Daniel Tucker works with the journal and event series AREA Chicago and is releasing a book of interviews with activist-farmers in the fall of 2010 on Chronicle Books (co-authored with Amy Franceschini). Nato Thompson is the Chief Curator at Creative Time and has a book about art and activism coming out on Autonomedia later this year. Together they have worked on several exhibitions and events, including “Town Hall Talks” – a massive interview project with socially engaged artists in Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City for the “Democracy In America” project by Creative Time in 2008. Here they discuss in general and specific terms some of the challenges and possibilities of curating and facilitating socially and politically engaged art today.

Transcript:

Daniel Tucker (DT): In the early 2000s there was a trend in institutionally sponsored art exhibits to incorporate activism as a subject in and of itself. Activist groups were displayed like artists, artist groups made art that borrowed aesthetically and conceptually from political activism. Some examples include Democracy When? (2002) at LACE in Los Angeles, Hardcore: Towards A New Activism (2003) at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and your own smaller scale example Counter Productive Industries (2000) at 1926 gallery in Chicago and later on The Interventionists (2004) at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. What do you think happened when street protest groups and tactics were activated or put on display in the exhibition space?

Nato Thompson (NT): Well, first of all. I wouldn’t necessarily agree there was a trend. It really depends on how one might measure such a thing and in comparison to what. The exhibitions you mention besides the Interventionists show I curated at MASS MoCA and the exhibition at Palais de Tokyo were all fairly small. There was a lot more movement in Western Europe but that could almost be described as a more prevalent institutional tradition over there. It is important to provide a word of caution in regards to the misleading idea that there was trend, because it assists in answer to your question. In the late 80s, there was a much more asserted trend toward political art that resulted in certain artists and collectives like Group Material, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Hans Haake, Krzystof Wodizko, Tim Rollins and KOS, having more stable art gallery lives. That is to say, the trend resulted in a paid artistic living with a specific type of result. This could not be really said of the intermittent movement of activist art practices at the early part of this decade. I’m not really put much a value judgement on that since lack of commercial success for a movement can provide certain benefits (like limited professional jealousy and divisive behavior) that can be productive. However, we must also bare in mind the trajectory of the alt-globalization movement that certainly motivated, and inspired, the spirit of art activism at the beginning of this decade. Certainly, its dissolution on US soil after 911 and the election of Bush has been absolutely crushing in terms of the prevalence of this kind of work.

So, what happened after some projects were displayed? Well, I would say that hopefully one of the functions of heightened visibility of political practice is a sort of legitimating of that kind of work. Teachers, young artists, older artists, and the curious are able to see a kind of way of participating in civic discourse that exceeds the methods they are familiar with. This type of legitimation across institutions is certainly useful in shaping the range of what people think is possible and acceptable. That type of legitimation can also go toward helping some artists get faculty work and then, perpetuate this type of thinking in their students. I wouldn’t say this happened on a large scale, but more in a limited manner.

DT : So you cite inspiration and artists getting jobs as the things that happen when these hybrid artistic-activist practices were put on display in galleries and museums. But what else happens? Lets dig a little deeper and talk about the transformative power of art. There is sometimes a critique of interventionist-inspired art shows that its just a bunch of “one-liners” when the art is decontextualized. So a project “about sweatshops” becomes the stand-in for “labor; or the third world exploitation which is fueled by first world consumption”. As an artistic project it is curated into fulfilling a distinct topical role, but often fails to be read or activated as a more multi-dimensional work. This is why I mentioned earlier that there was a pattern of talking about activism as a subject in-and-of-itself which seems to encourage this disengagement with the complexity of the work or the context in which it was intended to be shown/used/activated. Five to ten years later after most of these exhibitions I am seeing art institutions taking on much more specific conceptual frameworks such as ecological and economic crisis. Do you see this as a continuum of the counter-globalization movement-inspired interventionist art of the early 2000s? What lessons can curators in this moment learn from the more broadly defined exhibitions of last decade?

NT: So, right, of course I missed the most important part of the impact of these works being shown: that people engage with them! So to what degree is that effective? Well, I think that there are numerous strategies at work under the heading of political art practice. It is almost difficult to discuss in the abstract what any of them do. Some projects are extremely nuanced, such as the works of the group Spurse who present a cloud of information that the viewer must make their way through. Other works are elegantly simple such as Michael Rakowitz’s Parasite project which was a homeless shelter attachable to an HVAC system. I think what one of the major impacts this work can do is to say what issues are worth discussing as well as expanding the manner in which questions are discussed.

Last year in 2009, artist Jeremy Deller worked with me on a project on Iraq titled It is What it Is: Conversations about Iraq. In that work, we traveled across the United States with a car blown up in Baghdad with a US soldier and an Iraqi who had both been through the war. The point was to generate open ended discussions on the road. We had many folks from the left dissatisfied that the project wasn’t taking a side. What people failed to understand is that it isn’t just the position one takes, but sometimes, how positions are produced that has a politics. I think this type of approach can be useful when considering political based work.

In terms of a continuation of the anti-globalization movement in art, I think that a sever burn out and depression set in under Bush. Some managed to retool their work to more community concerns in the vein of what you are doing with AREA, others jumped at a more tightly constrained gallery based practice, and others gave up to get teaching gigs and start families. Ultimately, I think that as opposed to curators learning something, I wish wish wish, artists would challenge the institutions that exist in much the same manner that students have sometimes historically challenged educational institutions. One battle is to challenge the function of art in culture in a more radical way. Curators can push the boundaries, but public pressure (because none really exists anymore) would really go a long way.

DT : That’s a fascinating point about the politics of how sides or perspectives are produced. I actually think that would explain some of the interest I’ve been observing from socially engaged artists in the theories and practices of popular education and critical pedagogy from recent histories of Paulo Freire (“pedagogy of the oppressed”) and the Highlander Folk School. The field of education has given a lot more attention to the ethics associated with exchanging ideas than any art school I’ve visited. That said, I think that some of the education-inspired art works I’ve seen and heard about in recent years and even the How We Learn/Pedagogical Factory series I organized in 2007 at the Hyde Park Art Center with AREA Chicago and the Stockyard Institute veer very close to an aestheticization of the learning space and experience. Its like “learning for learning’s sake” – which is cool as a life choice, but can be odd as an institutionally-sponsored art piece. Sometimes I think, lets get over performing education and lets actually just participate in educational spaces that allow us to develop our ideas further. If there were really dynamic and low-cost educational spaces for adults to develop new skills, learn history, and practice their creative and critical thinking then I bet we would see less inspiring people feel like the only choice they have is to enter expensive universities. Of course that doesn’t address the economic motivations for going to school, but it does start to get at the cultural motives.

Related to your “making demands” comment, I was reminded of an experience I had recently representing AREA Chicago at a meeting of Chicago-area non-profits organized by the Crossroads Fund about “Non-Profits and the Economic Crisis.” After a fun popular-education role-playing style skit about foreclosures and about wealth disparity in the US, there was a panel of foundation representatives talking about how their funding was changing either related to cuts or cut-backs of their support of Chicago area culture and activism. Since I had little professional stake in the conversation I asked a representative from the MacArthur Foundation if it would be strategic for fundees (or MacArthur Foundation grant recipients) to hold a rally, do a mass call-in, or some kind of classic direct-action on their offices to demand that they maintain funding levels at all costs. Now this felt a bit absurd to me because I would be the first one to criticize non-profits for being overly dependent on this foundation money which is amazingly interdependent with the health of the financial sector. How people from cultural and political non-profits have managed to convince themselves that was a stable ground to build organizations on is beyond me. But I asked the question out of genuine curiosity and also because I felt there were people in the room who were at risk of loosing their jobs because of the elimination of certain grant programs by foundations that were in the room. I had no idea what they would say, but the representative simply said that any kind of direct action would be ineffective and that that’s simply not how foundations work. He went on to say that anyone worried about the impact of cuts to grant programs on their organizations should try to set up a meeting with him personally. This reminded me of another reason its crazy that so much culture and politics from the Left is wrapped up in financialized foundation money – that its totally undemocratic.

To the same extent, I would argue that most museums and arts organizations are too. They are not designed internally or externally to respond to the demands of constituencies except funders. Non-profits just don’t work that way for the most part, unless they have affordable and democratic membership structure. But even museums that have members are not designed internally to respond to member demands about the direction of the institution. Which makes me think that its a bit pointless to encourage people to go knocking on the door of museums or art institutions making demands. It would be more appropriate if substantial percentages of their funding is public or if they are entirely public – because then everyone has a stake in the distribution of those public resources. In most cases art institutions are more beholden to their board and their funders than their audiences. Sure we could do boycotts to withhold admission fees in some cases, which might make a difference – but if we are talking about just getting them to make more relevant programming then it might seem questionable to try to shut them down and prevent them from doing any programming.

What kind of public pressure would be strategic given these conditions I describe if an audience really wanted an arts institution to direct its energies in new or different ways?

NT: While I agree with some of you of what you say Daniel, I think it is important to bare in in mind the Machiavellian nature of producing social change in the country. How did arts organizations become dependent on foundation money? Because people and organizations become dependent on the forms of cash that allow them to survive. The ones that tend to survive longest and at times, have impact, are the ones that are at the same times, most regressively dependent on their cash. It is a paradox of operating in a system of unequal distribution of power and resources. It is of course hardly ideal. Nonetheless, non-profits still have a mission statement and while you might think they are solely responsible to their board and funders, they are also dependent on the validity of their mission. You might think that challenging organizations based on their mission is a naive approach, but I am convinced that it would raise the stakes of debate. We must take seriously the material infrastructures that produce the conditions of perception. They are not just pointless cultural spaces, but massive shapers of what people perceive as valid concerns and aesthetics.

I too have been very interested in Paolo Freire and the idea of radical pedagogy as a model for considering the power of aesthetic gestures. There is room for lots of models of participation. You call it “performing” education which has the ring of a sort of inauthentic education. There are certainly no shortage of artists approaching the world in a sort of manner in which they arrive at something that already has a long history. They could say, “I have this art process that is non-hierarchical and people share their experiences in the world and we learn based on each others knowledge sets.” And then, you can’t help by reacting that what the artist has arrived at is people talking to each other. Not particularly ground breaking but I suppose a nice thing overall.

Nonetheless, this basic form of personal exchange can feel fetishized and alienated when placed in an art context particularly if you feel that the placing in this context denotes a certain underlying social capital generating intention. This skepticism doesn’t exist solely in the realm of art but in all the fields of cultural production which leads to the gut instinct in grounding everything in long=term “real” forms. The fact is, this desire to ground things stems from a national paranoia of social capital and in-authenticity that permeates our perception of all things ambiguous.

DT: How can curators support the creation of authentic and grounded culture that truly aspires to transform social relations?

NT: It feels awkward to single out the curatorial role doesn’t it. It is such a team effort so I guess one would have to caution that curatorial projects must be enacted within a multi-front production of meaning. In the curatorial field, one operates in the field of legitimizing certain projects as well as introducing people to new methods of cultural production. Supporting artists with an active critique as well as methods that produce possibilities is clearly a good idea. I would suggest operating with an analysis of capital and its effects on aesthetics in mind and not being afraid to deploy that is useful as well.
DT: Since part of the role of the curator is to introduce audiences to culture and ideas they find meaningful, lets conclude by mentioning a few projects we think do exactly what you describe: operate with an analysis of how capitalism structures social, economic and political life and explore ideas that point towards other futures.

The most inspiring work I’ve seen is the work of the Croatian curatorial collective What, how and for Whom? This group really strategically uses the exhibition format (and the standard accompanying lecture series and exhibition catalog) to really pursue ambitious and rigorous research questions at the intersections of art and politics. As opposed to some of the relational art that I was criticizing earlier for being insincere, they actually tend to focus on presenting work that was made for exhibition (as opposed to participation). Their larger group exhibitions “What, How and for Whom, on the occasion of the 152nd Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto”, “Collective Creativity” and “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” have all used the exhibition format to strategically address the history and culture and possible overcoming of capitalism.

What have you seen that has really stirred you or informed your work?

NT: Lately, I am really inspired by specific practices by artists and collectives whose work really pushes into the realm of reality. That is, they take their task seriously. The ARTWORK newspaper that Temporary Services put out was really quite inspiring. I am also enjoying the productivity of the group FEAST based in Brooklyn who basically produce artist grants through dinners. Recently, the artist Tania Bruguera said something to me that really inspired me. She said, “I don’t like a political art that points at things. I want to be the thing.” I think this movement toward the production of models and actual existing phenomena, is an incredible opportunity to think about cultural production. Working with Paul Chan in New Orleans certainly inspired how I think about community based work and the power of ambiguous gestures coupled with basic grassroots organizing. They can be quite inspiring together.

The Myth of School Choice: Interview with Chicago Public School teachers Jesse Senechal and Maura Nugent

AREA Dialogue: Artists Working on Prison Issues
a discussion between Dan S. Wang, Daniel Tucker, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Marc Fischer

When Art Scenes Say We: Interview with Pilsen Open Studios

Interview with Jamie Kalven/The View from the Ground 

A short version originally published in Clamor Magazine Issue #31 in 2005, and then in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #4, Manifesta, and CASAzine.

Imagine a three story media production studio that appears for one weekend, brings hundreds of queer and feminist independent media producers together for the video taping and staging of their own “television shows,” talk shows, historical reenactments and skill-sharing workshops. In October, Pilot TV did just this by creating a unique space for collaboration, asking questions and building community in a wonderful and experimental temporary autonomous television studio.

PILOT TV is a hybrid activist convergence taking the form of a do-it-yourself television studio. We invite you to take part in 4 days and nights of participatory, creative problem-solving to rethink how we “stage” protest. Help us turn this three-story Chicago building into a fully functioning Hollywood studio, replete with fantastical sets, collaborative crews, and improvised madness.

Stage a panel discussion as a talk show, lead a workshop as a cooking show, get behind a camera, sew a costume, party all night, or just show up and get involved in the conversation. PILOT will be an open-ended space for those of us involved in the global anticapitalist movement to come together in sweat-space, build momentum, and strategize our biopolitical resistance on (and off) camera.

As the last vestiges of public space, natural resources, and community-control are bought-off, our bodies will continue to be the final line in the struggle for autonomy. Join us at the PILOT laboratory for 4 days of fleshy resistance, aesthetic experiments and tactical performance! Trespass the corporate control of media with nomadic TV, pirate radio broadcasts, and guerrilla drive-in screenings! Enjoy parties, community meals, and do things on camera that you could never do legally in real life!

–From the call for participation disseminated last summer.

Daniel- So where did the idea for Pilot come from?

Emily- Well, in initial conversations between another organizer, James Tsang, and I, we kept throwing around this word, this idea of “Transfeminism.” We were excited that it had no set definition and thought it might have some possibility in terms of encompassing a wide variety of new feminist concerns (and old concerns as well, like the idea that biology shouldn’t control your destiny…) Our conversations about defining transfeminism quickly multiplied into all these other slogans and exclamations of our desires for “Body Flight!” and “Feminist Trespass!” against biopolitical control and capitalism. Our basic idea was that we should work out these questions with our peers in a productive, performative, open-ended space. It eventually was settled that we would call people from across the continent to come and take part in a weekend of collaborations producing feminist television ‘pilots’, which would then be edited, compiled, and redistributed back to all participants so they could distribute them on their local public access channels, schools, or microcinemas wherever they live. This would also have the effect of building a new network of anticapitalist transexuals, queers, and feminist media producers for possible future action.

D- Can you mention some of the models, other events and projects that Pilot was inspired by?

E- Pilot was moved to build a horizontal production space that could feed into, and in some ways differ, from the incredible horizontal distribution networks created by the global Indymedia movement. We were inspired by projects like DIVA TV, Deep Dish and Paper Tiger, as well as lesser known histories of queer, feminist, and collective media activism such as the Videofreex and Raindance Corporation. In addition to those influences, we decided that Pilot should take the best aspects of a protest convergence center and a Hollywood tv studio.

The thing which is so exciting about these convergence/hub spaces that develop during large protests is that they become these participatory sweat-spaces where all sorts of interactions are possible and are activated just by filling a room with people, resources, and passions. We imagined that this potential for collective self-realization would be multiplied if we threw the variables of a TV studio (sets, props, cameras) into the mix. I find often that the experience of engaging in a convergence center is a lot more meaningful, both personally and politically, than the foregrounded “protest” itself. These are places where people are coming together, teaching each other, sharing workshops and food, housing each other and practicing direct democracy..

D- Another element in the Call for Participation mentioned that Pilot
was an event to rethink how we (as activists) “stage protest.” How do
we stage protest? How can an experimental event format like Pilot inform how we protest?

E- Looking at protest as something that is “staged” as opposed to natural allows you to be strategic in how you interrogate the meaning and effectiveness of a collective action. Consider that “demonstrations” are just that; mass performances where we demonstrate this fairly scripted scenario where people march, hold signs, reach catharsis, scuffle with police, hold candles, etc. In fact, this performance is so well-scripted that police agencies often ‘rehearse’ it, casting undercovers in our roles, and compensating for any ‘improvising’ we may try to do. [For web version, this could link to this great mpeg video of Chicago Police performing protesters on the news]

Clearly what needs to happen is total rethinking of the project of social protest.. and what we do with the agency of collectives. The premise during Pilot was to make this performative nature transparent in order to open it up for poetic, aesthetic, and practical restaging. We shared a really wide array of possibilities with each other, from direct political interventions like the Women on Waves pirate abortion ship to the intimate performance of John and Yoko’s “Bed-In” against the war in Vietnam.

D- There were more than 35 different “shows” that were taped during the weekend including a talk show called “Feeling good about feeling bad” which focused on the experience of political depression, a performative lecture by the Society for Biological Insurgents, and a genderqueer erotic remake of the 1925 Eisenstein film “Battleship Potemkin.” Considering all of the kinds of shows that happened during the weekend, what were people trying to figure out?

E- We were trying to educate each other about the incredibly rich history of feminist media activism, and some of the early utopian proposals for what video and television might be. The popular meaning of feminism has been whittled down to these very narrow clichés, but in fact it is a set of essential tools for ethical social practice and resistance to patriarchy, hierarchy, and capitalism. As far as trans-feminism relating to media democratization, we didn’t privilege either one as a concern. We saw them as coextensive and interdependent struggles. I guess it is on this level that feminism most strongly informs anticapitalist movement today. Our concern during the weekend was about doing activism from the level of the body up. Starting with how we meet our basic needs for food or healthcare, up to things like how we resist oppressions based on race, citizenship, gender, or sexuality, our position as laborers and consumers in the global economy, the importance of feelings, the bodies made up by our families, communities, and cities.

D- The founding document that you sent out read, “Calling all
trans-activists, women, queers, male feminists, media activists,
intersexed hackers, radical educators, genderchangers, direct-actors,
performance artists, anti-racists, mothers, documentarians, prop
collectors, youth video collectives, squatters, fence-climbers,
cyber-feminists, urban farmers, prison abolitionists, women’s
health-care providers, all-girl graffiti crews, resistant bodies and
trespassers of all kinds !!! Did that happen?

E- Well I am not sure if there were actually any intersexed
individuals who were also “hackers”, but basically yes. It felt unlike
any other activist convergence or media context I’ve ever been in, in
the sense that the majority of people participating and coordinating
technology were all women, or had at one point been a woman, or were
becoming women!

D- So you have talked about the ways in which Pilot responded to the
conference and protest models of social space, but what about the
Hollywood influence? When I rode my bike down to Bridgeport (the
neighborhood in Chicago where Pilot took place), I came across a huge
sign on the hill by the highway reading “PILOTWOOD.” Hollywood is a
pretty messed up place in a lot of ways, how did it serve as
inspiration?

E- Well, it’s inspiring in the sense that there is so much symbolic
wealth there! As a LA native I really think people need to be
fucking with the spatial referents remaining in Hollywood, you know,
like staging takeovers and sit-ins at news stations, or doing direct
actions in the guise of a movie shoot. In terms of Pilot, the main
thing we were appropriating was the Fordist vertical-integration
model of media production, where everything happens “in-house”.
While production has been decentralized incredibly, there is still this
phenomena where tons of skilled individuals with cameras, lights, scripts,
and makeup will come together into one building in the morning and
at the end of the day a television show will come out. For Pilot we
borrowed this myth of the Hollywood studio and got rid of the
unnecessary hierarchical divisions between producers, directors,
actors, and audience members.

One of the problems we encountered was that there just wasn’t enough set up and breakdown time for people to shoot 9 TV shows a day, even with the three sets we had. Because of this there wasn’t enough time for the education of people with less technical expertise, so hierarchies of knowledge were set up due to a sped-up production schedule. Some of the problems at Pilot can be worked out in future events. And there did seem to be a big interest on the part of participants at making that happen. Maybe it will turn into a more permanent studio, or possibly a mobile production house like the soviet cinema trains.

D- In terms of the actual productive capabilities of Pilot, it would be helpful if you could elaborate on the different ways in which resources were pooled and technology was acquired. Did Pilot have fundraisers or grants?

E- No, we didn’t have any grants but we raised maybe a hundred bucks and built community prior to the event with a call-out zine and CD, conversations, show-and-tells, and a weekly speakeasy restaurant that we ran out of various apartments called the Secret Café. Quite a bit of the A/V equipment was acquired through a parasitic technique where individuals with access privileges at jobs or art schools worked together to leverage large chunks of equipment for everyone during the weekend. Meanwhile, everyone who came contributed some kind of resource to the pool, weather it was their construction skills or their DV camera or their wig collection.

D- And in the end?

E- Pilot proved that it is possible build a TV studio without ANY money whatsoever, that with self-organization and collective resource sharing we can build alternative infrastructures that are equally as fantastic and sustainable as anything made for the traditional capitalist economy! All in all, the weekend was an incredibly packed and complex experience. It was marked by lots of improvisation, pleasure, dialogue, public sex, failure, creative television production, skill sharing, and countless new relationships. I can’t speak for the rest of the Pilot participants, but I know I experienced community the way I would like it to be everyday; queer as fuck, and experimenting together …for all the trespassing to come.

Please see www.pilotchicago.org for more information or to get involved in the post-production efforts.

About the authors:
Emily Forman was one of 25 Pilot co-plotters and has been deeply involved in collaborations and other organizing efforts ranging from the Department of Space and Land Reclamation campaigns to the Autonomous Territories of Chicago. She is always down to work on projects that sound excessive and impossible! emily@counterproductiveindustries.com

Daniel Tucker is an artist and activist living in Chicago who is generally interested in art that happens in streets. He was one of over 100 participants in the Pilot TV project last October. Tucker is also initiating an independent research project about “self organized” group process and organizational structures. daniel@counterproductiveindustries.com