YATES MCKEE is a PhD candidate in Art History at CUNY Cradu- ate Center, and has worked with various post-Occupy groups including Strike Debt and Clobal Ultra Luxury Faction. His writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, South Atlantic Quarterly, the Nation and Arf- STRIKE ART forum. He is coeditor of the movement magazine Tidal and the anthology Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism. He lives in New York City. Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition Yates McKee VERSOV London • New York Chapter 2 The Arts of Occupation: Zuccotti Park, Site-Specificity, and Beyond An occupation is a kind of happening, a performance piece that generates political affects. Hardt and Negri, Declaration We are coming together as bodies in alliance in the street and in the square. As bodies we suffer, we require shelter and food, and as bodies we require one another and desire one another. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and voice. We would not be here if elected officials were representing the popular will. We stand apart from the electoral process and its complicities with exploitation. We sit and stand and move and speak, as we can, as the popular will, the one that electoral democracy has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here, and remain here, enacting the phrase, “We the people.” Judith Butler, address to Zuccotti Park, October 23, 2011, spoken through the People’s Microphone The Arts of Occupation: Zuccotti Park, Site-Specificity, and Beyond 87 86 STRIKE ART took on a new life when its iconic power was turned against itself in Facing up Broadway at the north end of Bowling Green Park in Lower what would become the foundational meme of Occupy Wall Street Manhattan, there stands the monumental bronze sculpture Charging (OWS) released by Adbusters. In the famous image, a ballerina stands Bull. Measuring eight feet tall and sixteen feet long, the bull receives thousands of tourist-pilgrims every week, who line up to take their atop the sculpture in an arabesque pose, her lithe, linear figure playing picture with the iconic sculpture. They often assume comic poses and off against the lumbering bronze corpus of the bull. In the back­ gestures appropriate to the cartoonishness of the object; shots involving ground, hordes of gas-masked militants surge forward toward the viewer the hypertrophic testicles of the animal are among the most popular. The through clouds of teargas. At the top of the image, at the apex of the sculpture is reproduced as an image ad infinitum on T-shirts, postcards, ballerina’s pose, we read “What is Our One Demand?” At the bottom, and miniature replicas throughout Lower Manhattan, alongside those of against the cobblestones of Bowling Green: #OGGUPYWALLSTREET the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers, kitschily embodying the swag­ SEPTEMBER 17TH. BRING TENT. gering self-mythologization of Wall Street. Ironically, though, the sculpture was borne not from the self­ assuredness of Wall Street, but rather from the global financial crisis of 1987 enabled in part by the neoliberal policies of Reagan and continu­ ing the erosion since the 1970s of the regulatory oversights imposed on the financial system during the postwar Keynesian system. Mainstream media channeled popular outrage over the crisis to “bad apples” and “crooks” on Wall Street, while in mass culture, Oliver Stone’s indictment of Wall Street in the 1987 film of the same name would end up inadvert­ ently lending it a kind of cinematic allure in the figure of Gordon Gekko and his infamous soliloquy to “greed” as a world-historical force of crea­ tive destruction. On December 16, 1989, without official permission, a little-known and very wealthy Italian artist named Arturo Di Modica had the three- ton bronze object ceremoniously delivered to the site of the iconic Wall Street Stock Exchange as a gift intended to “celebrate the power and endurance of the American people.” Though the object was removed within twenty-four hours, it was, claimed the New York Post, “beloved by Wall Street workers and ultimately re-sited at its current location by the New York Gity Department of Parks and Recreation as a “temporary loan to the city.”^ From its first installation in 1989 to the summer of 2011, Charging Bull was thus by and large a quaint tourist attraction, a mascot for the finance industry, and a grotesque market-populist work of public art Adbusters Network, #OccupyWallStreet poster, devoted to celebrating the ethos of private profit. But in July 2011, it released as digital meme, July 2, 2011. The Arts of Occupation: Zuccotti Park, Site-Specificity, and Beyond 89 88 STRIKE ART The Adbusters image descends directly from the visual culture of the The Adbusters call to “occupy Wall Street,” however, emphasized an alterglobalization movement we discussed in the previous chapter, espe­ element that had not come to the fore in the UG system, namely, the cially the signature aesthetic device of coilaging together carnivalesque figure of the outdoor collective encampment that had captivated the absurdity—a ballerina surfing the inanimate icon of the Charging Bull— world during the massive occupation of Tahrir Square in early 2011. with those of anticapitalist militancy—throngs of gas-masked protesters Protest camps of course have a long and varied history, ranging from who seem to have been displaced from the streets of Seattle in 1999 or Resurrection Gity set up by the Givil Rights Movement in Washington, Quebec in 2001. Recalling the cover of We Are Everywhere, the image D.G., to peace camps, border camps, and climate camps staged in the evokes Emma Goldman s famous (though apocryphal) dictum, “If I can't following decades around the world.^ Tahrir took this phenomenon to a dance I don't want to be part of your revolution.” hitherto unknown scale and level of intensity. It functioned simultane­ Yet even as the image clearly channeled the legacy of Seattle, it ously as an aesthetic spectacle, a mode of physical self-defense against also resonated with images emerging from the autonomous struggles the state, a living infrastructure of social reproduction for its participants, unfolding across the world over the preceding years at the University of and a prefigurative zone of common life at odds with the oligarchic and California (UC) and in London, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Wis­ authoritarian order it was opposing. These combined functions made it consin-the Global Springtime that, the poster seemed to prophesize, the territorial nucleus of revolutionary power, what Badiou would call an would soon be returning home to roost at the symbolic epicenter of “evental site,” whose logic would be replicated and translated with differ­ the crisis.^ A crucial feature of these struggles that made them distinct ent inflections at different sites in the following year.® from the earlier alterglobalization protests was the tactic and discourse As discussed in the previous chapter, the figure of the camp had been oi occupation-a commitment to collectively seizing space (a school, a central to an important work of art from the late 2000s, namely, Ayreen factory, a square) and staying put physically rather than staging a one-off Anastas and Rene Gabri's Camp Campaign. The home base of Anastas act of protest against, for instance, a mobile trade summit. Specifically, and Gabri's practice over the prior ten years had been 16 Beaver, a collec­ the transitive injunction to “Occupy was taken from the UC struggles tively run discursive platform housed in a dingy light-industrial building of 2009, where “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” was an essen­ directly adjacent to both the Stock Exchange and the Charging Bull tial rallying cry. The more militant elements among the UC occupiers sculpture. Throughout the 2000s, 16 Beaver was an essential political combined this injunction with an analysis of communization. More crucible for New York Gity. It mediated between the left-wing tributar­ than simply a protest demanding this or that finite reform, occupation ies of the art system and academia, radical activists of various stripes and from this angle involved the blockage of official flows and functions in generations (especially of the autonomist and anarchist persuasion), order to reappropriate time, space, and resources for the reproduction of and a never-ending flow of friends and guests from around the city, the collective life against the relationships of the wage and private property. country, and the world. Many of the latter were first encountered by Thus, holding space per se is not an end in and of itself, but it provides a Anastas, Gabri, and other members of the collective such as Pedro Lasch, base of operations from which to expand and deepen the struggle beyond Malav Kanuga, Jesal Kapadia, Matt Peterson, Scott Berzofsky, and Brian its immediate site. This combined movement of occupation and com­ McGarthy during their own peripatetic travels to Europe, Asia, the Middle munization would also inform the occupations of The New School m East, and Latin America, oftentimes enabled by invitations from art New York in 2008-09, many participants in which would go on to work institutions as well as by some members' own complex diasporic connec­ within the early phase of OWS two years later (and would stage a short­ tions to places like Palestine, Armenia, Germany, Mexico, and India. 16 lived re-occupation in November 2011).'^ Beaver was thus a kind of shadow-formation to the anxious handwringing The Arts of Occupation: Zuccotti Park, Site-Specificity, and Beyond 91 90 STRIKE ART by art critics about the “nomadic” quality of the global art system at the electronic archives of 16 Beaver, Gabri and Anastas also followed their time, tactically using the latter to build a dense network of connections custom of transcribing their own notes by hand in real time.