“Blog this!”

Well, Art Life is over. The class has finished.
Everyone and -thing seems so depressed! It is essential to maintain optimism even when you have learned from the most reliable sources that the situation is even worse than you thought. Don’t let the reality being constructed for you sap your will. Go on and make it different.
Friday, when the "NY Post" carried pictures of a haggard Saddam in his jail cell, even as the "Times" ran two inside pages of an Afghani cab driver tortured to death by Americans in the invasion there I thought of Paul Werner’s scary post on his WOID letter http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ptw1/WOID.html about “Greuelpropaganda,” what Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called "defensive war against atrocities propaganda." That’s what the government puts out when somebody’s called their bluff and raised embarrassing facts. This is a bad sign on the media horizon…
(Do you suppose that when the police came for them, those activists and political people in '30s Germany and '70s Latin America were experiencing depressive symptoms? What do you think they took for that?)
It is over, and yet Art Life continues. Putting this class together – or piling it up, maybe! – I have learned so much about what is happening in the world of creative resistance. Today was like the first session, no one showed up but Seth and Andrea, so we just had a chat. We tried to look at Nils Norman’s comic book for Thurrock in 2015 (the “graphic novel” at http://www.visionarythurrock.org.uk/docs/artists/nilsnorman/) but it wouldn’t launch. It’s charming, with the little South Park-style hippie greenies going around saving their blighted community. We looked at his vehicles, the Geocruiser (a converted bus), and the grandly named bicycle-mounted Gerard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation Mobile Field Center and Weather Station. Then ambled over to the Danish design group N55 with their multiple “manuals.” These guys are an anarchist’s Ikea, with multiple splendidly articulated and suavely designed projects. Seth had also seen Temporary Services’ wonderful Mobile Structures Resources http://www.temporaryservices.org/mobile_struct_rsrce.html. And we didn’t even look at their Mobile Sign Systems page. Seeing all this makes one want to DO something! Uh-oh, art that makes you wanna make art is as bad as books that make you want to write.
* * *
Since it is unclear who is looking at this blog, I will post the readings I sent to our list for the final session, even though we did not discuss them. I will also probably continue this blog as I mull over the course experience – the final product will be a syllabus, which I’ll post to my website – which remains merely a gleam in my eye… (I may break down and download FrontPage – ugh!)
[my email to the class]
Dear Friends,
Here is the material I just added to the “Art Life” box at Mayday Books. Some of it you can just take, some of it you will have to take to the copy shop.

ONLINE – and only one copy in the box

A good article on recent protest art:
“Art Crimes: The Ebb, Flow & Dilemma of Protest Art,” by Kari Lydersen, 3.26.01
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featlydersen_74_p.htm

A piece on a central problem in this kind of work – recuperation:
“The Revolution Will Not Be Commodified: Prolefeed and the co-opting of protest culture,” by The Mobiustrip, 2/23/02
http://www.the44.net/blog/rev1/

IN PRINT ONLY – 5 copies in the box

old stuff, chart of genealogy of classic avant-gardes –
George Maciunas, “Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus” – oversized chart, 5 pieces, substantial overlap

“A Drink with a Twist” – Interview with Superflex about the Guarana project, Arthur [magazine], January 2005

Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, “Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space and Unproductive Activity,” from Ted Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free (SUNY 2005)

Selections from “Digital Detournement,” a catalogue published by Ed Marszowski in 2003 for the Version 03 conference in Chicago
A survey of recent projects from this conference. Some idea of the most recent one, Ver. 05 just concluded, is at http://versionfest.com/version05/festival/archives/000334.html

print, only ONE copy (it’s big):
an extensive series of cases or project histories --
Ted Purves (and his seminar), “Handbook for Gift and Exchange-Based Art” from Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free (SUNY 2005)
this is 70 pages, 35 leaves

OTHER STUFF NOT IN THE BOX, but relevant and online –
This is a text I read from last week, a review by the Italian labor theorist Bifo about a book by the net art theorist Lovink – “Franco Bifo Berardi reviews Geert Lovink’s ‘dark fiber’”
http://www.generation-online.org/t/Bifosreview.htm

This is a text I’ve been mulling. The panel includes the theorist Brian Holmes, and artist Claire Pentecost, active in the Critical Art Ensemble defense effort.
Nataša Petrešin -- “Potentiality of a Cultural Resistance: Talk with Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost, Marko Peljhan, Igor Zabel” – a 16 Beaver group “Journalisms” posting at –
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001377.php

Stephen Wright at 16 Beaver May 2 2005

See http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/ for his text – basically he interpolated this text in his talk last night… Here following are disconnected notes I made on what he said.
At the time I came in, he was saying that the contention that something is “just art” is used as a defense when the work is being censored. Instead, art [or “artivism,” “creactivist” work] should “corrode, pollute, infiltrate and contaminate” the real. This is “art without spectatorship,” art that is emerging as a “competence” (that is, the ability to do something; it strikes me like the old Greek idea of art as techne, i.e. as skill). Without the validating frame – the construction of which is the work of the artworld – “art is not visible as such.” [I thought this leaves aside the vernacular ‘frame,’ e.g. circuses and such.] “Only documentation [of activist work] confers art status” on this work. That is, when it is brought into the frame of the gallery or museum. [Is buzz, lore, and legend “documentation”?]
He spoke of Bureau d’Etudes, the French group. They had gone through college insisting upon one diploma for all three of them. After the collapse of the Somali government, they squatted the abandoned Somali embassy and began to issue documents. [Sounds like a fantastic project!]
(This I did not understand – “Intersubjectivity allows subjectivity to emerge.” Wright referenced a 1960 interview with Marcel Duchamp – at http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/md_guy/md_guy.html -- in this, Duchamp speaks of “a new feeling” that is black humor. I thought when you are looking at artistic practice as “affect production,” then the construction of feelings in the audience/observer is the principal object of study.)
Wright passed out the Bd’E’s monumental “World Government” poster/pamphlet or map, a work which relates to Mark Lombardi’s drawings and Oyvind Fahlstrom, who “used economic information as an art material” during the 1960s. The “World Gov’t” maps had been handed out during demonstrations. Wright described the affect produced by the piece as first curiosity; then desire to know more, and finally an urge to do something. But at no point does one say, “yes, but it’s just art.” That would be “enfeebling.” Competence, in Chomskyan linguistics, is what you have been being born into a language. You don’t have to perform it – it’s understanding, embedded perceptions and habits. (I’m not really clear on the translation from linguistic to artistic competence…) The work reaches the threshold of invisibility as art.
Wright spoke about the Yesmen, a very well know artivist group since the film came out last year. They arose out of RTmark, or ®™mark (“registered trademark mark”), the information mayhem investment website. He gave a brief précis of their spectacular career in impersonation, climaxing with a speech as WTO in Australia announcing the dissolution of the group, which was applauded by some executives who felt emboldened by the speech to express their feeling that the inequity of wealth needed to change. (Of course that’s Australia!) In this work, the relation between fiction and reality is blurred – it’s a kind of “reverse Quixotism” in which the fictional garb exposes the naked truth. In their impersonation of Dow Chemical in the Bhopal matter, the “system of legitimation was infiltrated and contaminated” when Yesmen appeared on BBC World News as Dow and announced they would pay for the cleanup and medical costs. Their stocks tumbled, and the real company was forced to come out and say they would do nothing for India. (The editor in chief of the TV program was fired.)
The Yesmen’s leisure suit project was shown in the Interventionist show at Mass MOCA. The main reason to show this kind of work in a gallery or museum is that “hopefully it will prove contagious.” Wright discussed another project in Argentina, the “escrache” work around the mass disappearances during the junta. Here artists play a key role in formulating and styling actions that are intended to “produce popular memory about what happened” during those times, and pointing the finger at the people who did the crimes. “The artists respect the absence of the 30,000 people [“disappeared,” i.e. killed by the Argentinian junta] through their own absence – the absence of art…. Art is present only in terms of its competence. It’s latent.”
Wright criticized the vogueish relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud. In this kind of work, “non-artistic actions are reimported into an artistic framework and considered artistic.” This is colonial, colonizing the lifeworld. “The symbolic capital of the artist is used to exploit what others are doing.” The key question is the relation between artistic and nonartistic labor. He gave as an example an artist who commissioned Afghani refugee women to make carpets to his designs, then exhibited and sold them for large sums. This work exploits the disproportionate “balance of power between art and the everyday.” Art enjoys great symbolic privilege. Amidst the current “fashion frenzy for politics” in the artworld, it is for Wright a question for artists of building their standing in the “reputational economy” or trading it in for “teeth in the real.” That is, “trading off real world effectivity for artistic visibility.”