Strike Art

Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition

Yates McKee

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784781880
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784781903
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Art & Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Artexplores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new-if internally fraught-political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other-oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action.

Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F, Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labor, debt, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of the overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that are still only beginning to ripen, at once shaking up and taking flight from the art system as we know it.

Chapter 1

Contemporary Art and the Politics
of Democracy, 1987–2011

We thus have to explore new forms of democracy, forms that are non-representative or differently representative, to discover a democracy that is adequate to our own times.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Globalization and Democracy”

In writing about the conjunction of art and politics in Occupy, a number of pre-histories could potentially be charted, starting as far back as the birth of the avant-garde in the nineteenth century and extending through to groups of the 1968 era such as the Diggers and the Art Workers’ Coalition referred to in the introduction.

However, a more proximate art-historical starting point would be the period stretching from the late 1980s to 2011 in which several generations of artists, critics, and curators in the United States devoted themselves to interrogating the politics of democracy. In this chapter I will highlight several strands of work wherein this interrogation was staged, weaving in and out of the institutions of the mainstream art system. My intention is not an exhaustive art-historical survey of the period, but rather an interested attempt to trace certain lineaments feeding directly into the advent of Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, or those uncannily anticipating it through certain political concerns and formal strategies. Periodizations of contemporary art often begin with the date of 1989, keying it to the universal world-historical event of the collapse of the Soviet Union.¹ I will begin here instead with 1987 in that some of the most relevant artistic developments for the coming decades in fact kick off in that year, feeding in turn into the post–Cold War conjuncture.

By “the politics of democracy” I do not mean simply politics as it occurs within the narrowly prescribed frame of democracy as defined for instance by the US electoral system. Rather, following the work of thinkers such as Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Hardt and Negri (all of whose thought would become prominent in artistic discourse in the 2000s), the politics of democracy here means treating the meaning of democracy itself as a matter of conflict.² What are the forms, conditions, and limits of democratic belonging? Who or what speaks in the name of the people? What is the relation of the people to the imaginary of the nation and apparatus of the state? Does “the people” remain a necessary horizon of the political, and if not, who or what replaces it? What are the democratic claims of those excluded from the reigning definition of the demos? What are the psychic and bodily coordinates of democratic citizenship? What are its aesthetic forms and affective registers? What is the relationship between the aesthetic and political senses of representation? What are the geographical scales of democracy? How might democracy be disarticulated from capitalism? Does democracy remain a viable concept at all for contemporary politics?³

Such questions came to the fore of contemporary art in late 1980s as part of a widespread dissatisfaction with democracy as defined by neoliberalism, in which free market ideology and the corporate-controlled electoral system come to hegemonize the meaning of the term, foreclosing other possibilities. This democratic discontent can of course be traced to uprisings of the 1960s. As Rosalyn Deutsche noted in her epoch-defining book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, the subsequent decades were met with an intensified attempt to police and limit what the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies called “the excess of democracy” threatening the foundations of the elite geopolitical order at a moment of crisis and restructuring for global capitalism as a whole.⁴

Deutsche’s approach to art and democracy began by analyzing the role of the art system in the gentrification of New York City in the mid-1980s. Following the fiscal crisis of the previous decade and the imposition of austerity measures, this was a period in which the class-cleansing of the city in the interests of real estate capital accelerated as New York was fashioned into a “global city” for elite consumption. Deutsche focused on the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, whose nocturnal guerilla projections of unhoused bodies onto sculptures and architectural facades of the city activated the repressed antagonisms underlying mainstream definitions of public art in terms of urban beautification and harmonious democratic consensus.⁵ Rather than provide “aesthetic-bureaucratic legitimation,” Wodiczko, invoking the Situationists, called in 1987 for “strategic challenges to the city structures and mediums that mediate our everyday perception of the world; an engagement through aesthetic-critical interruptions, infiltrations, and appropriations that question the symbolic, psychopolitical, and economic operations of the city.”⁶

Struggles against gentrification came to a head with the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988, pitting squatters, housing rights advocates, and local residents against the NYPD in a four-night pitched battle. As recounted by historian and activist Alan W. Moore, along with ongoing struggles throughout the Lower East Side against gentrification and displacement, the riots were a major crucible for anarchist culture and art in New York City as exemplified by the work of agitational illustrator Seth Tobocman and the squatted social center, gallery, and performance space ABC No Rio.⁷

Responding to these developments was Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here …, a collaborative counter-exhibition originally sited at Dia Center for the Arts in 1989.⁸ Installed in a space designed to resemble the domestic interior of a small apartment—replete with furniture—the exhibition assembled together photographs, videos, planning documents, architectural models, advertising propaganda, and activist campaign materials all pertaining to contemporary housing struggles in New York. Tactically deploying the resources and visibility provided by a mainstream art institution, If You Lived Here… was used as a temporary organizing platform connecting artists and activists from groups like Homeward Bound and the Mad Housers in a common fight against what participant Neil Smith described as the “revanchist city” of neoliberalism gaining ascendency at the time.⁹

Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here… Installed at Dia Center for the Arts, 1991.

Also developing the form of the multimedia counter-exhibition during this period was Group Material.¹⁰ The collective worked across various sites within and outside art institutions in a mode described by Brian Wallis as “an expanded notion of cultural activism” animated by an ideal of critical public pedagogy.¹¹ An exemplary project was Democracy (1987–88), a series of exhibitions, panels, and “town hall meetings” hosted, like If You Lived Here…, by the Dia Center for the Arts, which at the time was run by the uniquely progressive curator Gary Garrels. Democracy comprised four thematic sections addressing the politics of education, the politics of “cultural participation” (encompassing but not limited to art institutions), the politics of electoral democracy, and the politics of the AIDS crisis (more on which below). Beyond the particulars of the sub-exhibitions themselves, a defining characteristic of Democracy was the conceptualization of the project as a whole as a prefigurative exercise in a process of democracy otherwise foreclosed by the actually existing political system, which was then in spectacular overdrive for the 1988 elections.

Though it might seem tame from our current vantage given the proclivity on the part of contemporary art institutions for dialogical platforms and participatory events, Group Material’s staging of the “town hall meeting” situated between the fictive space of art, on the one hand, and the actuality of a collective assembly on the other created a form of what David Deitcher called at the time “social aesthetics” that would have enduring resonance in the following two decades.¹² As Deitcher pointed out, even if the figure of the town hall risked a certain nostalgia for face-to-face immediacy, Democracy in fact dovetailed with the emergence of an historic social movement in which Group Material’s stated concern with democracy as “self-representation and self-governing” was in fact unfurling in real time with life and death literally at stake: the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).

Artists were essential to ACT UP, not merely as decorators or designers, but rather as organizers and tacticians in their own right contributing to a movement culture of militant direct action and biopolitical grievance in the face of governmental neglect, cultural stigmatization, and corporate profiteering surrounding the AIDS crisis.¹³

Organizationally, ACT UP in its primary phase was an anarchist movement based in the self-empowerment on the part of people with AIDS—especially but not exclusively gay people. At the same time, ACT UP involved a dual power strategy. It fought to at once forge a radical community of mutual support and collective empowerment on its own terms, while at the same time going on the offensive with precise demands on existing institutions—including the meta-demand that people with AIDS collectively take a leading role in every facet of responses to the crisis rather than remaining objects of biopolitical management. Essential to immediate life-and-death stakes of the AIDS crisis was the question of cultivating new forms of subjectivity, with the “person with AIDS” breaking out of an isolated experience of silence, shame, and fear and becoming a collective power attuned to the political nature of affects—grief, anger, loss, but also joy, pleasure, and pride.¹⁴ Culture in a highly expansive sense was understood to be crucial to this dual process of empowering subjective transformation and targeted mobilization. As suggested by the title of the copiously illustrated play-by-play account of the first years of the movement, AIDS Demo-Graphics, in ACT UP, embodied direct action and the creation of mobile images—both for mainstream media and movement media—were inseparable.¹⁵

The opening salvo of ACT UP was a protest at the Wall Street stock exchange in March 1987 to highlight corporate profiteering from the first generation of AIDS drugs to become available on the market. The tactic used was the die-in, a theatrical model taken from the anti-nuclear movement of the early eighties wherein demonstrators use their living bodies to at once publically mourn those who have died while refusing to tolerate those deaths that seem to be inevitably forthcoming within the parameters of the status quo. The targeting of Wall Street indicated that from the beginning the immediate goals of ACT UP were set within a broader horizon of anti-capitalism, as indicated in the fake pieces of currency dropped inside the stock exchange the following year reading, “Fuck your profiteering: People are dying while you play business.” (This action was inspired in part by the tossing of dollar bills into the stock exchange in the 1960s by the Yippies, and would itself in turn inspire the use of agitational counter-currency by G.U.L.F. in the Guggenheim action described at the beginning of this book.) ¹⁶

ACT UP die-in, Wall Street Stock Exchange, September 1989 (left); (right) Gran Fury, Art Is Not Enough, poster for The Kitchen, 1988.

The position of art in ACT UP was a vexed one, as indicated in a famous poster by Gran Fury, the affinity group responsible for much of the movement’s visual culture: “With 42,000 Dead, Art Is Not Enough. Take Collective Direct Action to End the AIDS Crisis.” The injunction of the poster is complex. On the one hand, in the face of a rapidly accelerating mass epidemic “art” is insufficient, though not necessarily anathema, to addressing the crisis. It is not “enough” to make art about the crisis as an external phenomena according to conventional forms of authorship and distribution. Second, the ways in which AIDS had hitherto been addressed in the art system had largely involved the relatively comfortable activity of fundraising for private medical research (as in Elizabeth Taylor’s celebrity-based “Art Against AIDS” initiative). For art to become significant in the face of the crisis, it would thus need to leave the comfort zone of both the studio and the fundraiser and be rearticulated in the space of the street. Significantly, however, even though it issues an admonishing injunction about the insufficiency of art alone, the poster deliberately remains within the orbit of contemporary art: it was, in fact, a design commissioned by the alternative arts venue The Kitchen, and served as a calendar of events for that season’s arts programming.¹⁷ In other words, rather than dismiss art, the “art is not enough” call was meant very specifically to leverage the resources and imaginations of those committed to art, demanding that art be reinvented as a new kind of political force in which its specialized identity would be unmade in an expanded field of movement work. The poster, it might be said, was a call to “strike art” in the manner similar to the moment of Occupy we are tracking in this book.

Indeed, ACT UP involved not the death of art but the proliferation of art in an array of reiterative emblems, slogans, graphics, posters, stickers, and props—“Silence Equals Death” accompanied by the inverted pink triangle of the Nazi era being the best known—that were in turn woven into choreographed direct actions and self-organized media networks.

And yet as indicated by the example of The Kitchen, while operating in this expanded field of movement culture, artists in ACT UP in fact availed themselves of the resources and visibility of platforms within the mainstream art system on a pragmatic and tactical basis. This ranged from a “Silence=Death” window display at the New Museum, a groundbreaking special issue of October magazine, and eventually even an exhibition at the Venice Biennale targeting the reactionary response of the Catholic church to the AIDS crisis. Furthermore, alongside the intensive, accelerated agitational work of the movement, individual artists also devoted themselves to making slowed-down, contemplative works of visual poetry exploring the phenomenological and psychoanalytic dimensions of loss, mourning, and survival, such as the candy-spill sculptures of Group Material member Félix González-Torres, and the self-reflexive film essays Fast Trip, Long Drop (1994) and Habit (2000) by Gregg Bordowitz.

By the mid 1990s, ACT UP had begun to transition from a direct action movement to a more profess...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Democracy, 1987–2011
• Chapter 2: The Arts of Occupation: Zuccotti Park, Site-Specificity, and Beyond
• Chapter 3: Artists, Workers, Debtors
• Chapter 4: On Flooded Streets and Breathing-in-Common: Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, and the Arts of Decolonization
• Conclusion: The Post-Occupy Condition: Walking We Ask Questions
• Acknowledgments
• Image Credits
• Notes
• Index