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.”