Commune plus one

By James Panero

On Occupy Wall Street & the legacy of the Paris Commune.

November 2011, for the New Criterion

[LINK]

They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame which never dies.
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir

[EXCERPT]

Occupy Wall Street is but the latest revival of a spectacle that has been performed many times before—not necessarily in the Arab Spring, which saw regimes toppled through political means, but in certain incarnations of idealistic vision that emerged out of a seventy-two-day experiment in Paris nearly a century and a half ago. Before there were the Tompkins Square Park riots, the student takeovers of 1968, or Occupy Wall Street, there was the Paris Commune of 1871.

How art propels Occupy Wall Street

By Michele Elam

November 4, 2011

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

In addition to news this week that street art from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. was being collected by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the movement's Arts and Culture Committee showcased spoken word performances and poetry readings in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

Elsewhere in the city, a group known as Occupy Museums demonstrated at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection and the New Museum protesting the corporatization of art, and the "No Comment" pop-up exhibition similarly represented itself as art inspired by the movement. Then there's the sudden popularity of anti-establishment Guy Fawkes masks, distant kin to the masked protests of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of anonymous artists who wear Gorilla masks to protest sexism.

Liar's Poker

Liar's Poker

Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation

By Brian Holmes

[05.09.04]

[Link to post on 16 Beaver Group site HERE.]

[EXCERPT]:

Basically, what I have to say here is simple: when people talk about politics in an artistic frame, they're lying. Indeed, the lies they tell are often painfully obvious, and worse is the moment when you realize that some will go forever unchallenged and take on, not the semblance of truth, but the reliability of convention. In a period like ours when the relationship to politics is one of the legitimating arguments for the very existence of public art, the tissue of lies that surrounds one when entering a museum can become so dense that it's like falling into an ancient cellar full of spider webs, and choking on them as you struggle to breathe. Now, the mere mention of this reality will make even my friends and allies in the artistic establishment rather nervous; but it is a reality nonetheless. And like most of the political realities in our democratic age, it has directly to do with the question of representation.

The Arts of Occupation

By Yates McKee

The Arts of Occupation appeared in The Nation on December 11, 2011.

[EXCERPT]

A certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm is encoded into the DNA of OWS, partly reflecting the influence of the Situationist International (SI). A group of experimental writers, urbanists and filmmakers whose work played an important role in instigating the Parisian uprising of May 1968, the SI called for artists to abandon their vocations as individual creators of luxury objects in favor of collectivized praxis. Drawing on the legacies of Dada and Surrealist collage, the Situationist principle of detournement called for the hijacking of capitalist images, objects and spaces in order to turn them against their intended meaning or function.

OCCUPOLOGY, SWARMOLOGY, WHATEVEROLOGY: the city of (dis)order versus the people’s archive

By Greg Sholette

December 14, 2011

[Published on the web at the CAA Art Journal HERE.]

Excerpt:

OWS has an odor. Its lustful, repetitious, and messy imagination is articulated not only through fat felt markers on tent flaps and recycled materials, but also on naked bodies, and on moving and dancing bodies, as well as the multicellular superorganism known as the General Assembly. Still, to describe this as an archive—or swarmchive—is to suggest that OWS is more than an accumulation of conceptual, biological, and material textures. It is also something being written, call it a promissory note, an obligation to a future reader from a place already dislocated in time (though admittedly aided by time-bending cybertechnologies like YouTube and Twitter). Not what does, but what will, the archive mean, Derrida once asked, to which he then replied: “We will only know tomorrow. Perhaps.”^[3] Tomorrow began at 1:00 a.m. on November 15 for OWS, the hour of Zuccotti Park’s brutal erasure on orders given police by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The NYPD raid seemed to express something else. Call it a repulsion toward damp, cardboardy smells, and commingled sweat, or a fear of the breathy exhalations emanating from the People’s Microphone, with its mandatory intervals of listening and hearing, and its uncanny pantomime of mechanical apparatus as if some inert thing were being jolted back to life. But perhaps most unsettling of all was the way OWS established a link with the dispossessed and discarded, a tactic Mike Davis perceptively contrasted to the university sit-ins of his generation in the 1960s.^[4] It seems that when creatives rebel, they take no hostages; they make no demands.

The Occupy Wall Street People’s Library, Zuccotti Park, October 1, 2011, prior to the police raid (photograph © the author)