What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-2, 4+5 & Endnotes]
Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 11:55PM 3 continues
Bruce Sterling at the European Graduate School, 2010; Photo ©Hendrick Speck & Paul McLean
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An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering.
I see some daylight in the general cultural situation. I was happy about the [SXSW] New Aesthetic panel, because it revealed things I had never seen. It was exciting because it touched something new, true and real.
Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are (left to right) Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev and Joseph Stalin.
The arts and sciences are, clearly, almost equally bewildered by their hardware now. The antique culture-rift of C. P. Snow doesn’t make much sense five decades later — not when sciences and the fine arts are getting identical public beatings from Lysenkoist know-nothings. Those abject talking-heads, abandoning charge of their machine-crazed economy.… Come home, artists and scientists; all is forgiven!
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- Bruce Sterling, "An Essay on the New Aesthetic" ( http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/ )
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The Zuccotti Park occupation was a dismal failure. The functioning of Wall Street was not disrupted. Occupy Wall Street never occupied Wall Street. Even Zuccotti Park was “occupied” only with the consent of the mayor of New York City, and it was cleared out the moment he withdrew that consent. In the end, no autonomous space was reclaimed. The effort to remake society by multiplying and weaving together autonomous spaces is back to Square One. Even worse, precious little progress was made during the occupation in articulating and working out what the movement is for, or how to solve the serious social and economic problems we now confront.
In light of these failures, it would be a grave mistake to try to glide unreflectively into a “Phase II” of Occupy Wall Street. It is time to think seriously about what went wrong and why it went wrong, in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Above all, I am concerned here to make clear the difference between “prefigurative politics” in the proper sense of the term and what Graeber uses the term “direct action” to mean: “acting as if you were already free” (see below). In the proper sense of the term, “prefigurative politics” refers to practices that foreshadow and anticipate a different world, a world that does not exist. “Direct action” in Graeber’s sense refers to practices that make believe that this different world already exists in embryo within the existing one. The latter notion is the one that was tested at Zuccotti Park and that failed the test.
pre•fig•u•ra•tion n.
1. The act of representing, suggesting, or imagining in advance.
2. Something that prefigures; a foreshadowing.
make–be•lieve adj.
Imaginary, pretended.
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- "The Make-Believe World of David Graeber: Reflections on the Ideology Underlying the Failed Occupation of Zuccotti Park" by Andrew Kliman
Augmented Reality documentation by Mark Skwarek (arOccupyMayDay)
[NOTE]: As I see it, the project of facilitating a new model for artistic enterprise and the phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street can be subjected to a useful mash-up, for considering purpose, application and utility, among other things. The flaws in ideologies that influenced significantly the formation of OWS are worth looking into, and the wave of "What next for Occupy?" exercises are accomplishing this, which is what must first be acknowledged. The first semi-formal evaluation phase of OWS has commenced, almost spontaneously, post-May Day, a direct action that clarifies one of the quandaries faced by Occupy: in the United States, a call for prefigurative direct action emerging from alien cultural envisioning toward manifestation "in the long term" is a doomed proposition.
Even pre-supposing the considerable accomplishments evidenced in the 1M activities, the long-term value to the movement of planned macro-interventions is apparently minimal. What was to be accomplished? Labor's re-radicalization on its own behalf did not occur. The resolution of union and immigrant worker issues wasn't fixed. The financial sector and the corporate syndicate was not cowed into reasonableness. The cops knew which side they were on, and those ties among banksters and the policy makers who order police action were, if anything, hardened. The monopoly media again managed the story to minimize the effects and reach of the protest, and almost effortlessly spun the narrative into a harmless, if annoying, nothing much, in the news cycle, 24/7/365. The trajectory of the US elections wasn't noticeably altered, and simply rebooted by a statement that the President supports gay marriage and the opposing candidate bullied gays when he was a youth, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, did the May Day action improve the internal culture and organizational strength of Occupy? Often the answer to a question like the last one isn't apparent immediately. However, I'm aware of no new initiative born of the 1M protest that indicates a revitalization of the NYCGA or its Arts & Culture working group. In fact, and here I can speak from the inside-out, the May Day action proved a polarizing situation, despite the great photos and videos, the largely peaceful and disciplined marches and gatherings, and the super-cool Guitarmy, one of a handful of really excellent collective creative happenings put together for 1M.
[NEWSWIRE]: JP Morgan/Chase just blew $2 Billion in the still barely regulated derivatives market. ( http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/jpmorgan-discloses-significant-losses-in-trading-group/ ) In a functional democracy, tonight, Jamie Dimon would not only be out of a job, he'd be behind bars.
Jamie Dimon
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Some people have claimed OWS is performance art. Hennessy explains what performance art is.
[ART ORIENTATION]: First, it's recommended that the reader take the Hennessy Youngman "Art Thoughtz" refresher course, via the free online art school he has so generously created on the internets: http://www.youtube.com/user/HennesyYoungman/videos
{Here's the early phase development of a dimensionally progressive alternative (art) program to generate 99% participation in cultural transformation traced}
>>>>+>>>>> $$ BTW, did HY 100th Monkey our Wall Street to Main Street "People's Collection/Off Your Walls" concept?? #SYNCHRONICITY! ...bout to go VIRAL! Trending: HOT! LIKE.
...Who cares! Hennessy rules! $$}{James Kalm sux balls
BYO Art Instillation (sic) @The Living Gallery
[Latest update: May 12, The Living Gallery is doing BYO Art. Here's the text:
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Inspired by an event Hennessy Youngman held, The Living Gallery will host an art opening where ANY BUSHWICK ARTIST CAN exhibit his/her work!
BRING YOUR ARTWORK!!!
I have hammer & nails, tape & pushpins
... THE OPENING WILL ALSO BE THE INSTILLATION! (sic)
Artwork will be on display until May 25th!
I wont turn away people, but ideally we want to celebrate BUSHWICK/BROOKLYN ARTISTS!!!
Come early to ensure that your artwork will be displayed. Due to wall limitations not all artwork can be exhibited. Please realize that The Living Gallery cannot be responsible for any lost, stolen, or damaged artwork. If you do not come pick up your work by May 25th it'll be thrown into the fiery pit of uncertainty.
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Fawn Potash's sample for WS2MS "People's Collection"
Maybe Bruce Stirling's New Aesthetic and Hennessy's Millennial should hook up?
....Maybe altogether with The People's Collection, AKA OFF YOUR WALLS, AKA ITSA SMALL, SMALL WORLD, AKA BYO ART...∞
Meanwhile, just for a rounded perspective, here's what the Wall Street Journal's Bret "Douchebag" Stephens thinks of Millennials, New Aesthetics and so forth: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577389750993890854.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet#articleTabs%3Darticle ...Propagandistic pundits like Stephens are so full of shit they don't know where to wipe first. There's no point to parsing the content of this generational hate mail. The content is completely lacking any. So, what does a rejoinder for a patently unserious SERIOUS lambasting need? Need we remind him his ultra-boss Murdoch is clearly another corrupt unprosecuted CEO-perp, whose crimes are ignored by the enforcers of justice, who apparently are on his dole? Need we remind him the Afghan "war" is so un-American at this point that bringing it up for anything other than the righteous expression of citizen outrage is outrageous itself? Need we point out to Stephens the systemic malpractice that is the global economy now, for which the once-periodically impressive WSJ today is nothing but a dingbat cheerleader, is currently a black hole eating the youth of the world's advanced democracies? The moralistic ooze of Stephens' screed is naught but a well-worn formulaic lie, and Stephens himself a hack liar. The amount of mental ingenuity required to pen a rant like this one is roughly equal to the amount required by a squid to eject ink from its arse. Stephens' literary art is indeed, continuing the likeness, invertebrate. If any school of squids ever could use a new aesthetic, or even any one, it would be the editorial board of WSJ. Stephens, judging from his text, is beyond hope of beauty. I wonder, were his interns paid, or slave labor? Stephens' noise is like the barking of the beasts who love the whip's handle (who have never felt its lash, but who should, in a free society). The Wall Street Journal is only a rag, anyway, like the kind one uses to wipe a dipstick (like BS - Mr. Bret Stephens). WSJ will foment an attack on a generation, by a toadie like BS, in order to call attention away from what someone like Jamie Dimon does for a living, which is rob an entire generation of a fair shot at the American Dream, so that a few anonymous suited scumbags can gamble with other people's money in the hedges, without a lynching at the end of their greedy spree. Bret (stick-up-his-ass) Stephens is not invited to the Peoples Collection.... If he shows, we'll tho'm a beat'n. Yo.
Nyssa Frank, The Living Gallery (Photos by Paul McLean)
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BYO Art, The Living Gallery
I bring up these three angles on youth-ishness (New Aesthetic/Millennials/Stephens' genJaundice), because Occupy Wall Street is emerging from a convergence of diverse cultural conditions, including the three cited. Artists and art are at the heart of a high-stakes contest of conflicting interests, at play in the metadata for occupation. How art, artists, the role of art roll into a broader discourse on the value of humanities in society is the sub-narrative. Thus, the agendas of those who would either serve as guides, witnesses or controllers, etc., for shaping of the cultural topology must be exposed and penetrated, if we hope to de-limit Occupy's capacity as a game-changer. OWS, if anything, has accomplished the impossible, in this aspect. Occupy has managed to topple entrenched metaphysical hierarchies of valuation. It has done so by being itself in public. Gauging responses to the phenomenon is no mean feat, for the matter of means and value is central the structuring of values and meaning in civilization. Soul is the root of any culture, and in this, the occupation of a place is fundamental to the programmatic growth of the appearance of subjectivity, which is what art is, and why, as Judd pointed out, art needs permanence. Art is not only a subject, as in a classroom environment. Art is the optics of human presence. As such, the Management Society will tolerate no human presence that does not reinforce the power of the master over the beast, the slave, nature, and so on. Management's insistence that meaning can only be validated by the measures of currency, a controlled substance, so to speak, is today utterly pervasive, bordering on psychotic. How else to explain the sale of "The Scream" for $120,000,000? Not only is the purchase of that timely, perfectly appropriate painting, suitable as a moral accusation, going to an anonymous bidder for that insane horde of wealth, a performative act of idolatrous desperation, it is also a rudimentary crime against humanity. This is what the command and control complex, devoted to extraction and exploitation at all costs, has come to. It is so oblivious to its own folly, that the disgrace of its behavior is lost in the rush to transmute all creation into property. No painting sells itself for the fortune paid for "The Scream." Apologists for this sort of heinous phenomenon defend the practice and profession that enables it through the faux ideologies of economic theory, mainly supply and demand. For them, a good artist is a dead one. The auction houses are art morgues that operate structurally no differently than auctions for livestock trade at a state fair, or the slave trades that were held at Wall Street in America's colonial pre-dawn.
BYO Art, The Living Gallery
The sale of a person now is recognized among civilizations generally to be an act of evil. Still, the practice continues. The sale of things animated by humanity, like "The Scream," is not only permitted, but celebrated by the culturati. This is a fundamental flaw in our society. Any new aesthetic must address this problem. The Millennial generation seems on the verge of embracing this meta-concept, which is why despicable wretches like Bret Stephens will be paid to loudly attack them "on principle," which, translated, means "to defend the abandonment of moral principle to preserve property-attached profit."
BYO Art, The Living Gallery
Slave trade is an occupation that, based on historical record, relies on assigning the slave a certain soul-lessness. The civilized man must designate the slave to be less-than-human, to be savage, to be in some aspect beyond redemption of spirit, or devoid of it, in order to rationalize what is an evil outright - the sale of a person. The categories of slavery are almost incidental, when juxtaposed with actual and total enslavement of one person to another. Wage slavery is slavery by degree, but compared to the plight of the manacled African on a ship bound for America not long ago, wage slavery is tolerable, otherwise the so-enslaved would die or kill before accepting it, yes? How else to explain wage slavery's persistence? In this aspect, the necessity of the new breed/latest iteration of half-masters (managers) who engage in the administration of the half-slave trade require the pleasant myth that slavery was abolished in order to enable the construct that permits half-slavery. Free time is a co-myth in this fabrication. Let's face it. The industrialists of today, the 21st century robber barons, will enslave everyone to the extent permissable by society.
BYO Art, The Living Gallery
...Which leads to my problems with the Marxists, anarchists and other brands of neo-protestants who would co-opt Occupy: they cannot go far enough, due to the limiting nature of coagulated ideologies divorced from the essentials of soul. Their histories are their albatrosses. Revolution disguised as realism is distribution artificially situated in a fake motion-time simulation - it barely approaches a pretense at philosophy anymore, for its functionary ordering of integrated behavior for the proper piece of the action. Replacing domination by the individual or small syndicate with domination by the collective makes no sense to art or the free person. Scrutinizing ana-thinking is similarly unsatisfying. Disabling all orders of exchange by strict opposition to directional progression over time is the celebration of entropy as a victory over wrong action.
BYO Art, The Living Gallery
What else? Using tribal societies as natural resources to be mined for precious elements is not different from mining coal, or if it is, it is only half-different. Demanding the keys to systematic production, proscribing self-ownership, for instance, is no solution. It is as sick in its own way as the ownership model it reacts to. Defining humanity by its means of production is in its dogmatic, recursive flow only for creative negotiation against force. Ultimately, we are talking only about a means for dividing the spoils of effectiveness more equitably amongst collaborators. The Other confounding most neo-protestantism, which are in fact half-epistemologies, is a refutation of all but the void as a collective incubator for individual ontology. None of the neo-prot models approaches art on its own terms, or people on ours. They cannot escape their derivative natures, as mutations of colonial procedures, promising improvements. All rely on imaginaries distorted by misinterpretations of innocence and freedom. None are willing to accept freedom and soul as anything more than literary tropes or spontaneous behaviors, to be effected differently than the Others did in half-measure, and none therefore can realize art as spiritual in nature, which is a matter of wholeness. The protestants, old and new, are strapped into binaries and refuse to be released. Time is money for both, people are equipment, and art is either forbidden or decoration for the houses of the winners. Nomads need not apply, especially if a machine can do their job.
BYO Art, The Living Gallery
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I Googled "Soul and Art" and the machine generated a lot of results (250,000,000!), and one linked me to one of the search-engine-darling inspirational quotation sites that abound on the web. Here's the quote: "Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else." (Marc Chagall) Lots of people have incorporated that quote into a cornucopia of virtual pages, most of them art-related or art-print-related. "Follow the quote" is one of my favorite web/viral phenomena. It's no wonder old school humanities professors bite their knuckles over the Internet's effect on attribution practice. That said, I have no idea whether Chagall actually said or wrote those words about soul and art, and I'm not going to spend any substantial effort to find out. I have my own history with Marc Chagall.
Best I can recall, I first encountered Chagall in the stacks of the University of Notre Dame Library, specifically the art book sections. The art bug bit me in my freshman year. One of the symptoms of the subsequent infection was my visiting the library that's famously adorned by the monolithic "Touchdown Jesus," several nights each week, to scan the hundreds of big picture books contained in that collection. What a gift!
Photo: Taylor-pics
Chagall's paintings, reproduced in many tomes, got my attention, mainly for the figuration (unorthodox) and color (brilliant), but also for something else, something like the "spiritual component," which Chagall never depicted in an ironic or coy manner. In my expanding experience with post-1900 art, this artist's representation of Jewish culture and religion was unusually direct, unapologetic, even fervent.
Chagall's "The Fiddler"
By my junior year, I had scanned nearly every art book at the ND library, and was flying People's Express to NYC on the cheap every few weeks, where I would scan the galleries and museums with the same relentlessness I had applied to the book piles. My second important exchange with Chagall happened over the course of a couple years of trudging from lower Manhattan to the 90s or so on those weekend art stomps. It seemed Chagall was all over the place. His work was ubiquitous, especially the prints, but it was the large scale stuff, like the Metropolitan Opera murals, that floored me.
The third encounter was at Hadassah, in Jerusalem, which I visited with a badly damaged finger, an injury sustained on an archeological dig in Capernaum. Chagall's stained glass windows at the children's hospital profoundly affected me at the time. I was already in an emergent moment spiritually. The spectacular windows coalesced my effervescing consciousness, and re-oriented it to art once more. The pain I was experiencing due to my mangled and infected digit only served to amplified the intensity of the encounter.
Floating in the Dead Sea, a few days after having my finger fixed at Hadassah
Over the years since, I had more direct, even hands-on, Chagall events. Cumulatively, the encounters for myself color, or inform, the online quote at the top of the paragraph, and make its sense believable. I could easily I think speak to Chagall/soul/art for an hour. He's still in my top ten all time faves. Sidenote: Chagall produced stained glass arrays and installations for cathedrals, too, and a nice one for the UN about "Peace." Isn't that nice?
But for now, let's reset the narrative array, with Marc and his life's story and art and statement on soul in the background. With Chagall as a baseline, let's chrono-transit and witness something that's Now: this year's Berlin Biennial, which I have mentioned already, because Occupy Museums is participating. Cinema verite videographer of Occupy and veteran of many other activist happenings Liza Bear emailed me a link to a Der Spiegel article on the BB, focused on its curator, Artur Zmijewski, "enemy of art."
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The jury that selected him for the Biennale, and which includes several curators, knew why it picked him: because he would design this year's show the way he creates art. His Biennale would be political, but also politically incorrect, bold and scandalous. It would address art's existential crisis as a theme and, as a result, would pose a perfectly reasonable question: What exactly is art good for anymore, other than generating high prices at auctions?
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And...
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Zmijewski says that his Biennale, like its predecessors, will also look like an art exhibition. People shouldn't have false expectations, he says. But that's precisely the trick. Many of the people he has invited are not artists at all, or they hardly see themselves as such anymore. Zmijewski is using them to occupy the art world.
He shows the art world that it is superfluous. He shows it with each work, such as the head of Christ by the Polish sculptor Miroslaw Patecki, a work that wants to be art and yet, in this environment, merely serves to illustrate the ridiculous and anachronistic nature of art. Zmijewski and his allies are behaving in more polemical and penetrating ways that the art scene is accustomed to. But this is exactly what the art scene, with its love of scandal, wanted.
One could also say that Zmijewski is declaring war on the art world, at its own request. The art world, which alternates between self-love and self-hate, will be only too glad to accept this.
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As I've said noted many times before, what other occupational concern hires people who publicly express hatred of said concern, to run important programs in that concern? Only in the art world does this shit fly. What do Zmijewski's sentiments about art tell us about why he invited OWS Occupy Museums/Arts & Labor to send representatives to participate in BB7? What does it tell us about OM & A&L that they will participate, and that 16 Beaver hosted a forum inviting feedback on the occupation of BB7? Whatever, I just received notice that revGames will be launching its version of the Olympics for 2012, and will be platforming this project via the Governor's Island summer program. For my money, the gamers will produce something infinitely more viable, something millennial, something showcasing a new aesthetic, through their interventions, relative to the other-focused occupants at work across the pond. It boils down to soul.
(Image by Paul McLean)
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(Image by Paul McLean)
The old Left long ago abandoned Soul by rhetorical necessity to protest the Church/State (military)/Commerce syndicate. The Left, in all its sinister insurrectionist moments of rebellious, dangerous ana-glory (at least, that's how the old Right perceives them), cannot seem to avoid following up every advance with abject failure. No question that this boom-bust architecture has everything to do with the tenacity of the greedheads. But at some point, the reverse wack-a-mole excuse stops holding water...
Sparrow, #m12, reading and sharing about Silence at Occupy Books, WS2MS
Resistance movements arising from the ashes, phoenix-like or hydratically, in protest, over and over, aren't sufficient anymore, to my mind. The stakes are too high, now. Being neo-protestants Adbusters, for example, could be just as easily be Churchbusters, or State-Warbusters. Whatever, Adbusters is not Occupy Wall Street, which is millennial, and an expression of the new aesthetic, although one could perhaps argue the relations between Adbusters and OWS are familial, are akin to Dr. Frankenstein and his beloved monster, although certainly not proprietary, as in master-slave dynamics. Ultimately, pattern recognition is all one needs to figure out why Occupy shouldn't listen to Adbusters HQ about co-optation. The soul of OWS depends on the movement getting past ownery claims and purity labels. Otherwise, the schematic fails not just as a negation of the Right, without any second negation. Think of photo development, and the Hegelian progression outlined in the intro to Phenomenology of the Spirit shows the way forward for Occupy, as a dimensional proposition, beyond the clinch of the old Left, aka Adbusters.
Photo: Monty Stilson
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Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge. More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth.
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BYO Art, The Living Gallery
Anti-Capitalists aren't generally self-co-identified as spiritualists, although they constantly invoke dead activists. In my own analysis, the core non-leaders of OWS and the ideologies they promote and adhere to, and push OWS to conform to, amount in the aggregate to a neo-Protestant reformation of non-believers, not a post-colonial synthesis movement provisioning individual freedom coupled with collective support and responsibility. In fact, the core leadership of OWS is the social media- or virtually-enhanced version of the academic and political left, which is the neo-liberal coin's Other side, as opposed to the Right side. Whether the neo-old-left's stated concern is labor-centric, anti-statist, or any other of a hundred oppositions, many of them legitimate in the specifics (e.g., see the very strong OWS showings against Bank of America, foreclosure practices and Monsanto, among many others, all derivative apps of old left movements, i.e., anti-Capital and pro-environment/-farmer movements, in these cases), the bottom line is that these left-conjoined Occupy protests are *against.* They are negations. They are binary. Is the movement going to be bigger than that dualistic formation? If OWS hopes to topple the 1%, it will have to be, because a 1% can come out against income inequality, bank malpractice, poor corporate governance and for a greener world, too. But let's look at how well this protestant work ethic is working for Occupy. Is Bloomberg gone, or Ray Kelly, or even pepper-spray-the-girls Bologna? Is BP kaput? Is BofA dead? Has Goldman Sachs shuttered, and Blankfein been trotted off to Rikers or Sing Sing? Did the troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan? Did the bankster takeover of Europe fail? Has Citizen's United been overturned? How are the unions faring? Is public education beating back privatization? Did Medicare/-aid for all happen? What about warrantless wiretapping? What are the stats on CEO pay, pre- and post-9-17? Has the 1% been deposed?**
Anti-Iraq War protest, Madrid, ca. 2003
... [ANALYSIS (snapshot)]
Not long after the eviction of OWS from Liberty Square on November 15, 2011, 16 Beaver Group, which has quietly served OWS as an important organizational node in downtown Manhattan, convened a week-long seminar, entitled "WELCOME TO THE NEW PARADIGM or THE CRISIS OF EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE." The description of the event defined its constituency and core mission thus: "It will involve artists, thinkers, writers, activists, occupiers, poets, programmers, workers, revolutionaries, students, debtors, laborers and laborless of all kinds into a focused yet open-ended conversation, collective research and analysis of our contemporary social-political movements / struggles." However, a scan of the offered subjects of the 16 Beaver seminar reveal nothing art-centric, and contain no reference to any spiritual direction for Occupy, or anything about its soul. Is the proposition of Occupy and its leaderless leadership that artists should be forefronted in the movement, and subsequently re-directed into other soul-less arenas? [6]
From its inception, everyone seems to want to know What Occupy is for. Perhaps more important now is what it has actually accomplished, and we can specify the inquiry to the sphere of arts and culture, just as we generalized (negative results) above in a Big Picture string of metrics. While OWS makes many assertions on an non-official official basis, about what it is for (remember the long list of Single Demands?), it is worthwhile, if one questions why the movement has failed to mobilize a large constituency in the USA, for instance, to measure OWS advocacy by its accomplishments and the means applied by Occupy to push its supposedly non-specific agenda. Let's be clear. The stakes are huge. Nearly everyone gets this. Bloomberg gets it, as the escalation of NYPD crackdowns on Occupy here indicate. Syndicates like ALEC and the US Chamber of Commerce get it, as do many other powerful lobbying organizations used to conducting their business-as-usual, influencing policy outside the bounds of public scrutiny. Even the World Economic Forum gets it, after an embarrassing media flop at its last session, caused by a few Occupy activists organizing a series of pranks at the 2012 WEF summit in Davos, resulting in the upending of one of the world's most effective propaganda machines, at least in the short-term. Obama and the other Presidential candidates get it, as do some of the richest people alive, and there is much hand-wringing in their camps over the potential of Occupy to affect their plans and ambitions. [7]
The macro effects of OWS are intertwined with micro effects as a media phenomenon, if nothing else. Any marketeer or propagandist can attest to the dimensional nature of attraction, attention and action. The array of devices, both virtual and actual, that can be used to refine and define message today in the domain of public opinion has never been more accessible to both sender and receiver, due to ubiquitous access to information afforded by mobile electronics and personal computers via the web. OWS has proved often as a movement to be savvy, responsive and effective in using a range of media to clarify its identity as such through lenses and filters that enhance the appeal of Occupy to important demographics, even when corporate monopoly media have presented skewed or biased data, or shunned Occupy altogether, at least temporarily. In the case of OWS arts and culture, the officially sanctioned identity narratives have from the inception of the movement relied on art as a foundation for the self-definition of Occupy. To a degree, this approach has contradicted the memes pushed by potent foes like News Corp, in its numerous iterations, through which the 1% management media have relentlessly sought to characterize Occupiers negatively, as dirty filthy hippies, irresponsible students, lunatics, drug addicts, rapists, violent political extremists, and democracy-haters. The utility of compositing "art" in the Occupy profile for OWS extends to a degree to the legal realm, as well. It's a funny twist, since FOX and friends as a class clearly are no lovers of art. Occupy plays both sides of the bias against the middle and comes out a winner. Art, and its romantic libertine imaginary, apparently resonates with the young the way nostalgia and hate motivate the old in America.
BYO Art, The Living Gallery
There's another wrinkle, in the sphere of law, in the domain of activist pragmatism. What is permissable as art, is often impermissable as protest (especially in Manhattan). Finally, if Occupy could mobilize the huge numbers of self-defined or credentialed artists in America, who rival the standing army of the US as a population, the boon for OWS would be massive. So, given the apparent and potential utility of art for OWS, the question is whether there is a reciprocal relationship between Occupy and art, on a utilitarian basis. How is Occupy helping art and artist, or is it? Does OWS even want to? Or would the movement rather art be something else, better suited for Occupy purposes, as envisioned by old left radicals like Adbusters, or other similarly entrenched constituencies consisting of non-artists who have long displayed a critical and moralistic superiority towards art and artists. In short, is Occupy co-opting art and artist? Brilliant thinkers like Brian Holmes [8] and Gregory Sholette seem to suggest that art [defined as or reduced to "cultural practice'] needs to be modified to better support actions against neo-liberal forces.
At the nexus site for OWS (occupywallst.org), the bio-script states, "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions." What of the "soul" of Occupy, which Adbusters asserts must be defended? Are art and soul commingled in OWS, or is Occupy a movement whose real agenda selectively applies art and soul to reinforce an ideologically specific set of objectives, the omission of which in materials available for public scrutiny permits or at least encourages the exploitation of art and artists for ends counter to the native interests of art and artists? Does the current failure of OWS to mobilize the 99% in America, even when many Americans resonate with the grievances expressed through OWS, relate to Occupy's internal conflicts or biases about what is and isn't art for the movement? What is the snag that prevents the people en masse from joining OWS in its many calls to action? Does it have something to do with the "soul" of the movement, and is there a dynamic connecting this soul through art to the objectives of OWS?
Hennessy explains how to make an art (2).
In the previous/following series of entries, I will discuss the linkages of soul, art and being for-, in relation to Occupy. The motivation for doing so is evaluation, and dimensional analysis. To recap the impetus: OWS, after months of praxis, focused on May Day actions, prioritizing concerns with worker rights and the "im/migrant" movements. Artists were actively recruited to participate through many channels, including the call2create.org website. As an indication of what (and who) OWS represents, the "leaderless" decision to direct the movement's resources into a signal event on May 1 is in many ways problematic, especially in terms of building bridges with the 99% in America. May Day is not one of this nation's shared cultural focal points on the calendar. In fact, May Day is here associated with histories that many in the US view with extreme prejudice. Is the May 1 "American Spring" drive an attempt at conversion by OWS, or at least by its core leaders and direct action groups, and if so, what are Americans being exhorted to convert to? Finally, what role is art to play in the action, and most importantly, what will be the response? If nothing else, the major Occupy May Day campaign can be construed as a prime time gambit for the soul of occupy, and art is being situated as a key component. [9]
Some people have suggested that OWS is a form of meta- or ultra-RA. Hennessy explains what that is.
I will additionally offer an alternate narrative for art and Occupy, based on the programs and practices developed through Occupy with Art, for which I have been co-organizer, since early October 2011, joining the group [formerly Occupennial] at its organizational meeting on September 26th at Liberty Square. The OwA alt.narrative arises from a distinct perspective on the role of artist, not just in a protest movement, but in society in general, especially democratic society. Whereas some in OWS Arts & Culture, like Yates McKee, emphasize the self-definition of creative participants in Occupy in terms of cultural work, OwA has engaged the question of 99% art and community through the vehicle of exposition and production, as well as through more discursive means. It remains an open question, perhaps played out on an individual scale in the field of collective enterprise, as to whether the avenues of expression and peaceable redress of grievances by the 99% can be embraced holistically within the parameters of Occupy, as it evolves over time. If Oscar Wilde is correct, then the nature of the individual and collective relations with art and soul are supremely important to the maintenance and encouragement of freedoms that exist as precursors to just society, which may or may not be equivalent to culture, as such, in the same way that the free market may not equate to democracy, using globalist-economy phenom China, now, as a significant comparative register....
[Sections 4 + 5 are only clippings at this point... 4 is contextual & 5 speaks to the motivation of the author...]
4
....In the first few weeks of OWS, the problematic commingling of art and politics in the context of protest emerged in a sequence of strategic missteps that pointed to schisms among those who advocated freedom from aesthetic hierarchy, anti-market extremism and freedom of expression. [10] The "No Comment" exhibit garnered much attention, but ended in a mess of accusations of curatorial malpractice over contract manipulation. A splinter group of anarchists occupied Artists Space, an action carried out independent of the consensus framework of OWS, which also garnered (generally negative) press, but the intervention culminated with activist removal and a disavowal by NYCGA Arts & Culture. Occupy Museums and Arts & Labor evolved from within Arts & Culture, but broke off the main body to form two OWS groups that through the present continue to carry out interventions, workshops and some direct actions. Membership crossover between these two groups is common. Joint protest actions carried out by OM and A&L show that they have refined their pursuits. OM & A&L function now as critical bodies aligned with small labor unions like Sotheby's art handlers' against New York museums like MoMA, auction houses and the like Armory and Frieze art fairs. Arts & Labor has been a disseminator of letters pointing out inequities in the art labor market, as in the A & L campaign against unpaid internships. A&L has also hosted workshops on more visionary subjects, such as The Commons and alternate economies. Neither has produced significant art projects, per se, but both have received prodigious attention from the art press.
The Puppet Guild, Music Working Group, and the Tax Dodgers (organized by Gan Golan), when considered together, illustrate a diversity of approaches and interests that for now still exist within the Occupy Arts & Culture spectrum, even though processes for garnering project approval, administering funds, and attracting volunteer support through the A&C working group are for most practical purposes defunct. Even when OWS possessed hundreds of thousands of dollars in its coffers, only a few thousands of those dollars were allocated to art projects. Endorsement by OWS and NYCGA for arts related activities arising from working groups or outside parties in support of Occupy has been limited to a narrow spectrum of undertakings that don't necessarily conform to any aesthetic, but rather adhere to strict protest-centric orthodoxy, such as David Graeber's, one of the movement's most visible "authors," core strategists and proponents. [11] The documentation of OWS in photography has been encouraged and archived, provisioned by a fluid team of movement-friendly photographers and presented centrally in conjunction with The People's Library as an online iteration, and in a now-extensive Flickr site, containing thousands of images. The documentation of OWS in these image databases recall the cycles of formation and dissolve that have attended OWS A&C. In the early months, during the actual occupation A&C served as a focal point for an assembly of medium-defined guilds. [12] The screen printing guild, for one, still survives, though most of the others have either disappeared altogether or created their own more or less self-sustaining organizations, as is the case with Occupy Design or Occuprint....
5
....The object of this text is not to critique Occupy, nor anyone associated with it. First of all, I believe critique is a failed practice, demonstrably so, especially with respect to its application to art. Certainly critique is inadequate in matters spiritual. Critique is only applicable to expressive forms situated outside the realms of spirit, instead being effective in the discourse of the abject, for example. Art, dimensionally, is a phenomenon of spirit....
Geno Rodriquez selected this video for the exhibit in Brik Gallery in WS2MS.
∞
* Fortunately, OWS attracted many people who did not fit this description, too.
^ It also should be acknowledged that the methods by which 99%-supporting activities are taking shape now are not necessarily less effective, even if they are not following the trajectory that GA proponents imagined they should. Collective action for Occupy has to some extent balkanized, along lines that do not conform to the strict, even utopian, ideals of some of the original designers of OWS working processes. In itself, the reformation of OWS post-eviction is worthy of extensive analysis and discussion, at least some of which has occurred, and much of which is undergoing systemic suppression by a spectrum of opposing interests. The fact that much of the disconnect is due simply (or complexly) with culture clash - what works in Spain's Indignados does not necessarily translate to New York City, or the US, for instance - and to pragmatic problems posed by GA methodologies, which welcome open-ended discourse. The demographic available for endless, often frustratingly ineffectual daily meetings in downtown NYC is obviously a narrow subset of the population, and not necessarily a desirable one for a high-performing movement setting out to displace the standard or status quo operating systems of the world.
** Obviously, there are also positive results, such as the CITI shareholder revolt against outlandish executive pay, which has been attributed to consciousness-raising by Occupy. It's fairly common for wise old Leftsters to point at the civil rights movement as a reference for how long systemic change takes. Occupy, as an uprising, is still in an infant stage.
[1] http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/jump.html
[2] Full disclosure: At the end of the Illuminator meeting, Ben passed out his "card," which was a coupon for a free pint of B&J ice cream. I took two, which have since been redeemed. By Adbusters extreme standards, I suppose, that indicates I've been co-opted, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. New York Super Fudge Chunk rules, and I've been eating it for years. I don't see much difference between the tactics of OWS' Kitchen and Ben's, at the point of exchange. For an account of how the OWS leaderless leadership (e.g., Marisa Holmes, cited in this article) responded to the formation of the Movement Resource Group, which included Cohen, see: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/01/from-russell-simmons-to-ben-and-jerry-the-would-be-sponsors-of-occupy-wall-street.html ...Also, the comments are very much worth scanning.
[3] Some reference points: "We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply this. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism." - Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man"
Also see: Zizek, lecture at the RSA, "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:" http://youtu.be/cvakA-DF6Hc (concluding with linkage to Wilde, at minute 27)
[4] http://artsandculture.nycga.net/statement-of-non-cooptation-draft/
[5] http://www.nycga.net/resources/statement-of-autonomy/ I attended one of the critical multi-working group discussion meetings for these docs at 60 Wall Street and argued against non-cooptation as an inherently defensive, self-victimizing position, and for freedom and fearlessness, instead.
[6] http://www.16beavergroup.org/everything/
[7] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/billionaires-occupy-davos-as-0-01-bemoan-economic-inequalities.html It's worth a Google to review the interventions of the Occupy protesters at Davos in 2012. The videos documenting the actions and interviews with the Occupiers, when juxtaposed with the powerful WEF message machine, plus the ripple-effect in the world press precipitated by Occupy WEF, yield a clear example of how the DIY tools available to activists today can unhinge even the most well-framed and -funded artificial news/corporatized media monopoly messaging systems.
[8] http://vimeo.com/26159244
[9] http://occupywallst.org/article/may-day/
[10] This article in Rolling Stone provides a good starting point. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/occupy-wall-street-art-meets-politics-in-zuccotti-park-20111014
[11] See "ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture" and THE SADNESS OF POST-WORKERISM or “ART AND IMMATERIAL LABOUR” CONFERENCE - A SORT OF REVIEW (Tate Britain, Saturday 19 January, 2008)" for an introduction to Graeber's ana-aesthetics, as such.
[12] https://artsandculture.nycga.net/network/guilds/
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Total Capitalism
by Sparrow
A little
capitalism
hurts no
one (e.g.
if I sell
you this
poem for
23¢) but
Total
Capitalism
crushes
the earth's
soul.
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