dOCUMENTA (13) GEHE ZUR DEUTSCHEN VERSION
newsletter@documenta.de
AND AND AND / Event 10 / Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street / New
York / Occupation began September 17, 2011 – ongoing
dOCUMENTA (13)
The big island formed a kind of alien territory – you might say that
its chief function was to serve as generator of synthetic desire.
AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which will use the time
between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 to consider with individuals
and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today
and the constituent publics or communities which could be addressed.
The series of interventions, situations, and occurrences entitled AND
AND AND are part of dOCUMENTA (13) and will compose a map of emergent
positions, concerns, and possible points of solidarity.
For the tenth event, AND AND AND returns to the United States in
solidarity with the Occupation of Wall Street.
As a part of their effort to interrogate and diversify the mode of
communication of the dOCUMENTA (13) press office, they have asked us
to post below their letter to the General Assembly and Affinity Groups
of Occupy Wall Street.
Date: Occupation Began September 17, 2011 – ongoing
Country: U.S.A.
City: New York
Location: 40° 42'34" N, 74° 00'41" W
Address: Liberty Plaza (For further information contact
projects@andandand.org )
dOCUMENTA (13) is not responsible for the views or factual claims
expressed by the artists and artworks it presents.
www.nycga.cc
www.documenta.de
www.andandand.org
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To the General Assembly and Affinity Groups of Occupy Wall Street,
14 months ago, a group based in New York, on Beaver Street, a few
blocks south of your occupation sought inspiration and new cultural
forms by visiting the US Social Forum. This trip into one of the nodes
of contemporary social movements was not just symbolic. Pulsing
through this journey to Detroit, a site which encapsulates the
apocalypse and abandonment awaiting anyone who believes capitalism and
our planet can both survive this crisis, was a question which asked
where does and how can art reside within social movements.
2011 has brought us into a new era and we have tried to look around
us. Those who believed that change will only come from without have
been shown that even those working inside this machine are ready to
revolt. How better to understand phenomena such as Wikileaks and all
of those who have risked their lives to reveal that at many scales,
the systems we inhabit are corrupt. Then the revolutions in Tunisia
and Egypt were a call that we have truly entered another epoch. And
those who stand against the emancipatory struggles resisting a global
mafia, that has sought to privatize and financialize everything from
our homes to the wheat in our bread, stand against history.
Left to a previous era are the suicides of 'martyrdom' operations
which revealed their impotency (in confronting racism, poverty,
inequality and new enclosures) by only emboldening a worldwide
security state, armed and ready to build new walls and designate any
resistance to its rule as terrorism. This era has brought us the
convergence of bodies that fight not in the name of any afterlife, but
for life here and now. What else could one expect when the basic
subsistence of millions is daily exposed to the fate of a senseless
pseudo-market, which has become the playpen of bloated vampires who go
by names like 'hedge fund manager' 'billionaire investor' or 'chief
executive officer.’
Those same vampires have held up an untenable equation to us:
Privatize gains yet socialize losses.
A revolutionary wild fire has spread from Libya, Syria, Bahrain,
Yemen, Jordan, Occupied Palestine, even to Israel. The sparks have
spread to Portugal, Greece, Spain, back to Greece again and to the
streets of London. Now they have landed in yet another one of the
capitals of capital, maybe THE symbolic capital of this financial
mafia, Wall Street. In all of these sites, we have heard different
variations of ENOUGH.
And you have put a number to this: ‘We are the 99%.’ And you have put
a number on this: the ‘the 1%.’ You have used every means available to
find a language to utter these words in a process that gives potential
meaning to democracy. As opposed to the false oppositions between
parties who vie for the power to govern how the ship should sink or
the train should crash: you are asking to stop the train or bring the
ship to shore. We need to change our coordinates: the numbers don’t
add up, and the equations seem to always miss the most elemental of
things.
Your lack of demands acknowledges the multiplicity of demands and
commands that our imaginaries yield to daily. Your lack of demands
leaves space for a discussion to emerge and for ideas to grow through
a common time. Your lack of demands refuse to recognize that there is
anyone manning the ship other than abstract algorithms and economic
laws which miraculously always seem to benefit only the 1%.
Thus your hand-made placards, your communiqué's, and pamphlets are not
simply a call to a sovereign pleading for new privileges, rights or
protections. They are beacons of hope, of love, of refusal, of
solidarity, poetry for a multitude to construct a common space in one
of the centers of Empire and to rethink what a common horizon could
become. Our forests, our water, our air, our soil, our seas are our
commons. Our labor, our ideas, our words, our relations are our
commons. These cannot belong either to a state or to private
enterprise, as they cannot be contained by any border nor controlled
by any single entity; they are the basic components of life. Yet, what
we have been asked to accept as our common destiny has been toxic debt
and toxic waste.
Joseph Beuys once claimed that everyone is an artist. And Robert
Filliou once asserted that art is that which makes life more
interesting than art. In these and many other terms, we can understand
you as artists. But we would like to add another proposition to these
statements: art can also be that burst of creation which does not
properly belong inside the domain in which it first emerges. And
though we are clear that, what you and the millions behind you and
with you, from Tunis to Cairo from Athens to Madrid, are doing is
politics; we also see these actions as a deterritorialization of the
politics we knew over these last decades.
We have heard of efforts to bring artists to Wall Street in the name
of an Occupenial. While we support all efforts to bring attention and
legitimate your undertaking, we believe that we must not miss this
opportunity to recognize the artists and artistry within this emergent
movement. Art is not outside or separate from this movement, it is
taking place each day you persist to build this common space/time.
We should not abandon or overlook what this moment of history calls
from us. We don't need recognizable artistic names to add legitimacy
to this movement, we need the multitudes, the whatever singularities,
the dark matter, the hackers, the day laborers, the 'service
providers', the precariat, the cognitariat, the caretakers, the
general intelligence that is and has been cultivated across multiple
virtual, material and invisible networks- to translate their specific
know-how and know-what into political action.
How to translate this massive collective and common intelligence into
political action? This has been a critical question of this young
century. The nascent processes taking shape globally, which you are a
part of, are an attempt at an answer. The art that aspires to become
political, especially in moments of upheaval, must have the capacity,
awareness and grace to become imperceptible, become part of a
movement.
In a lecture on February 22, 1969 Michel Foucault, concluded his
remarks on the ‘Author Function’ by speculating that at the very
moment when our society would be in the process of changing, the
author function would disappear, and invoking Samuel Beckett,
concluded by asking “What difference does it make who is speaking?”
Today anonymity calls us out of a tyranny of naming, which runs the
risk of subsuming every political action or statement into someone’s
property or a spectacular game for attention. And all of you, who have
anonymously and collectively plastered with texts and occupied the
streets of Tunis, Athens, Madrid, Cairo, London, New York and beyond
have introduced a new game to politics. No authors for this movement
and no leaders. And whatever new rules belong to this game remain to
be explored. Certainly, the old tricks of trying to subsume or reduce
molecular processes to individuals or parties will have no place here.
This is not solely a game of appearances, but also of consequences.
And the most significant political actors as well as artists of this
new century recognize this fact. The fate of a planet and all forms of
life and culture which inhabit it, hang in the balance.
We remain inspired by your ability to spread across continents and
build up the consistency of a new socio-cultural-political movement.
And if politics has an aesthetics then you are the aestheticians of an
emergent politics. And thus, a potent contributor to an emergent force
not only in the politics, but also the political art of this new
century.
In solidarity and singularity and multiplicity,
and … and … and …
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 05:28AM 
Here is the current look of Bat Haus, a co-working space and community nexus in Bushwick.[FROM THE BAT HAUS BLOG]:
