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Title: Reappropriate the Imagination! Author: Cindy Milstein Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: art, ethics, prefigurative politics
An art exhibit, albeit a small one, is always housed in the bathroom of
a coffeehouse in my town. A recent display featured cardboard and paper
haphazardly glued together, and adorned with the stenciled or
hand-lettered words of classical anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin and
Errico Malatesta. The artist’s statement proclaimed, “I am not an
artist”; the show offered only “cheap art,” with pieces priced at a few
dollars. Undoubtedly the materials came from recycling bins or trash
cans, and perhaps this artist-who-is-not-an-artist choose to look the
quotes up in “low-tech” zines.
There is something heartwarming about finding anarchist slogans in the
most unexpected of places. So much of the time, the principles that we
anarchists hold dear are contradicted at every turn, never discussed, or
just plain invisible. And thus seeing some antiquated anarchist writings
scribbled on makeshift canvases in a public place, even a restroom,
raised a smile of recognition.
But only for a moment; then despair set in. Why is anarchist art so
often a parody of itself, predictable and uninteresting? Sure, everyone
is capable of doing art, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is an
artist. And yet it is generally perceived as wrong in anarchist circles
that some people are or want to be artists, and others of us aren’t or
don’t want to be. Beyond the issue of who makes works of art, why can’t
art made by antiauthoritarians be provocative, thoughtful, innovative —
and even composed of materials that can’t be found in a dumpster? More
to the point, why do or should anarchists make art at all today, and
what would we want art to be in the more egalitarian, nonhierarchical
societies we dream of?
This I know: an anarchist aesthetic should never be boxed in by a
cardboard imagination.
The name of one radical puppetry collective, Art and Revolution, aptly
captures the dilemma faced by contemporary anarchist artists. It
simultaneously affirms that art can be political and that revolution
should include beauty. Yet it also underscores the fine line between art
as social critique and art as propaganda tool. Moreover, it obscures the
question of an anarchist aesthetic outside various acts of rebellion. It
is perhaps no coincidence at all, then, that Art and Revolution’s logo
design echoes the oft-quoted Bertolt Brecht contention that “art is not
a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it” — with
“ART,” in this collective’s case, literally depicted as the hammerhead.
Certainly, an art that self-reflectively engages with and thus
illuminates today’s many crushing injustices is more necessary than
ever. An art that also manages to engender beauty against the ugliness
of the current social order is one of the few ways to point beyond the
present, toward something that approximates a joyful existence for all.
But as capitalism intensifies its hold on social organization, not to
mention our imaginations, efforts to turn art into an instrument of
social change leave it all that much more open to simply mirroring
reality rather than contesting or offering alternatives to it. And short
of achieving even the imperfect horizontal experiments of places like
Buenos Aires and Chiapas, much less replacing statecraft with
confederated self-governments, attempts to make art into a
community-supported public good remain trapped in the private sphere,
however collectively we structure our efforts. Artistic expression is
fettered by the present, from commodification to insidious new forms of
hierarchy, and hence creativity is as estranged from itself as we are
from each other.
Such alienation isn’t limited to the aesthetic arena, of course. But
precisely because creative “freedom” appears to defy any logic of
control — in “doing-it-yourself” (DIY), one is supposedly crafting a
culture that seems to be utterly of, for, and by us — it is especially
seductive as a space of resistance. Our aesthetic tools should be able
to help us build new societies just as much as demolish the old, but our
renovations will likely be forever askew when set on an already-damaged
foundation. And no matter how shoddily constructed, they will always be
sold out from under us to the highest bidder. Still, we have to be able
to nail down something of the possibilities ahead.
Art at its best, then, should maintain the dual character of social
critic and social visionary. For the role of the critic is to judge, to
discern, not simply beauty but also truth, and the role of the utopian
is to strive to implement such possible impossibilities. As Sadakichi
Hartmann put it in a 1916 Blast article, radical artists should “carry
the torn flag of beauty and liberty through the firing lines to summits
far beyond the fighting crowds.”[1]
This is perhaps art’s greatest power, even when distorted by the
present-day social order: the ability to envision the “not yet
existent.”
Since the 1970s, a series of interconnected phenomena loosely drawn
together by the term globalization have transformed the world. One of
these changes is the rise of “global cities” as nodes of control, and
over time, this has become embodied in the designed/built aesthetic
environment.[2] In City of Quartz, Mike Davis wrote of the “fortress
effect” behind a free-market maneuver in the aftermath of the 1960s to
reoccupy abandoned (read: poor because abandoned by capital, whites, and
so on) downtowns. New megastructure complexes of reflective glass rose
up in city centers, hiding elite decision-makers and their “upscale,
pseudo-public spaces” inside.[3] Several decades later, with global
capitalism seemingly triumphant, brazenly transparent architecture is
replacing secretive one-way windows. Just take a peek at the revitalized
Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany. Corporate office-apartment buildings
of see-through glass reveal lavish interior designs, and are ringed by
airy public plazas featuring cheerful sculptures, artsy ecological
waterways, and multimedia installations.
Since anarchists today are by and large neither city planners nor
architects, nor those commissioned to produce public art, we’ve had to
make do with temporary festivals of resistance decrying the environment
that’s been built to constrain the majority of humanity. Such carnivals
against capitalism have succeeded in fleetingly reclaiming everything
from facades to landscapes to outdoor art. And in those moments,
libertarian leftists have become impromptu designers of place. The
preferred artistic medium here is flexibility, with a dab of anonymity.
A large stick of chalk, a homemade stencil, or strips of cloth are
easily concealed, and just as easily used to transform a sidewalk, wall,
or fence into a canvas. In these and many other ways, anarchist artists
set up the circus tent of a playful urban renewal, bringing glimpses of
the pleasure in reworking social spaces together, of integrating form
and content into the everyday-made-extraordinary by creative cultural
expressions.
On the other hand, when we’ve actually expropriated or “freed” spaces,
we seem to re-create an aesthetic of deterioration in those places
already destroyed by state and capital, racism and fear, almost reveling
in the rubble. The degradation foisted on the poor, the marginal, and
the forgotten is gleefully picked up as some sort of pirate sensibility.
All too often, capitalism’s trash is the blueprint for own trashed
creations, as if artistic expressions modeled on a better, more visually
pleasing world might just make us too comfortable to swashbuckle our way
to revolution. Garbage, along with the shoplifted and the plagiarized,
are all romanticized as somehow existing outside domination by anarchist
artists who thoroughly inhabit a social structure (as does everyone)
where the best of peoples’ cultures are tossed aside, stolen, or
plagiarized for profit and power.[4]
Whether conceived of as circus or chaos (or both), however, these types
of civic artworks are as evanescent as the latest iPod updates; they
merely frolic on built environments instead of collectively shaping
them. Such artistic strategies are ultimately hollow, replicating the
feeling of life under capitalism, whether one has material plenty or
not. Instead of offering a challenge or a vision, both our joyful and
joyless DIY art ends up parroting the bipolar “choices” that most people
struggle against daily: the lure of the ephemeral, unattainable
spectacle, or utter rejection in the debris of its excess. And yet this
reopening of social space via creativity brings with it a sense of
inclusiveness, of democratic places remade and consented to by all — or
at least the potentiality thereof.
Art as social critic/visionary, when doggedly and imaginatively placed
in the commodified (non)commons of today, just might play its part in
moving us toward a noncommodified commons: what we share and enjoy
together, in the open, always subject to use by all, subject only to
directly democratic structures, and always the vigilant sentry of a
better and better society.
It’s not that everyone needs to make art, nor should artists offer an
aesthetic of revolt or a revolting aesthetic — that is, mere negation or
else nihilism. That’s not what makes art revolutionary. It’s that
everyone needs to routinely experience critical-utopian art as commons,
commons as a critical-utopian art.
To some degree, whether self-consciously or not, anarchists’ artistic
impulses get to the heart of what makes capitalism so deplorable.
“Value” is determined by how much one has and can continually exchange
as well as accumulate, whether in the form of money, property, or
especially control over others. We anarchists, and billions of
non-anarchists, know that value can never be measured by piling quantity
on top of more quantity; that how we live our lives, and especially how
we treat each other and the nonhuman world, is what matters.
As a political philosophy, anarchism thus aspires to the ongoing project
of balancing individual subjectivity and social freedom — the
qualitative dimensions of life — knowing that both are essential to the
potentiality of the other. As a practice, anarchism engages in
prefigurative politics, from forms of cooperation to institutions of
direct democracy. This is what makes and keeps us human, in the most
generous sense. And such a project will be forever necessary, whether
within, against, or beyond capitalism.[5]
One way that anarchists attempt to reclaim value is by carving out a
cultural realm that allows everyone to participate, to be valued for
what they can envision and/or create, and by redistributing the
possibility of producing works of art through the use of affordable,
accessible, indigenous materials. We use what’s at hand, often lend a
hand to whoever wants to make art, and attempt to do this in ways that
are multicultural and inclusive. In isolation from the other realms of
life — economics and politics, the social and the personal — and
embedded within structures of domination and forms of oppression,
however, the cultural effort to revalue value frequently reproduces the
social system we oppose.
Examples abound here, sad to say. Puppets are among the easiest of
targets, primarily because they became the poster kids for
anticapitalist mobilizations. Devising a cheap and collective manner to
produce artistic expressions of resistance isn’t problematic per se;
such creations have allowed us to prefigure a better life even as we
protest present-day horrors. But when puppets all start looking alike,
whether filling the streets of Seattle or Hong Kong; when they are
mass-produced from the same materials, in the same manner; when they are
something eco-entrepreneurs can fund to both create the appearance of
grassroots protest and turn radical notions into the most liberal of
demands[6] — then we are developing our own factory forms of creativity.
Those we mean to empower — the everyone-as-artist — become
near-assembly-line workers. So even when the production is fun or done
in an edgy warehouse space, the profound recognition (of self and
society) that comes from the creative act is lost. Art and the artists
become unthinking, cranking out copycat rip-offs of the latest political
art trend.
The distribution and consumption of such works can become equally
debased. At a convergence in Windsor, Canada, to challenge free trade
agreements several years ago, a prominent puppetista angrily insisted
that thousands of anticapitalists should pause their direct actions to
watch her collective’s street theater. “We’re here to entertain you, and
you need to stop and be entertained!”
It certainly isn’t enough to make sure that more and more people are
cultural producers (or consumers of free art) — the anarchist version of
DIY quantity piled on top of more DIY quantity, somehow adding up to a
new society. Indeed, “the people” making art might mean that there is no
art at all, for quantity can actually destroy quality. And without the
qualitative dimension, there can be no appreciation of beauty or craft,
or the self who crafted that beauty.
This Wal-Martization of resistance art — cheap, accessible, homogeneous,
and everywhere — isn’t the only conundrum we face. It is as hard for us,
“even” as anarchists, as it is for “ordinary” people to resist the
hegemonic forces at work: those dominant types of organization and ways
of thinking that become naturalized, and hence almost unquestioned in a
given time period. Perhaps the only bulwark against internalizing and
thereby reproducing the current hegemonies we rebel against is our
ability to simultaneously think critically and act imaginatively.
Indeed, this is where anarchism as a political philosophy excels: in its
ongoing suspicion of all phenomena as possible forms of domination, and
its concurrent belief in nonhierarchical social relations and
organization. This ethical impulse — to live every day as a social
critic and social visionary — certainly infuses anarchist rhetoric. It
also underscores all those values that anarchists generally share:
mutual aid, solidarity, voluntary association, and so on. But for even
the most diligent among us, acting on these ethics is much trickier than
holding them in our hearts or jotting them down in a mission statement.
A British anarchist historian recently asked me for a tour of Hope
Cemetery in Barre, Vermont. In Barre’s heyday, at the turn of the
twentieth century, socialists and anarchists worked together in the
granite industry, living and dying (often and too young) as those who
made tombstones. These Italian immigrants built an anarchist library and
later a labor hall, established a food co-op and art school, published
newspapers such as Cronaca Sovversiva and hosted speakers like Big Bill
Haywood, and rabble-roused. Yet more than anything, they sculpted their
communal aesthetics into the hard gray stones dotting the cemetery, a
lasting commons to the good works of these radicals. “Look at the
artisanal quality of each and every gravestone,” to paraphrase my
visitor. “This exemplifies the difference between the appeal of Marxism
and anarchism back then. Factory workers could never see themselves in
their work, but these stone carvers could recognize themselves in their
designs; they could see their own potentiality.”
Such recognition is the first step toward valuing our world, toward
knowing we can self-manage the whole of our lives. But it can only come
when our artisanal efforts are part of crafting a social beauty. This,
in turn, can only be defined in the process of doing-it-ourselves (DIO),
where we don’t necessarily all produce art but we do all substantially
participate in engaging with, debating, judging, and determining the
place(s) of creative expression.[7] The qualitative would be that realm
of social criticism and pleasure that comes in the full recognition of
free selves within a free society.
The creative act — the arduous task of seeing something other than the
space of capitalism, statism, the gender binary, racism, and other rooms
without a view — is the hope we can offer to the world. Such aesthetic
expressions must also aim to denaturalize the present, though. And this
dual “gesturing at and beyond” will only be possible if we continually
interrogate this historical moment, and whether our artworks are working
against the grain within that context.
For the pull of the culture industry is strong. No matter how subversive
and cutting-edge we might remain in our creative works, global
capitalism is always ready to recuperate our every innovation. Our
rebellious ad busting has become indistinguishable from advertisements
employing rebellion-as-sales-pitch. For instance, just after Seattle
1999, an ad featured protesters running in their Nike sneakers from tear
gas and police, with the familiar “just do it” tagline; yet it was
unclear whether this image was the brainchild of Nike or activists — and
either way, it didn’t matter. It sold a lifestyle; it mocked a movement.
Creative work and/or processes of collective art-making without an
explicit politics that integrally and forever vigilantly incorporates
critical thinking into its practice will almost necessarily, especially
under the current conditions, become part of the problem. Some of this
will be clear, as when our freely traded handmade patches become the
inspiration for prefabricated “made-in-China” clothing in pricey
boutiques. The less-obvious manifestations are more troubling: when the
DIY sensibility itself, so key to anarchist artistic creations, slowly
but surely ingratiates itself into multiple mainstream commodities, from
Home Depot’s “You Can Do It” to the new Oreo kits that allow the
consumer to “make” their own, with cookie tops and cream separated.
The flow, of course, doesn’t simply go in one direction. As “products”
of the dominant culture, we also are influenced before we ever cut a
stencil or edit a video. Without constant awareness, we almost
unwittingly take up the project of this society of control, with its
fragmentation, insecurity, and shallow infotainment. Social isolation is
mirrored by an anarchist art that asserts its anonymity, where we
willingly erase our own subjectivity, and its temporariness and
flexibility, where we willingly give up accountability and
connectedness. The contemporary state’s evisceration of human and civil
rights, with its move from “the rule of law” toward “the rule of
lawlessness,” is reflected in an aesthetic that exalts in its own outlaw
status. The art of cartography allows radicals to map out the constant
fear of being watched by, in turn, surveilling others. And much of what
antiauthoritarian artists produce replicates the culture of distraction
that keeps people from acting and thinking for themselves — such as
documentaries without a narrative, or screen prints that reduce social
conflict to “us” versus “them.”
The artist-as-social-visionary has to peer hard to separate potentiality
from peril right now. As autonomist Marxist Harry Cleaver commented in
1992 in relation to anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s method, “He had
to seek out and identify, at every level, from the local workshop and
industry to the global organization of the economy, signs of the forces
of cooperation and mutual aid working at cross-purposes to the
capitalist tendencies to divide all against all.” Then and now, such
cross-purposes are what gesture at “the future in the present,” to again
cite Cleaver, but discerning them isn’t easy.[8]
The artist-as-social-critic doesn’t have to search far for subject
matter these days, and yet many people seem to be “pushing against an
open door,” to borrow from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s formulation
in Empire. That is, the social ills we’re contesting have long since
been superseded by even more horrific phenomena. As Hardt and Negri
argue, we’ve been “outflanked by strategies of power.”[9] Our
countermove, then, must be based on imminent critique, working through
the internal logic of what we’re scrutinizing toward its own undoing and
alternative potentialities. It must be a critique of the “real by the
possible,” as philosopher Henri Lefebvre asserted in 1958.[10]
One theme picked up and challenged by radical artists over a century ago
was fragmentation, an emergent concern in their day. Now, social
atomization is a fact of everyday life, and more frighteningly, is
accepted and even celebrated. Contemporary artwork that portrays
fragmentation only serves to mimic rather than decry our societal
“breaking apart,” precisely because the damage has already been done. So
here comes one task for art: to depict resistance not to fragmentation
per se, for mere description has lost all power of critique, but to
illustrate how social acquiescence to it has become a valued commodity.
This ties into a related issue: alienation. Building on Karl Marx’s
work, avant-garde artists and intellectuals long ago moved the critique
of alienation from (only) the realm of production to that of
consumption, culminating most famously in the Situationist
International’s critique of everyday life and assertion of “all power to
the imagination.” Life had become a spectacle, with us as its passive
spectators.[11] Today, this estrangement has gone one step further in a
globalizing cyber-society, where people eagerly join the spectacle as
active actors in the vain hope of feeling life again — through such
things as reality television, hot dog — eating contests, and pieing
prominent individuals — only to participate more thoroughly in their own
removal from the world. And thus here’s another aim for art: to capture
the new forms of alienation that appear as active engagement, but that
ultimately sap the very life out of us all.
A third area worthy of artistic scrutiny is what geographer David Harvey
has called “time-space compression,” pointing to “processes that so
revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are
forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the
world to ourselves.”[12] Under globalization, temporality has become an
ever-accelerating, just-in-time, simultaneous phenomenon, and spatial
barriers have shrunk or even been overcome altogether. Yet anarchist art
often still harkens back to a nostalgic time-space of “before,” clinging
to archaic forms and/or content — the pastoral black-and-white woodcut,
say. Here’s an additional artistic aspiration, then: to interrogate the
dizzying “no-time” and displacing “no-place” of our present virtual
reality and real virtuality.
This dovetails with the dilemmas raised by high technologies and
excessive consumption/waste. During the industrial era, artists such as
filmmaker Charlie Chaplin showed the “little guy” being dragged through
the gears of Modern Times, yet in our informational age, the computer
now bypasses the cog as emblematic, and the “programmer guy” is pulled
into The Matrix. Moreover, the new forms of production made possible by
digital technologies have filled houses with kitsch, dumpsters with
food, and big-box stores with clerks. One anarchist answer to
technological/production shifts has frequently been to use garbage as
art material — a decades-old artistic choice that has lost any bite
(especially since most commodities are now junk to begin with), but more
crucially is unfeeling in light of the millions who are forced to use
garbage as architectural (and often eatable) material. Or else to
supposedly avoid high tech — conveniently forgetting that nearly all
commodities involve communications technologies in their design,
production, distribution, and/or disposal. The task for artists here is
to separate the wheat from the chaff: to critique the ways in which new
types of technologies/production help facilitate, versus potentially
diminish, pointless excess or new methods of exploitation as well as
time-space compression, alienation, fragmentation, and of course
top-down power.[13]
Which brings us to the question of maintaining power, or sovereignty:
the possession of supreme authority. Wars, revolutions, and “peacetime”
are all essentially waged in the name of seizing this ultimate power
(with anarchists hoping to redistribute it horizontally), but the
ongoing consolidation of sovereignty is where much of the terror is
often done. An increasingly uneven balance of power is held in place
today by nation-states inculcating a particular blend of fear, despair,
paranoia, and hate, and if all else fails, returning once again to
“improved” forms of torture as a last resort. Anarchist art frequently
just pokes fun at anxieties, depicts its own hatreds and paranoia, or
worse, lapses into portraying the ways that states retained control in
the past — say, via a monopoly on violence (something that suicide
bombings, 9–11, and other nonstatist acts of violence have shown to be
false). Contemporary art should instead scrutinize and expose
present-day mechanisms of power: how the mundane as well as the lovely —
the bus to work, the toothpaste tube, or the nice new neighbor — are
made into objects of anxiety-as-control; how explainable events become
paranoiac fantasies of hate-as-control (the Muslim, the Jew, or the
Mexican “is responsible”); and how one’s private spirituality,
sexuality, or diet (indeed, one’s very personhood) become fair game as
physical and psychological abuse in the faceless, nameless, hopeless
Gitmoization of torture-as-control.
This list of aesthetic concerns could stretch out further, but let me
wrap up with an area that art, from the start, has always tried to
capture: remembrance. From bison hunts to biblical stories, from
victories in battles or revolutions, from socialist realist to fascist
art, artists have attempted to memorialize the past as a means to
sustain or shape the present. At its best, such creative recollections
have attempted to make sense of the past and the present in order to
contemplate a better future — especially in the face of hegemonic
representations. Strikingly, however, the current moment is marked by a
reversal of aeons of art history: forgetting. Call it the postmodern
condition, or blame it on the speed of daily life or efforts to escape
harsh realities, but history seems to get lost almost before it’s been
made, and we’re left with a hodgepodge art of immediatism. Such
ahistoricism erases the developmental logic of domination and hence our
ability to contest it, but also that of the revolutionary tradition and
hence our capacity to nurture it, thereby helping to “disappear” hope.
The artistic imperative here is simple: struggle against memory loss,
including our own.
The above themes may seem amorphous; worse, they may appear to be
completely removed from the many pressing, often life-and-death issues
people face — the numerous “isms” that most of us battle, from racism to
heterosexism to anti-Semitism, and sadly on and on. But it is through
such concerns that, for instance, racism operates in specific ways right
now, and can therefore be illustrated and potentially fought. Today’s
form of fragmentation, for example, has turned many toward
fundamentalisms — Islam, Judaism, or Christianity — as a means to regain
community, often at the expense of women, queers, and indeed anyone
dubbed as the transgressive other. Fear has an object, and in the
contemporary United States that is frequently the young black male and
the bearded Middle Eastern man. Spatial displacement brutally creates
refugees, who then become targets of hate. You get the picture. Rather,
you can paint, print, or perform the picture.
Lest I seem to be blaming artists for an inegalitarian world, or
minimally for not doing enough to challenge it through their work, let
me reiterate: I desire to encourage shifts in cultural production and
cultural producers in order that both can contribute to the project of
ever-freer societies. There are valid reasons for artistic choices —
say, whether to sign a work or not — but all too often such choices seem
already circumscribed or shaped by today’s social ills. Art should
instead aim to turn the tables: this miserable historical moment could
be the raw material for artists to give shape to choices of our own
construction — ones that might circumscribe domination.
As an anarchist whose creativity comes through the act of writing, I
know all too well that penning words or printing a poster both become
damaged in the context of a damaged world. And the world seems
increasingly damaged at present. A lithographer friend recently told me,
“I’m not making art right now, because I don’t want to produce work
that’s nihilistic, and that’s all I can feel these days.” Despite these
counterrevolutionary times, though, we must all try to work through our
own fears and despair, in ways that allow our imaginations to run
utopian. My hope is to instill hope in others by claiming that it is
through our continual ability, together and alone, to understand and
resist the emergent global order with clear eyes, and envision and
prefigure humane alternatives with even clearer eyes, that we might just
win.
So how might we begin to clamber out of our boxed-in existence,
precisely in order to “win,” knowing that there will never be a final
victory but simply better approximations of fundamentally transformed
social relations?
One starting point might come from Emma Goldman, who in 1914 observed
that modern art should be “the dynamite which undermines superstition,
shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women [sic] for the
reconstruction.”[14] Another might be found with anarchist artist
Clifford Harper, who noted of his 1974 “utopian images” posters: “they
depict an existence that is immediately approachable.”[15] And yet
another is hinted at by libertarian left social theorist Murray
Bookchin, who in 2004, reflecting on his imminent death, wrote, “To live
without a social romance is to see without color. Imagine what life
would be like in black and white, without being able to hear — to be
deaf to music. Step by step our potentialities like hearing became
organized sound, and the Marseillaise was born.”[16]
Other points of departure come from on-the-ground experimentation by
contemporary artists, some anarchists and others not, that grapple with
some of the concerns mentioned above. Such as provocateur street artist
Banksy, who despite his growing fame and fortune, still manages to
question how present-day sovereigns maintain their control. Whether
painting giant windows to a better world on the separation wall being
erected by the Israeli government, or placing a life-size figure dressed
in Guantanamo Bay orange within the scenery of a Disneyland ride, Banksy
serves to startle, to act as a vigilant public eye. Moreover, he asks
people to “imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal... A city that
felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just
the real estate agents and the barons of big business. Imagine a city
like that and stop leaning against the wall — it’s wet.”[17]
Another example comes from installation artists Esther Shalev-Gerz and
Jochen Gerz’s attempt to deal with “’forgetting’ in a place of
‘remembering,’ and thus establish, through the act of public
participation, each person’s memory.” In 1986, they erected a
twelve-meter-high lead column in a town square in Hamburg, Germany, and
“invited passers-by to write their name on its surface.” It became a
“community board without restriction,” and “mimicked the process of an
ideal democracy — a public space open to unrestricted thought ... and
all-encompassing dialogue.” Over seven years, which included the fall of
the Berlin wall, the column was slowly lowered into the ground as
sections filled up. A debate ensued during that time over public
space/art, and especially the Nazi past and neo-Nazi present. But as
this disappearing “countermonument” was also meant to illustrate, “in
the long run,” according to Shalev-Gerz, “it is only we ourselves who
can stand up against injustice.”[18]
To my mind, the best efforts are the ones that focus as much on
horizontal social organization as on aesthetic questions, thereby
highlighting the DIO art-as-commons dimension of anarchism that, again
to my mind, really does distinguish an antiauthoritarian art. Novelist
Ursula Le Guin, for one, imagined a utopia where museums might function
like libraries. The Internet now facilitates open-source, interactive
electronic museums. Other inklings of this can be found in those
creative projects that play with, and work at, the notion of communal
control of our now-privatized spaces and prefigure directly democratic,
confederated social structures.
One compelling case study is the United Victorian Workers, Local 518,
organized in late November 2005 by an artist/activist collective as a
counterpoint to the Victorian Stroll in Troy, New York. The “official”
stroll is a privately funded annual event designed to lure holiday
shoppers to the “historic streets of downtown” by creating a “magical
stage” peopled by the Victorian upper crust; the “unofficial” version
“gave a presence to those whose labor built the city by dressing in
Victorian-era working-class apparel and performing a period-inspired
strike during the event.”[19] Many of the bystanders as well as the
participants, though, couldn’t tell the difference, and the full history
of nineteenth-century Troy was reinserted into the public imagination.
As one of the artists involved with this project remarked, “It was a
collective intervention into public memory and Christmas shopping.”[20]
Certainly, “by making visible the class and labor struggles of the era,”
this interventionist art piece “obliquely points out the city’s motives
to present a selective history conducive to consumption,” as
Shopdropping observed.[21] But it also cleverly and clearly transforms
the “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” of protest moments into a tangible
lesson played out in the actual historical space — potentially sparking
civic dialogue and action around contemporary injustice.
In a much more expansive effort in April 2001, the three-day Department
of Space and Land Reclamation campaign involved sixty mostly illegal
reclaimings of public space in Chicago, thereby explicitly linking
artistic expression to vibrant conversations and decentralized
self-management in the city’s many distinct neighborhoods. As the
weekend’s catalog noted, “Artists/activists/radical citizens have once
again found common ground” in multiple practices that “all resist the
encroachment of top-down centralized control and private capital.
Projects of reclamation situate the producer at a critical intersection
of power.” A central headquarters, open around-the-clock during the
campaign, was designed “to connect various practitioners of reclamation
as well as initiate a critical dialogue about the building of a radical
aesthetic/arts movement in Chicago and beyond.”[22]
And in one final example, in summer 2006, CampBaltimore, in a surprising
collaboration with the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore, encouraged
people to debate urban design through the lens of social justice while
building a network to transform art and society.[23] According to
anarchist Mike McGuire, who participated in the project, CampBaltimore
built “a trailer that could serve as a mobile convergence center,” which
included “a small infoshop, a place from which to serve meals, a mobile
sewing workshop, and a place to do film screenings” within
neighborhoods. Another part involved “Headquarters: Investigating the
Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” housed in the
museum. Here, “blurring the lines between the practices of artists and
activists,” the museum also became “an infoshop and center of
operations: a platform for activities that investigate Baltimore’s
program of uneven urbanism and a site to mobilize for local and global
struggles.”[24] “It’s not like a traditional model of political activism
or artistic models of political activism. It’s both — and [it’s] trying
to offer an alternative way, seeing other ways, ... grappling with the
evaporation of public spaces in the city and the privatization of
everything,” explained museum artist-in-residence Gabri.[25] Rather than
art on the walls, then, “Headquarters” featured short videos documenting
grassroots struggles in Baltimore, a dry-erase map of the city that
people could write on, a flowchart outlining socioeconomic
interconnections, a mini library, and a meeting space, among other
things. The trailer and museum became platforms for people to think and
converse about their city — and hopefully change it.
In these instances and others, there is a sense of attempting to engage
with the complexities of the present, and via a process of
art-as-dialogue, working together to both critique and reconstruct our
lived public places. Such imaginative projects indicate that centrally
planned forms — whether capitalist, fascist, or socialist — cannot build
a dailyscape that speaks to who we are and want to be. And that there
also needs to be an integration — or reintegration in many cases — of
what is now seen as art into those things now viewed as either material
necessities, functional, or infrastructure. Mostly, though, they
gesture, hopefully and often joyfully, at a time-space of “after.”
What would such a time-space beyond hierarchy, domination, and
exploitation look like, and what of an anarchist art then? That is
something we need to dream up together, through our various acts of
imagining, debating, fighting for, and deciding on that ever-dynamic
time-space.
In the meantime, in this present awful time-space, I dream of an art
that agitates even as it unmasks injustices; that educates even as it
inspires; that organizes even as it models self-governance. That
surprises and provokes, sometimes upsetting a few carts in the process,
and that isn’t identifiable as anarchist art by its look but instead by
its sensibility. I long for a nonhierarchical aesthetic that isn’t
afraid of instituting imagination as a public good, which can also stand
up to public involvement and interrogation as well as directly
democratic decision-making. That has an unending commitment to the
notion that through creative expression, humans achieve a qualitative
self- and social recognition that can, by breaking through the
alienation we experience today, point toward self-determined social
relations — not wealth or fame, but knowing that we are fully seen by
and see others, “warts and all,” as we shape a world of beauty together,
all the while defining “beauty” by what upholds values such as
cooperation, dignity, love, freedom, and other anarchistic ethics.
To hell with cardboard! Let’s utilize whatever artistic mediums are
necessary, toward endless, plastic possibilities in societies of our
own, ongoing collective creation. That would be beautiful, indeed.
[1] Sadakichi Hartmann, “Art and Revolt,” Blast 1, no. 22 (December 1,
1916): 3; repr., The Blast, ed. Alexander Berkman, intro. Barry Pateman
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 181.
[2] The term “global city” was first coined in Saskia Sassen, The Global
City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
[3] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
(London: Verso, 1990), 226, 229.
[4] Obviously, many artists use free or discarded materials because they
don’t have the financial resources to buy art supplies, and hence their
aesthetic can simply be chalked up to a lack of means. But also
prevalent among anarchist artists is the notion that trash is valueless
from the standpoint of capitalism, and so by utilizing such material,
one is creating something of noncapitalist value. Or at least throwing
capitalism’s excess in its face as some sort of incriminating evidence.
This reduces capitalism to economics, though, and ignores Karl Marx’s
great insight: that capital is first and foremost a social relation.
Whether one uses expensive or free art supplies, the social organization
behind them both remains the same. But of course, even on the level of
economics, waste management is a multitrillion dollar industry, utterly
dependent on recycling and garbage. So whether you take a materialist or
social theory perspective, a “cheap art” aesthetic is perfectly
compatible with present-day forms of domination. Today’s junk can easily
become — and has — tomorrow’s boutique item; society’s rejects (from
punks to urban black youth) can become — and have — tomorrow’s formula
for hipster culture.
[5] Contrast this to the project of anarchy qua primitivism, which is to
somehow “forget” that we are imaginative, qualitative beings marked by
our capacity for dialogue and hence reasoned actions, and instead
“return” to passive receptacles foraging for our most basic needs, which
seems to me exactly what capitalism and statecraft as forms of social
organization strive to reduce us to. This is no digression: when we deny
our very ability to think symbolically, the notion of art disappears
too, not to mention us as humans along with it.
[6] As one example, some Vermont puppeteers, who certainly needed the
money for their many unpaid political projects, were commissioned to
produce a puppet show for the 2005 Montreal Climate Control Conference.
Yet there were strings attached. The eco-capitalist who financed these
puppets had his own agenda in mind: make the art look like a
self-initiated activist protest, but keep the theme in line with his own
reformist political point. (This isn’t to say that these particular
artists, and others like them, aren’t also able to subvert the
eco-capitalist’s goal to some degree.)
[7] As Erik Reuland noted in editing this chapter, “Many people would
also argue that the whole definition of art should be exploded, and many
things traditionally considered crafts or trades could be viewed — and
invested with the same value — as artistic practices. They’re not
necessarily asserting that everyone can and should draw, write songs,
and so on.” Such a debate is complex, but at the risk of
overgeneralizing for my present purposes, the notion that art’s
definition should encompass much more, and many more people could thus
be considered artists, seems to often so water down what we mean by art
and artists as to make both unrecognizable. Why does this matter?
Precisely because of the concern articulated here about the recognition
of our selves and each other as profoundly individuated humans, with
wonderfully differing artistic and nonartistic things we might choose to
excel in, embedded in a profoundly articulated community of our own
ongoing self-determination.
[8] Harry Cleaver, “Post-Marxist Anarchism: Kropotkin,
Self-Valorization, and the Crisis of Marxism,” 1997 extended essay
(available from AK Press), 5, 8 (emphasis added).
[9] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 138.
[10] Henri Lefebvre, foreword to Critique de la vie quotidienne, 2^(nd)
ed. (Paris, 1958), 16; cited in Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern
Leftism (1975; repr., Baltimore, MD: Insubordinate Editions), 47.
[11] See, for example, Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967;
repr., Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006); Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of
Everyday Life (1967; repr., London: Rebel Press, 2001). For more on the
Situationist International along with some downloadable texts, see
.
[12] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 240.
[13] Josh MacPhee offered the following comment while editing this
chapter: “The trouble is that Modern Times is a better movie than The
Matrix!” I agree. And given that it’s perhaps harder than ever to make
artwork that isn’t degraded from the start, Josh asks, “What is an
artist to do, simply accept that degradation? Is not the woodcut a
harkening to a time when craft mattered, and therefore a rejection of
the made-in-China [or made-in-the-USA] aesthetics?” Sure. But what Josh
and I are both getting at is this, to quote him again: It is “no longer
about what we do (with capitalist globalization, everyone has access to
everything, so skateboarding, noise music, tall bikes, and silk
screening become fodder for Coke ads) but how we do it. This is a
deceptively simple idea, but it can be easily misunderstood. It does not
mean that there is a ‘correct’ way to do things (that is, a way to move
into a neighborhood and not gentrify); we are still beholden to the
larger systems we exist in. But it does mean that the ethics of how we
do things matters, for the very reason that they are at the core of the
new world we are trying to build.” I appreciate the dialogue Josh and
Erik added to this chapter in the editing process — a good example of
“how we do it.”
[14] Emma Goldman, foreword to The Social Significance of the Modern
Drama (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1914), available at
.
[15] See
.
[16] Murray Bookchin, “The Twilight Comes Early,” November 2004,
available at
.
[17] See
.
[18] See
;
www.thephotographyinstitute.org
.
[19] For more on the official Troy Victorian Stroll, see
. For the unofficial version, see the “Action” section under the
“Projects” header at
.
[20] E-mail to the author, October 19, 2006.
[21] See
.
[22] See
www.counterproductiveindustries.com
.
[23] See
.
[24] E-mail to the author, September 22, 2006;
.
[25] Quoted in Bret McCabe, “Unite and Conquer,” City Paper, July 12,
2006, available at
.