Gregory Sholette

GREGORY SHOLETTE Clearly the response by artists and academics to public events was far more direct and confrontational in the not-so-distant past than today. On May 2, 1970, members of the Art Workers Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group staged a mock gun battle in front of the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1976 a group of art historians and artists produced an anti-catalog denouncing the nationalism and racism of the bicentennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As late as the early 1980s, members of Group Material collaborated with an El Salvadorian support group to curate an exhibition opposed to United States pol- icy in Central America for a popular dance club, and the collective Political Art Documentation/Distribution paraded a blue, blimp-like Pac Man with the fea- tures of Uncle Sam in front of the White House. Militant street theater, interventionist scholarship, activist curating, artists directly challenging their own well- being by denouncing museums and the art market—all of this appears inconceivable today. Perhaps the last artist-organized cultural campaign aimed at mass-mobilization in the United States was Artists Call Against Intervention in Central America in the mid-1980s. Organized primarily in New York City by veter- ans of the 1960s such as Leon Golub and Lucy Lippard (as well as younger organizers such as Doug Ashford of Group Material), Artists Call brought together younger artists, alternative spaces, small commercial dealers, and even a few major art galleries. Skillful organizing convinced these varied cultural partici- pants that acting to oppose U.S. military buildup in Latin America was ethically necessary and politically invaluable. (Imagine today a similar series of exhibitions and projects calling for the resignation and trial of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for human rights violations.) The focus on mass mobilization, however, began to shift with the tactical approach of ACT UP and the Guerrilla Girls. Both of these groups, starting in the mid-1980s, moved away from broad- based ideological critique in order to highlight and hopefully resolve specific instances of social injustice. One might say that this shift reflects the demise of one political paradigm—the totalizing critique of the New Left—and the rise of another—single-issue campaigning associated with Non-Governmental Organiz- ations (NGOs). In this sense, the counter-WTO events initiated in Seattle in 1999 represent a new type of mass collectivism in which numerous individuated interests converge in the form of a symbiotic swarm, as opposed to a mode of collectivism in which ideological positions or a unique vision of society draws par- ticipants together, as was the case with Modernism, or is the case with radical Islamism. Three structural changes therefore distinguish the current political cli- mate from the more aggressive, social commitment of artists, academics, and cultural institutions in the United States roughly between the mid-1960s to the early ’80s, including: 1. The enclosure of public spaces through privatization; OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 135–138. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2008.123.1.135 by guest on 01 October 2021 136 OCTOBER 2. The dismissal of ideology critique and a concept of social totality; 3. The loss of concrete skills for mobilizing extra-parliamentary activity across a range of disciplines and interests. The latter consists of a definite set of techniques for creating sustainable political engagement. Honed in the U.S. during the civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and gay liberation movements, these skills greatly benefited from the still earlier radicalism of the 1920s and ’30s, even as the New Left rejected the centralized, hierarchical approach of the traditional Left. The loss of such practical expertise, especially after the 1970s—due in part to people dying or moving out of urban centers, some because of gentrification—explains why the unprecedented mass demonstrations just prior to the invasion of Iraq were ineffectual at stopping the onset of war. There is no doubt about the sincerity of that protest. Millions ful- filled their constitutionally guaranteed right to dissent. However, watching the paralytic shock expressed when elected representatives refused to transform their heartfelt opposition into legislative action revealed what is missing: sustainable, extra-parliamentary organizing, independent of official politics and parties, and immune to the Reagan-era liturgy of American democratic inviolability. The practical result of all three structural changes, therefore, includes the diminishment of the actual space and time for organizing and participating in political resistance (high rents, long work hours, just enough pleasurable distraction to make it all seem worthwhile); an emphasis on short-term tactics as opposed to sustainable alternatives by socially engaged artists and activists; and a shrinking emphasis on the possibility of building any long-term alternative or counter-public sphere. This in turn has led to a radically different approach to cultural politics from that of the past. But before expanding on this point let me add that there is a fourth fac- tor to consider now, one that is strictly political in nature: the self-censorship that has occurred since the passage of the U.S. Patriot Act and similar legislation aimed at limiting civil rights in the name of security (allegedly following the hor- rific events of September 11, 2001, but more likely part of a long-term neoconservative agenda). All that is required to cast a paralyzing chill over a small field like the arts is one well-publicized instance of state-sponsored intimidation. The United States Attorney General’s ongoing criminal case against Professor Steven Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble and the scientist Robert Farrell serves just such a purpose. (See http://caedefensefund.org.) Cultural resistance has not disappeared, but it has undergone a profound mutation in a very short period of time, roughly since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tactical media practitioners such as the Yes Men and Critical Art Ensemble have retooled the coalition approach of ACT UP, borrowed from such post-1968 theo- ries as those of Michel de Certeau, but also tempering the more radical urban activism of the Situationists to produce short-term interventions that do not con- front authority head-on so much as temporarily “occupy” its spaces and technologies. Organizationally speaking, such groups reject institutional develop- ment, celebrating instead decentralization and even “disorganization.” The logic Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2008.123.1.135 by guest on 01 October 2021 Questionnaire: Sholette 137 of this is clear enough, after the fall of actually existing communism political activists fear the re-imposition of centralized party politics just as much as they do capitalist hegemony. This has transformed the nature of collective practice. Gone is the Modernist notion of social planning and universal mass-man; in its place we find horizontal networks of “pro-am” (professional plus amateur) productivity “collectivized” by information technology rather than ideology. At the same time, it is impossible not to see this same flexibility, precariousness, and tacticality as corresponding to the precepts of neoliberal enterprise culture. For example, the Do It Yourself (DIY) approach gained favor among younger artists and political activists in the 1970s, becoming nearly mainstream in the ’90s, albeit in inverse proportion to the disappearance of public institutions, labor unions, and alternative or countercultural space. What is remarkable, as well as paradoxical, is that so many younger artists today see their work as a type of social or political critique, even if it is not always directly interventionist or tactical in form. The willful vague- ness of this new oppositional actor initially appears to be born as a political orphan. Yet she or he may also represent the emergence of a radical subjectivity quite different from that of the ’60s and ’70s, let alone the ’20s and ’30s. The per- ceptual distractedness that Walter Benjamin observed in moviegoers may indeed be endemic to cyberspace, but it does not follow that new technology necessarily leads to depoliticization. After all, the industrialization of labor and extremely long working hours did not prevent the ninteenth-century proletariat from imag- ining a society with different social and economic relations. Today neoliberalism, or what David Harvey describes as the geopolitics of aggressive dispossession through the return of what Marx called primitive accumulation (or what Naomi Klein terms the Shock Doctrine), is curiously similar in its effect on workers, including artists, to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capitalism. In the postwelfare state, people simply have less surplus time to divert into such things as political organizing or protest. (I have even had students tell me that along with concerns about incurring repression by government agents or police––note my comments regarding the Kurtz case above, as well as the illegal detention of pro- testors at the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2005––they also fear taking too much time away from building their careers.) The multiple wars over oil reserves and other resources, the global wave of urban gentrification, and the mechanization of leisure time do add up; they are connected. But what is markedly different today from the working conditions that gave rise to the histori- cal proletarian class-consciousness is the decentralization and outsourcing of manufacturing and the disappearance of the factory as a site of both exploitation and systematic resistance. Thus resistance takes a different path from that of the past. It moves from the industrial workplace into the post-Fordist social factory of the everyday. The return of precarious modes of labor has given rise to new forms of decentralized organizing.

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