's problematic, but art is basically what the
bourgeoisie say is art, and although I can control what I
do now, I can't control what happens to it in twenty
years time, and it might well be considered art in twenty
years time. The point is not to claim any universal
validity for what we're doing, and not to assume that
people should be interested in what we're doing which
is the basis of most funding for the arts and the basis
of any justification for it, the idea that it has a
humanising function. Whereas, we say, this is just what
we want to do and we happen to be interested in this,
there are no grand claims for it, or claims that it has
some kind of deep significance and therefore ought to
interest people. (_)
Alastair Mabbott, The List No. 99, Edinburgh 26/7/89.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ART STRIKE WRITTEN DURING THE FIFTH
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF PLAGIARISM, GLASGOW, AUGUST
1989
The Art Strike can only be propagated on the basis of a
limited idea of what art is. If art is everything,
according to the definition of Dada and Fluxus, an Art
Strike would be death.
The propagators of the Art Strike agree that it is
intended to break the barrier between so-called 'low' and
so-called 'high' culture. But if these persons would not
think and work themselves into those categories, they
could neither demand nor do the Art Strike.
If art is everything and I cannot reduce my definition
of 'art' to a more restricted one the word has no
meaning at all. Therefore I propose to give up the word
'art.'
If there is no art, you do not need an Art Strike.
Perhaps the desire for the Art Strike is more interesting
than the idea itself. Some possible reasons:
In a world where creativity is split up and cannot be
described by definitions or names ('Neoism' and
'Plagiarism' are desperate attempts), unity shall be
gained by non-action, if it is impossible by action. This
is obvious in the concept of the exhibition ('Reversal of
Slogans/Slogans of Reversal') . A slogan is always
demanding unity, and slogans are the essence of Neoism
and Plagiarism.
Art Strike and death: the information sheet about the
Festival includes the (simplifying) sentence 'Plagiarism
is for life, Post-modernism is for death.'
Since Duchamp, originality ('anti-plagiarism') seems to
be possible only by self-destruction, mainly of the body
(Vienna Actionism, Chris Burden, etc). In fact, the Art
Strike idea results from the wish to do something
original and it is self-destructive as well (see second
statement). Perhaps there is a subconscious desire for
death, which led to the idea of an Art Strike, although
strictly denied by its propaganda.
(_)
(Thoughts not finished).
Florian Cramer, first published in PhotoStatic 38, Iowa,
Autumn 89.
STEWART HOME INTERVIEWED BY SIMON REYNOLDS EXTRACT
(_) I nearly missed Stewart Home, caught him just days
before he began a three year 'Art Strike' from 1990-1993,
during which he'll neither produce nor discuss any work.
Again, it's a 'borrowed' idea.
"I read about this artist, Gustav Metzger, who'd declared
a cultural strike between 1977-80, and thought 'Why don't
we have one?' And I've been planning it for five years.
The idea is so ludicrous, it's really funny. Metzger's
idea was that after three years, the bourgeois art
economy would collapse and artists could return and
dictate how their work was received. But of course,
artists are all in competition with each other for sales
and gallery spaces, so it never worked. I just wanted to
attack this idea of the artist who works incontinently,
has all this creativity spewing out uncontrollably. I
wanted to demystify the process. Coz being an artist
isn't this magical process.'
In order to go on strike, Home first had to become an
artist 'It was like a dare. I'd been in punk bands, got
bored and then decided to apply the 'anyone can do it'
idea to the art world. I started on the avant-garde
fringe and then brazened my way into doing straight
gallery installations. I wanted to see if I could
legitimise myself.
'The thing to remember about critics is that they go
along to review an exhibition and if your programme notes
sound plausible and they can just lift your words,
they're more likely to review it.. So I found that how
you write the press release, how you use theory to
bullshit and intimidate the gallery owners, was crucial.
All this negotiation has to be undertaken before
something is accepted as 'art.' And I pulled it off.'
'I'm "legitimate:' the British Council paid for me and my
collaborators to take a show to Sweden. I've got press
cuttings, art journals in America write to me asking for
theoretical pieces. The annoying thing is that I'm going
on strike just when I've started making enough money to
live on it. But I'm glad to stop really. Having a career
in art is boring.'
What will you do?
'Well, coz I've been so involved in all this nonsense for
five years, I've built up an enormous collection of pulp
literature that's unread. That should keep me occupied.
And I'm looking around for a job. Trouble is, I'm over
qualified. Most employers can't understand why I'd turn
my back on being an artist.'
Melody Maker, London 20/1/90.
EXTRACTS FROM BLOATSTICK N0. 2 ART STRIKE ISSUE, SPRING
1990
ART STRIKE: A STALINIST CRITIQUE (AN ATTACK ON THE
LEADERSHIP)
1. The Art Strike leadership is made up of predominantly
White American and British Middle-class males (to
obfuscate matters more they sometimes use women's names
as AKAs). These men do not survive via wages or salaries
from the art world they criticise. Will they strike and
condemn the capitalist occupational (mainly white collar
or service industry) structures that provide them with
their livelihoods in solidarity with striking artists?
2. With no Artists' Union how can there be a successful
art strike?
3. What is Art Strikes' relationship with Labour Culture
and Labour Unions? Is it an appropriation of Labour
terminology or has Art Strike initiated a dialogue with
working people?
4. In showing an Art Strike booklet to a young African-
American student she said to me, 'Why, they've been doing
that in the projects for decades.' Does the leadership
realise the inherent class, racial and larger
occupational structures of privilege, that form and limit
their peer group?
5. Do they plan to address these larger issues of
predominant culture along with those of less visible, yet
more radical culture, since their current sexual, racial
and class tendencies seem to now preclude their
participation in those cultures, or will they remain
elitist?
6. What is Art Strike's relationship with and commentary
on the Cultural Democracy Movement, the AIDS ACT-UP
coalition, Art Against Apartheid, Art Against AIDS and
other activist groups that use art and performance in
Dissent?
7. Art Strike leadership offers us a perceptive analysis
of the art industry's co-option into the spectacle of
advanced Capital but only the vaguest inklings of how to
survive or practice culture outside or in opposition to
this Spectacle. Can you be more specific?
8. Does the Art Strike also realise their focused
critiques of the art world are delivered in the language
of that world and are thereby appropriated to the
Spectacle of that same world?
9. Will Art Strike leaders become involved in any direct
organising outside of pamphleteering and annual
exhibitions?
10. What are the resources of the leadership?
11. Why the anonymity?
12. Does the leadership of Art Strike naively anticipate
a spontaneous anarchic uprising in the
social/occupational group of the art world at any time?
Does Art Strike use this fantasy as an excuse to avoid a
commitment to union organising and leadership?
13. The artists you would desire to strike won't_ being
the commercial artists and organisations they are
satisfied with their participation in the Spectacle of
Capitalism because they reap its benefits. To my
knowledge you have usually lobbied only the alternative
non-profit liberal art world, who will support your
intentions, but not to the point of joining you in any
action as radical as a strike. Artists any further to the
left, along with other disenfranchised groups, are
usually excluded from the art world system you have
targeted, and for all practical purposes have been
'striking' for years, please comment on this
contradiction.
14. As a satirist and a cultural organisation
administrator whose actual food and rent comes from the
art world, your laissez faire and cynical intellectualism
offers me, and I assume others, no incentive to strike.
You seem both incapable of providing leadership, succour,
resources, radical alternatives to the current structure,
or most importantly solidarity with other workers. Please
offer us further definitive strategy.
15. Your critical commentary is appreciated although I
know the Art industry sucks. But I also know that the
Real Estate industry and the Military industry suck. Why
don't you try to get them to strike?
Marshall Webber.
CONFESSIONS OF AN ART STRIKE COMMITTEE MEMBER
'I'm a microscope on that secret place where we all want
to go_" The Mekons.
Really almost no one is arguing against the Art Strike on
its own terms. Who is against liberty? But the strike is
far outnumbered by people too fearful or cynical to make
that equation, or to realise that the Art Strike as it's
been formulated is incapable of hurting a cockroach, or
an artist. It would be fair to say that the organisers of
the strike are so obsessed with preventing individual
accumulations of power that they have guarantied the
strike's marginality.
The Art Strike is, in fact, a wholly benevolent, if
inefficient, tendency devoted to gift-giving,
correspondence, and doing good deeds for the community,
sort of like a non-hierarchical Lions or Kiwanis club.
The apocalyptic rhetorical style favoured by many
strikers I am not innocent is just our version of
grandiose titles, secret handshakes and ornamental robes.
Or rather, that is how it would be viewed if the strike
were successful, which is to say if the techniques by
which artists and other in-groups alienate themselves
were to be rendered impotent by a mass rejection of the
practice. The Art Strike cannot do other than eliminate
itself along with the other crap. We always said the Art
Strike was the worst idea ever, we made posters that said
so. Yet it was so much more attractive that the workable,
'realistic' ideas that it opposed. This embrace of
absurdity was one of several liberations I experienced
during a year long experiment that was also at times
boring, circular, frustrating and tedious.
Obviously the Art Strike lacked the commitment, energy,
appeal and public relations of Dada or Punk, which may
only mean that it lacked a money angle, but I insist it
was, like those, a magic phrase, the mere incantation of
which could stir violent antipathy in some and almost
instantaneous gut comprehension in others. There was a
short period during which the words 'Art Strike' were
truly my words, and during that period I was able to step
up in front of a group of people without any preparation
and command their attention in a way that I never could
before or since. I understood in my guts that nothing was
true and permitted myself to say anything. I blithely
advocated at least five separate platforms depending on
the mood and the company. I contradicted myself wildly,
in the belief that paradox is where language warps
because it's gotten close to reality, and that certain
contradictions in the text can be the doorways out of it.
Whenever I became insecure about my image, I could feel
the energy dissipating. It was only then that anyone ever
looked to me for leadership.
I burned out on the discussion after a while and lost my
natural grasp of its essence, a grasp which had enabled
me to carry on long, valuable discussions without feeling
that I had to win each point, a habit of mine that kills
conversation and makes me a monologuist. The right thing
to say is of course the thing that contributes to the
flow and energy of the discourse, and the pleasure of
saying the right thing is sublime. One time a friend
commented on how frequently I was saying the right thing
and naturally that stopped me.
The other joy of the Art Strike was the way we dealt with
written text. Anything anyone wrote about the strike
immediately became common property. I saw my phrases
appear without the slightest disjunction in other
peoples' writing and I freely incorporated theirs. Hardly
anything was signed. This approach was not taken out of a
desire to mystify, but out of an honest recognition that
the force which made the strike work, to the extent that
it did work, was not the contributions of individuals but
the simple fact that we were acting in community, that
none of us knew anything about the Art Strike except what
we had worked out together.
I have focused on the success of a few personal
interactions instead of 'dismantling the dominant
cultural apparatus' because, to make it as plain as
possible, that's what it's all about. The dominant
cultural apparatus is in our heads and its function is
separation. It makes us lie to each other, exploit each
other, compete with each other and fear each other. Art
Strike as a proposal functioned as a wake up call, saying
in effect, that even artists adhere to a sense of the
status quo, unconsciously assuming privileges and burdens
that might better be shared equally by all. Art Strike as
an event, if it could be truly realised, would be more
terrifying and beautiful than any work of art. And it
would change the world.
(Aaron Noble, December 1989.)
I WILL NOT OBSERVE THE ART STRIKE FOR THE FOLLOWING
REASONS
I thought we already had one for the last decade.
I believe the local galleries have 3 years worth of dead
artists' work already stockpiled.
LeRoy Neiman endorsed it.
It will do nothing whatsoever.
It is a parody of strikes; how about artists supporting
real strikes?
If you want to press an issue, you have to start with
small actions and build momentum; then you can do big
ones.
There doesn't seem to be any affinity or outreach with
labour unions, homeless activists or others fighting for
change. It is thus isolated and NO strike can succeed
without public support.
I'm operating under the assumption that the mainstream
culture has already collapsed. We've got video cameras,
monitors, printers, tape recorders etc, what the hell do
we need from mainstream culture?
The 7.0 Loma Prieta Art Strike was enough for me.
Fred Rinne, October 1989.
MESSAGE FROM CARL ANDRE TO THE CALIFORNIAN ART STRIKE
ACTION COMMITTEE
Congratulations for furthering the cause of capitalism!
The drive of advanced capital proletarianises the
primitive capitalist. The Luddites broke machines because
they did not want to become wage-labourers. Wage-labour
only for all artists! Up the rich! All artists to the
sweat shops! Let no worker own his own production.
WALKING ACROSS SCABBY WATER EXTRACT
(_) I guess because I'm so involved with the network of
people who are participating in the Art Strike and the
Festival of Non-Participation, I felt like I had to have
a formal response; which is where the ART SCABS FOR THE
ART GLUT comes from. The phrase 'Art Strike' is valuable
for the effect it would have on mainstream or commercial
media because it's an idea which the media isn't familiar
with. In terms of my own life I need some sort of hyper-
activity, and along with hyper-activity you have to have
the affirmative strategies that go along with it. I like
the notion of an Art Strike because it's a sensation. It
creates an immediate response from anyone and it might go
no further than that. But then again, if someone who is
an artist replaces painting with cooking food, I don't
really think that the actual impulses which make both
those things happen is any different. The Art Strike
seems to be a denial of the avant garde_ There is such an
enigma attached to the people behind the strike. Stewart
Home, by creating an Art Strike is making himself an
object of art and that's another one of those
contradictions. (_)
There are two qualities about the Art Strike. The first,
which interests me very little, is the quality of denial
which is something we all did when we were very young. It
was the only kind of reaction we could have, very
primitive kind of response, i.e. 'I don't wanna do it.'
The other quality, which I am intrigued by, which is what
I will try to study about the Art Strike, is the quality
of invisibility, how you take something and make it
disappear. It may have the same effects and energies but
it doesn't have to exist. You're making the impulse of
creativity disappear. If I could be in an existence that
doesn't have a constant influx of media, I would be very
interested in a kind of invisible culture. I think the
Art Strike has to admit that there is a basic human
response which is creativity and nothing short of
lobotomy can get rid of that. The Art Strike teaches how
to have some sort of cognition of what is going on
without having to channel it through making painting all
your life. (_)
Miekal And, Factsheet Five No. 33, Winter '89.
STRUCK BY THE ART STRIKE (AN ART GLUT PREAMBLE)
EXTRACTS
What I do like about the Art Strike is that it's such a
strong issue. It's got everyone riled up. Nobody feels
wishy washy about it, people appear to be either gun-ho
or angrily against it. The whole notion of the Art Strike
forces us to think twice about what we're doing, examine
the role of art in society, in history etc.(_)
I'm sorry, I have to laugh when I remember asking John
Berndt what he was going to do during the Art Strike. I
laugh as much at my own frame of mind at the time as I do
about his answer, since at that time I hadn't really
formulated any thoughts on the Art Strike, and was a bit
in awe of the whole idea, especially the fact that some
people actually were taking it seriously. John said that
among other things, when 1990 came he was going to study
electronics and I remember thinking, wow, maybe I should
strike and start studying languages, or areas in science
that have always interested me. But now its so clear that
I am doing those things, not in a contrived manner, but
in the natural path of my art life. If there had never
been an art strike, I'm sure John, being an extremely
intelligent person, would have studied electronics anyway
at some point, and quite naturally have integrated it
into his creative work. (_)
Stewart Home, whom I see as the mastermind behind the Art
Strike, has thought about language and its influence, and
also about identity, but I think his emphasis misses the
point_ Home's major point_ is that 'the avant-garde'
manipulates language to form an identity for itself based
on appearances of 'rupture,' 'difference' and 'refusal'_
Home_ stat(es) that "Marinetti's verbal attacks upon the
artistic ideals of the past were never intended to be
taken as anything other than the means for creating a
symbolic 'rupture' with entrenched tradition.' As if
physical action is the only way to change things. Home
sounds like a militant anarchist here, but something else
became clear to me.
I was intrigued by this last essay in Home's Handbook: I
kept feeling that the crux of the Art Strike was hidden
in it. Suddenly it hit me! The Art Strike is an art
piece, deftly created by master Home, using all of us
artists and our various responses to the strike as his
materials. It really is a brilliant piece and as avant-
garde as one could get: it's challenging, shocking, makes
a lot of people think and has elicited strong reactions
in a number of directions. The Art Strike is an art work
riddled with ambiguity, hidden meanings, food for action
and controversy. And, to use Home's own phrases, it has
created and perpetuated its identity by language, by the
printed word pamphlets, postcards, slogans and logos,
articles, broadsides, even buttons! Home is doing with
the Art Strike exactly what he appears to be criticising
in the article, and he's doing it consciously! Confusing,
eh? Ambiguous, even perverted, for artists are actually
stopping their creative endeavours(_) Is it a movement
'backed up by physical action?' In a sense yes, but it's
a negation, advocating 'physical' non-action.
Paradoxically, the idea of not doing art teaches us a lot
about art, just as John Cage's famous "4' 33" in
masquerading as silence reveals the vast realm of sound.
Again, whether or not he intended it as such (and the
uncertainty is titillating), Stewart Home has created a
big and important art work for the avant-garde.
The morning after I wrote most of this essay and began to
see the Art Strike as an art work, we got a piece of mail
which confirmed this vision. John Berndt sent us the
latest Art Strike rhetoric: 'Critics Praise Stewart
Home!' This piece is so obviously tongue-in-cheek, it
doesn't even pretend to be serious. It made me see the
Art Strike in yet another light: as a scam, a ploy, an
imaginary event, a joke. And I think Stewart must be
laughing the hardest, all the more when people take it
very seriously. Not that the Art Strike is a totally
empty joke: it has caused a huge stir, and will 'go down'
in experimental underground history. Whatever it is, I am
not angry at Stewart and his kin (how many of them see as
big a picture of it as Stewart, though?), rather I am
grateful for the food for thought, and for the
opportunity to respond with our own movement the Art
Glut! Long live Rhetoric! Long live controversy! Long
live Stewart Home! Long live the Avant-Garde, and may it
stay avant rather than derriere.
Elizabeth Was, circulated as an undated manuscript.
ART STRIKE
We call on all cultural workers to put down their tools
and cease to make, distribute, sell, exhibit, or discuss
their work from January 1st 1990 to January 1st 1993. We
call for all galleries, museums, agencies, 'alternative'
spaces, periodicals, theatres, art schools &c., to cease
all operations for the same period.
Art is conceptually defined by a self-perpetuating elite
and marketed as an international commodity. Those
cultural workers who struggle against the reigning
society find their work either marginalised or else co-
opted by the bourgeois art establishment.
The ruling class uses art as a 'transcendental' activity
in the same way it once used religion to justify the
arbitrariness of its enormous privilege. Art creates the
illusion that, through activities which are actually
waste, this civilisation is in touch with 'higher
sensibilities' which redeem its other activities. Those
who accept this logic support the bourgeoisie even if
they are economically excluded from the class. The
concept that 'everything is art' is the height of this
smoke-screen, meaning only that certain members of the
ruling class feel particularly free in expressing their
domination of the proletariat to one another.
To call one person an 'artist' is to deny another the
equal gift of vision; thus the myth of 'genius' becomes
an ideological justification for inequality, repression
and famine. What an artist considers to be his or her
identity is a schooled set of attitudes; preconceptions
which imprison humanity in history. It is the roles
derived from these identities, as much as the art
products mined from reification, which we must reject.
Unlike Gustav Metzger's Art Strike of 1977 1980, our
intention is not to destroy those institutions which
might be perceived as having a negative effect on
artistic production. Instead, we intend to question the
role of the artist itself and its relation to the
dynamics of power within capitalist society.
The above is a text from a leaflet promoting the Art
Strike 1990-1993. We have a definition of a particular
way that creativity is channeled in present society
Art.
It asserts that art is bourgeois and elitist. You only
have to compare the coverage in the tabloids and the
'quality' papers in terms only of square centimetres
devoted to its propagation to reveal the class emphasis
of something that apologists claim to have universal
value.
When the artists and administrators choose to make work
'accessible' it is in the hallowed chambers of the
secular cathedrals, the gallery and museum. People are
ushered in, to pay their respects to the relics, the dead
skin of the humanist saints.
Artists of course lead the way, blazing new trails,
boldly decorating where no one could be bothered before.
This seeps down to us lesser mortals in the form of
exciting new adverts, repackaged goodies and novelty
philosophies readily bowlderised by colour supplement
hacks.
The insistence on metaphor and allusion to placing in the
art historical context make it a coded world as
specialist and mystifying as stamp collecting.
Commodification is, if not an inevitability, financially
useful. Art objects are the next step up the ladder from
executive toys. Intellectual arguments surrounding work
become interesting accessories. Neo-Expressionism
competes with minimalism for the market share in much the
same way as Acid House does with Techno. The most trite
examples of this tendency are companies like Hunter and
Philip Morris, the one a bomb manufacturer, the other a
tobacco corporation, both arts sponsors and both
responsible for thousands of deaths, maybe attempting a
little expiation by applying a philanthropic gloss to
their facades.
Art creates a false sense of space, an illusionary
sanctuary where integrity and intellectual freedom
flourish untainted by the coarser aspects of life. From
this radical nature reserve, artist feel that they, when
conscience dictates, are able to make forays into social
and political activity. The activist artist is always
more interested in success within the art sphere rather
than a realignment of society where our stolen creativity
is repossessed. A recent, particularly crass, instance of
this is the US artists who painstakingly reconstructed a
shanty town in a gallery.
Precisely because of the free reign that they feel they
have been allowed, artists are able to fine tune the
order of appearances. In this way artists, like other
professional intellectuals, become valuable technicians
of dominant culture.
Whatever doesn't kill power is killed by it. This is as
true for paintings of the reproductive organs of certain
plants nicely arranged in a vase as for self-consciously
critical work.
There are several possible responses.
To produce art in a strictly formal way. Refine it to a
craft of technical, aesthetic and mathematical precision.
The old cliche of art for art's sake, and why not? The
problem only occurs when the structure of society
detaches the by-product of an individual period of
creativity, maybe with the artist's connivance, and
institutes it as a sterile husk, a coinage.
To subvert it's supposed transcendence from within by
producing superficial work in the hope that art might
implode under the immense density of it's own
meaninglessness. In this way a lot of self-importantly
named Post Modernist art simply reels out knowingly bad
jokes. But you can only play about with the pieces of
shit for so long.
Others have tried to widen the boundaries of art. To
achieve the aestheticisation of all life. Instead of
turning inwards, thrust it out. This can be the highly
romantic view put forward by Oscar Wilde or the
Surrealists. It can also end up with the nice looking
flat roofs of Corbusier that just happen to leak like
seives, or result in the missionary zeal of the community
artists, rushing round worried that the vast majority
have always been on Art Strike, desperate to introduce us
to the delights of arty farty vicarious experience.
Everyone grins themselves silly when they've got a multi-
media arts complex.
To an extent this avoids the issue. By defining
everything as art, the word loses any currency. (Which is
probably a good idea).
We live in the most highly aestheticised point in
history; adverts, TV, music, everything redesigned and
repackaged with rabid ferocity. Muzak is the creation of
a complete anaestheticism. Alone it is not enough. To
expand out into life effectively it must be part of a
broader onslaught, ideological and economic as well as
cultural. That's where the real fun begins.
Silence the position of the Art Strike. This is
possibly the worst, most incoherent response. When we go
to bed, cook or laugh, do we do so for capital? Although
we are at present doing so in a society where the major
benefactors are bastards, to credit them with complete
control, accidental or not is a paranoid conspiracy
theory. To talk of your existence merely in terms of
strategy is to deny the most important and revolutionary
impulse pleasure.
On a level of mundane practicality, the only people who
go on strike are probably pretty decent anyway. (It would
be great to get the pop star artists to shut up for a
while though). To disarm ourselves of methods of
struggle/creativity is doing the recuperators' job for
them. Capitalism would of course be different, but would
it be any better if nothing had ever been said against
it? The strikers are very vocal in exactly why they
choose to produce this art of silence.
The Art Strike has been claimed as a good 'propaganda
art.' Why bother? I am only interested in a sustained
period of real life and will not exist as a theatrical
symbol. Symbolic acts rely entirely on the media coverage
given to them, as opposed to real acts which have a
direct impact. In this aspect the strike becomes ultra-
leftist posture politics. A holier than thou pose rather
than the arty farty one.
The most interesting idea to arise in support of the Art
Strike is a calling into question the role of 'artist' or
'politico.' Presumably the people who define themselves
into these categories are making an honest attempt at a
reaction to society. The trouble comes when they see
themselves only in these terms. The reaction becomes a
self-policed act of conformity. You still refer to
yourself as 'artist' if you make a point of desisting
from the practice known as 'art' for a certain period of
time. It remains a defined role, albeit negative. Surely
it is common sense to avoid this adoption of stereotypes,
but to impose another on top makes an equal
contradiction.
The voluntary shifting of roles can be fun, allowing for
play, but then why only three years? And why do people
have to do it at the same time? I can imagine the Art
Strike Action Committees becoming self-help groups for
those with cultural cold turkey.
Silence = death, not just for AIDS. Renunciation of
creativity is a tactic of despair, not even that but the
abandonment of any tactics whatsoever.
No author credited but we know it was by Matthew Fuller,
first published in Leisure No. 2, Cardiff, Autumn 1989.
NO ART FOR ART'S SAKE EXTRACTS
Eliot 1 and Karen Eliot 2,3,4 and 5 make up Baltimore's
Art Strike Action Committee, along with about 20 other
less directly involved local artists. The group was
formed last year in support of an international 'Art
Strike,' which is set to begin this January 1 and end of
that same date in 1993. Although movements have popped up
recently to fight cuts in National Endowment for the Arts
grants and fight the censorship that goes with it (the
Corcoran Gallery boycott there's also 'A Day Without
Art,' a call for galleries to close or hold AIDS benefits
on December 1) the wide-sweeping Art Strike that the
Eliots demand has nothing to do with those issues. For
that matter, it has nothing to do with pay, working
conditions, or the other usual reasons for work action.
(_)
'There have been 15 or 16 Art Strikes in the past,' Eliot
1 says, explaining the movement's history. 'Most of them
have tended to frame their activities as being against
specific regimes, or to make specific changes in the art
world.' But he says the current strike is aimed at the
art world's raison d'etre and not any one particular
political ideology or artistic stance. 'This strike is
more omnidirectional,' he says, 'It's intended to attack
attitudes which claim to have universal significance.'
In other words, much of the strike is aimed at the egos
of the artists themselves, which like the gallery
circuit, have elevated the artist to a superior status in
the intellectual and creative hierarchies.
'It's interesting to note that the great majority of
artists I've met in my life seem to be particularly
nervous about what they're doing,' Eliot 1, the group's
unofficial spokesman says, 'They have a great deal of
anxiety about whether or not it has any value.
Essentially, what we're doing is trying to make it clear
to them that it doesn't have any value at all. In fact,
(the art) is negative and completely murderous and
destructive (because of its links to a murderous and
dehumanising ruling class).' (_)
Michael Anft, Baltimore City Paper 12/10/89.
THE END OF EVERYTHING EXTRACT
I wonder why those who speak of ending art are always
artists. And haven't they been trying to end it for
decades already? I remember Dada.
A couple of months ago, Anonymous sent me (and I thank
her or him) a packet of Art Strike propaganda. 'Demolish
Serious Culture' said the flyer. Art Strike Action
Committees in London and San Francisco have declared the
years 1990 to 1993 to be 'the years without art.' In the
spirit of anti-art, I have since lost the information,
but I recall it as a protest against you know the
Commodity.
Now, for one thing, Tehching Hsieh already did this
piece, though only for a year. During that period, he did
not create, look at, read of, or talk about art. To
strike, paradoxically, is to become an artist. It's a
conceptual project.
The Strikers quote Jean Baudrillard's statement: 'Art no
longer contests anything, if it ever did.' But does
refusing to make art contest anything? If only it did.
C. Carr, Village Voice, New York 14/11/89.
EXTRACT FROM NOVOID 7 ART STRIKE SPECIAL DECEMBER 1989
When reading about the Art Strike, one wonders what it
really is. Is it just a puerile attention-getting device
for a few 'artists' whose work would otherwise escape
notice? Is it a stupid symbolic gesture, the product of
anger against a defined target but with no clear plan of
action? Or is it a serious response to cultural problems,
which it has some chance of solving?
The A.S. isn't any one of these, but a combination of all
three. I think many of its contradictions are a result of
taking itself too seriously. Around a kernel of an idea
there are the encumbrances of ideology, elitist
snottiness and the smug virtuousness of the Politically
Correct. These distractions caused me to reject the A.S
for a long time, and have probably caused others to
reject it too.
Another fault of the A.S. is that it doesn't carry its
point far enough. Yes, artists enjoy an artificially
privileged role in society, but they are not alone.
Writers, poets and musicians also get more acclaim than
they deserve. This is significant since many A.S.
organisers have announced that, instead of doing art
during the strike period, they will write or work on
musical projects. Only one, to my knowledge, has
announced that he will follow the A.S. directive: 'Give
up art. Feed the starving.' It is disheartening that the
ASAC lack the moral strength to enact what they preach.
Righteousness, demanding of sacrifice but only from
others, they resemble another group of phony preachers
televangelists. Could Stewart Home be the Jim Bakker of
the avant-garde. I'm starting to think so.
All of this posturing should not be confused with the
idea itself. When stripped of its extravagant wishful
thinking, it's apparent that the A.S. wants change to
result from the (in)action of individuals, and not the
art world in its entirety. The art world will not give up
its privileged status, that much is clear. If
individuals, though, begin to question their role in it,
then its effects on society are necessarily diminished.
Art, in the current cultural context, is noise. Some art
might be interesting, or even subversive, but it is noise
nonetheless. In response, artists can offer more noise,
in the form of new 'art movements' or just more art, or
they can offer silence. The A.S. is asking for this
silence. In a time of constant bombardment with
'culture,' silence may be a welcome relief. If this is
what the A.S. is after, then I support it.
I don't support, though, the A.S.'s political
motivations. By inferring that the withholding of art
will precipitate revolution, the ASAC is wrongly
suggesting that culture consumption is a necessary part
of society. This same error was made by the
Situationists. It's unfortunate that the ASAC does not
have the wisdom to recognise Situationism's shortcomings.
Colin Hinz.
NETWORKING THE NINETIES EXTRACT
Art Strike serves a purpose in the current situation of
mail art. It is a cleansing agent which is intended to
get artists thinking about why they make art and whom
they serve by doing so. After talking to Stewart Home,
who originated the concept, it is my opinion that the
concept is intrinsically connected to the English class
system and an understanding of the extreme right and left
politics that hold sway over there. For this reason, most
North Americans, and indeed, those outside England, find
the whole of the arguments difficult to grasp.
Jon Held Jr., Factsheet Five No. 35, Spring 1990.
TWENTY OF THE MOST DIFFICULT, AWKWARD AND SEARCHING
QUESTIONS YOU COULD ASK ABOUT THE ART STRIKE 1990-93
1 What is the Art Strike?
Art Strike is the total withdrawal of all cultural
production for a period of 3 years (1990-1993). All
artists will cease to distribute, sell, exhibit, or
discuss their work between January 1st 1990 and January
1st 1993.
2 What art will be struck?
Art Strike is a total assault upon all cultural activity
within the modernist and post-modernist traditions.
3 Strike for what?
To dismantle the cultural apparatus.
4. Is this a joke?
Absolutely not. How can you have shows when people don't
even have shoes?
5 What is the Art Strike?
Art Strike is the rough undressing of creativity. What
an artist considers to be his or her identity is nothing
but a divisive set of schooled, snotty attitudes.
6 What's wrong with being an artist?
To call one person an artist is to deny another the equal
gift of vision.
7 What will I be if I'm not an artist?
Think of how many people have experienced sexual ecstasy
without even talking about making art.
8. What's wrong with making art?
We're living in an isolation tank, only instead of warm
water we're bathing in bullshit. Within the information
economy, opposition spreads the flow, each statement
creates its own negation, context shifts constantly, and
the only principle that emerges from the din is the
principle of the flux itself, consumption.
9. What is the Art Strike?
Silence.
10.What do you expect to accomplish?
We will step outside of history.
11. Why should I go on strike?
Self-interest.
12. Is this a joke?
Sure: a joke, a fraud, the worst idea ever.
13.What is the Art Strike?
In its origins, just another cocky whiteboy spectacle.
Now, however, girls are playing too.
14. What's in it for you?
We hope to promote our own careers. Of course, only the
Strike's failure would accomplish this, so you don't get
out of it that way.
15.Why do so many people hate this idea?
Because they stand to lose everything the don't have and
wouldn't deserve even if they did have it.
16. Will sex be better in the years without art?
It goes without saying.
17. What is the Art Strike?
Art Strike is the ceremonial mask of a movement away from
competitive art making and toward an acognitive culture.
18. Who's behind it?
Better that a thousand movements fail than one leader
succeeds. Anyone can organise the Art Strike, many have.
19. Why 3 years?
In the first year the world will be a field of
undifferentiated experience. In the second year figures
will emerge from the background. In the third year an
acognitive culture will arise.
20. Why must we stop making art?
Because the refusal of artistic identity is the only
weapon left to us and the demolition of serious culture
the only way ahead.
Compiled by the Art Strike Action Committee of
California, originally published as a flyer, Summer 1989.
CONFESSION IN SUPPORT OF THE 1990-93 ART STRIKE
I may as well admit it from the start. They've been
right all along, I'm useless, totally worthless.
But then, chances are, so are you, or you wouldn't be
wasting your time reading this magazine. Not really
wasting your time. Wasting the precious air that your
excuse for a body is breathing, when you should be
rotting in a rapidly disappearing Amazonian jungle,
performing the only function that you're good for, as
compost. After all, isn't it about time that you did
something for the trees after having deforested them for
so long for the sake of making paper to put your silly,
egotistical drawings on?
No, not wasting your time. This magazine might even be
damn 'good' for your lowly conniving, pseudo-sensitive
pollution you so ludicrously glorify as ART. Face it,
you're a careerist of the most parasitic kind. At least
admit that this CoBalt slop in printed form is no more
than a sort of 'True Crimes' manual with pretensions of
superiority. I have! When I realised that useful people
like car mechanics, wet nurses and mad bombers have good
reason to scorn my flights of imagination and abstract
thinking, I was brave enough to blurt out to the world
that I'm just another con artist. Just out for an
unfairly easy living and a free meal. JUST LIKE YOU!
(dirty scribbler). Do you have the guts to spill it out
as honestly as I have? Or are you just going to snivel
and complain in that cushy Bolton Hill (or wherever)
apartment that your parents pay for because you're
incapable of facing harsh reality long enough to support
yourself? Or maybe you're too busy being duped into
gentrifying someplace like Hollins Market so that the
rich can get richer and the you-know-who can get you-
know-whater. Ever notice how many of your non-artist
neighbours are going to prison? Avant-garde =
Gentrification. Be it of the soul or of the city, when
the artists come, there goes the neighbourhood.
Not that I'm any better than you are. That's why this is
a confession. As my parent set (tentatively a
convenience) is infamous for having written, 'Artists are
only good for three things: making glasses, basket-
weaving and counterfeiting money.' Well put, but with
all due respect, not going far enough.
Have you ever asked yourself why you're reading this
magazine? Probably not, so let me rub it in your mug.
Oh, I'd say half of your motivation lies with your scummy
need to pick up those little tricks of the trade like how
to pretend to convince the government and corporations
that you just might be smart enough to bad-mouth them if
they don't give you payola to support your addle-brained
pot habit all so that they can pretend to be doing
something socially useful by keeping you alive. Then
there's your pathetic need to qualm your microscopic
conscience with that big fat mutual pat on the back.
'Gee, you're sooooo talented! I just love the way you
take that palette knife and squiggle it around like that!
OOOHH! that really is great! That prick and pussy and
horse tongue collage would really shock your mom and dad!
Better not let them see it! (giggle).'
So what's the ball point of this? The ART STRIKE, the
only answer to a problem we should've gotten rid of with
the bubonic plague. In fact, why stop for just 3 years?
Take a good look at yourself, stop exercising solely to
get your mouth between your legs and give up art
altogether. Do you want to be so ashamed of yourself
that when you're fifty-five and your grandchildren come
to visit you in the nursing home you can't even look them
in the eye? Don't forget, if even they hate you, you
won't be able to bum your fucking cigarette money off
them.
Don't be more of a scab than you already are, SUPPORT THE
ART STRIKE!
Tim Ore (aka tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE & Michael Tolson)
originally published in the Maryland arts magazine
CoBalt.
THE INTERNATIONAL STRIKE OF ARTISTS? EXTRACTS
"Would you take part in an International strike of
artists? As a protest against art system's unbroken
repression of the artist and the alienation from the
results of his practice. It would be very important to
demonstrate a possibility of coordinating activity
independent from art institutions, and organise an
international strike of artists. This strike should
represent a boycott of art system in a period of several
months. Duration, exact date of beginning, and forms of
boycott will be worked out on the completion of the list
of enrolled artists and propositions. Please give notice
of this to the artists you know. The deadline for
applications/suggestions is 15/05/79."
I received about forty replied to this circular letter.
Majority of artists expressed their reserve to this idea
or doubt to the possibility of its realisation, but there
were positive answers too.
The idea of the International artists' strike is under
present circumstances probably an utopia. However, as the
processes of institutionalisation of art activities are
being successfully applied even to the most radical art
projects there is a possibility that this idea could one
day become an actual alternative. I therefore believe
that publishing of the replies I received could be of
certain interest.
Goran Dordevic. (_)
Dear Goran
Thank you for your letter and apologies for not writing
sooner.
I have, in fact, been on strike all summer, but it has
not changed anything and I am anxious to begin work
again, which I shall do very soon.
Good luck,
Susan Hiller. (_)
Dear Goran Dordevic
Thank you for your letter of 22 Feb 79. I think the art
system has the same relation to the world system that a
seismograph has to an earthquake. You cannot change a
phenomenon by means of the instrument that records it. To
change the art system one must change the world system.
Be well
Carl Andre. (_)
Dear Goran
Thanks for your letter. Personally I am already on strike
of producing any new form in my work since 1965 (i.e.
14 years). I don't see what I could do more -
Best Regards
(Daniel) Buren. (_)
Dear Goran
Thank you for your communication on the proposed
International Strike for Artists. I did not respond
because I do not believe that this proposal is either
efficient nor sensible.
Museums and commercial galleries will go on functioning
very well without the cooperation of the socially
concerned artist, and these of course would be the only
ones to possibly join such a strike.
Rather than withholding socially critical works from the
art-system every trick in the book should be employed to
inject such works into the mainstream art world,
particularly since they are normally not well received
there.
Sincerely yours,
Hans Haacke. (_)
The reason Les Levine did not reply is because we receive
literally thousands of circulars in the studio each month
and it is impossible for Mr. Levine to respond personally
to each one of these. We can only deal with personal
mail. It's likely Mr. Levine didn't even see your
circular. However, Les Levine is not interested in
strikes of any sort, artists' or otherwise.
Yours sincerely
Mulberry Baxter. (_)
Dear Goran (_)
I am in complete agreement with what you say about
institutions although it would be unproductive for me to
join a strike. (_)
Yours, John (Latham). (_)
Dear Goran Dordevic
Sorry to take so long, but rather than strike I spend all
my energy on striking back at the art system by working
around and outside of it and against it and letting it
pay for my attempts to subvert it. (_)
All best,
Lucy R. Lippard. (_)
First published in Casopis Studenta Istorije Umetosti
3/4, Yugoslavia 1980 with dual Serbian/English text.
ART AND CLASS
Art, as a category, must be distinguished from music,
painting, writing &c. Current usage of the term art
treats it as a sub-category of these disciplines; one
which differentiates between parts of them on the basis
of perceived values. Thus the music of Philip Glass is
considered art, while that of Adam and the Ants is not.
This use of the term art, which distinguishes between
different musics, literatures, &c., emerged in the
seventeenth-century at the same time as the concept of
science. Before this, the term artist was used to
describe cooks, shoe-makers, students of the liberal
arts, &c.
When the term art emerged with its modern usage, it was
an attempt on the part of the aristocracy to hold up the
values of their class as objects of irrational reverence.
Thus art was equated with truth, and this truth was the
world view of the aristocracy; a world view which would
shortly be overthrown by the rising bourgeois class. As
a revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie wished to
assimilate the life of the declining aristocracy.
However, since the activities of the bourgeoisie served
largely to abolish the previous modes of existence, when
it appropriated the concept of art it simultaneously
transformed it. Thus beauty more or less ceased to be
equated with truth, and became associated with individual
taste. As art developed, the insistence on form,
knowledge of form, and individualism (basically
romanticism), were added to lend authority to the concept
as a particular, evolving, mental set of the new ruling
class.
Further reading:
'Distinction: A Social Critique Of The Judgement Of
Taste' Pierre Bourdieu (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
1984).
'The Cult Of Art: Against Art And Artists' Jean Gimpel
(Weidenfield & Nicolson, London 1969).
'Art, An Enemy Of The People' Roger L. Taylor (Harvester
Press, Hassocks 1978).
Stewart Home, first published in Smile 11, London Summer
1989.
This version of the Art Strike Papers differs very
slightly from the printed edition. Actually, it may vary
a great deal, depending on who else has had their hands
on it before it came your way. For a start, it was taken
from a word processed version made prior to the book
being typeset, so it will contain a few typos and
formatting 'errors' that were 'corrected' in the printed
edition. However, as of my re-editing (this may have
changed by the time you get it), the compilation also
contains a few additional pieces of information, for
example, about the identity of authors using akas or
remaining anonymous, therefore it cannot be considered
either an earlier or later version, it is simply an
alternative rendering at last, technology has liberated
us from the authority of the text! No more anchored
authorial voices, we are everywhere!
"Art, seen in relation to its supreme destination,
remains a thing of the past. It has hence lost for us
what once made it true and vital, its former reality and
necessity."
Hegel
"The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in
particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad
mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of
division of labour. If, even in certain social
conditions, everyone was an excellent painter, that would
not at all exclude the possibility of each of them being
also an original painter, so that here too the difference
between "human" and "unique" labour amounts to sheer
nonsense. In any case, with a communist organisation of
society, there disappears the subordination of the artist
to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely
from division of labour, and also the subordination of
the artist to some definite art, thanks to which he is
exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc, the very name of
his activity adequately expressing the narrowness of his
professional development and his dependence on division
of labour. In a communist society there are no painters
but at most people who engage in painting among other
activities."
Marx
Title: The Art Strike Papers
Author: Stewart Home / James Maddox
Date: 1990
Description:
Text of the pamphlet of the same name, comprising commentaries around
the 1990-93 Art Strike.
Keywords:
Art, Anti-Art, Home
Related Material: