Interview

Indirect Action: Questioning Neo-Situationism

by Yates McKee

The phrase “active spaces” is ambivalent: it implies on the one hand that spaces are endowed with some kind of power to act or to generate effects. Yet it also suggests that spaces in fact need to be activated by something other than themselves, and that without this constitutive activity they would remain in some sense static, hollow, or lifeless. This ambivalence is a major concern for the discourse of relational aesthetics, which claims to overcome the position of passivity supposedly assigned to audiences by traditional artistic spaces. It seeks to determine how a space might exhibit art without foreclosing the agency of its audience through a rigidly determinate program. Notoriously, the typical solution is for a curator to invite artists into a space in order to catalyze open-ended exchanges and events whose realization depends on the participatory interaction of the audience. From this perspective, an “active space” would be a space that acts to create the conditions of possibility for its own unpredictable activation by artists and audiences, which in some cases may exceed the space of the gallery as conventionally conceived.

Rikrit Tiravanija activating space

Claire Bishop has recently interrogated the claims of democratization made for this model, charging Nicolas Bourriaud as a formalist in that he posits the generic principles of open-endedness and participation as ends in and of themselves, failing to attend to what she calls the “quality” of the activities catalyzed by an artist such Rikrit Tiravanija: “what Tiravanija cooks, how and for whom are less important to Bourriaud than the fact that he gives away the results for free.”1 This results in a claim for social engagement unburdened by political specificity and institutional self-criticality that “rest[s] too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and community as immanent togetherness.”2

While Bishop’s critique has proven crucial in renewing a debate about the status of political claims in contemporary art, the scope of her insights is limited to figures operative well within the official circuits of the international artworld. She thus fails to register the emergence of a powerful neo-situationist impulse on the part of many young artists, critics and curators to “realize art by abolishing it” through a relocation of their practice within the expanded networks of activist counter-publicity that have proliferated over the past decade in tandem with the counter-globalization and antiwar movements.

We Are Everywhere (Verso 2003)

Technically enabled by the internet but by no means confined to cyberspace, the networks in question are often claimed to actualize the formal principles invoked so vacuously by Bourriaud, such as collaborative self-organized production, de-commodified distribution, horizontal dialogue, festive participation, and programmatic open-endedness. Whereas Bourriaud looks to these principles to compensate for a bleak landscape of post-political ennui, groups such as the Notes From Nowhere collective resituate them at the heart what they call “the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism,” a project of political, economic, and cultural democratization that challenges the neoliberal mantra “There is No Alternative” with the utopian imperative “Another World is Possible.” 3

Artwurl.ogs’s concern with “active spaces” responds to this post-Bourriaud conjuncture, in which the specificity of art appears to dissolve into an expanded field of what the editors refer to as “politically effective cultural production.” Writing in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 3, Nato Thompson marks this shift of criteria when he writes “The question is not ‘is it art?’ but more importantly ‘what does it do?’”4 If the term “art” survives this shift, it is primarily to be used on a tactical, case-by-case basis in light of the institutional support and public visibility it can sometimes provide for “interventionist” practices, whose raison d’etre is “the creative disruption of everyday life.” Thompson’s The Interventionists should be recognized as the first major exhibition in the United States to register and formalize the this impulse in contemporary art, which responds to “the increasing privatization of culture in the form of intellectual copyright and in the shrinkage, policing and control of public space.”5 The practices in question “trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice,” yet they “don't preach or proselytize; they give us the tools to form our own opinions and create our own political actions.” Rather than establish a fixed, overarching ideological program, the challenge for an exhibition such as The Interventionists is to act as a flexible membrane through which an audience may encounter works in such a way that their own potential to act is opened up, exchanged with others, and eventually actualized in the domain of everyday life.

Recalling Debord’s remark that “that which changes our manner of seeing the street is more important than that which changes our way of seeing a painting,” Thompson writes “The streets have long embodied the public sphere: a space where the entire citizenry can participate democratically and freely. Most political artists desire to reach the general public, and so the streets are their most natural field of action.” The exhibition does not claim to substitute for this “field of action,”6 but presents itself as one tactical node in what Thompson calls the “infrastructures of resonance” through which activities such as street demonstrations might be conceived and coordinated.

This is important to emphasize in order to counter the predictable, cynical charge that an exhibition such as The Interventionists simply neutralizes activist practices by removing them from their proper space in the street, immobilizing their material use-value in the static confines of the gallery. Of course it is always important to remain vigilant about the capacity of institutions to reinscribe oppositional practices as mere fashion or worse—consider the reactionary frame given to the work of two Interventionist artists, Michael Rakowitz and Lucy Orta, in MoMa’s military-humanitarian exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk.7 The problem is not Thompson’s good faith attempt to navigate between the dynamic fluidity of the street and the limitations of an established art space. Rather, what I want to question is the way in which Thompson, along with other neo-situationist such as Notes From Nowhere, have posited the space of the street as the exemplary figure of active subjectivity, public immediacy, and political effectivity from which artistic practices should take their measure in the final instance. My point is not to dismiss the street as a “field of action” but to consider how artistic practices might work to unsettle the space and time of “action” itself, which for neo-situationism is typically thought in terms of presence. As Thompson writes, “Instead of representing politics (whether through language or visual imagery) [interventionists]...enter physically; that is, they place their work into the heart of the political situation itself.”8 While Thompson is correct to question of model of art that would treat “politics” as a discreet entity or iconic theme, he implies that “representation” is something that is inessential to the material ground of “the political situation itself.” When he claims that interventionist practices are characterized by “a refusal to restrict their practice to mere representation” and that it “‘presents’ rather than ‘represents’”9 Thompson dismisses the work of critical postmodernism, which drew attention to the fundamental role played by linguistic and visual relationships in the constitution of subjectivity and space alike. Rather than “merely” mediate an underlying reality known in advance, critics such as Rosalyn Deutsche have tirelessly argued that it is only in representation that the boundaries of what counts as a “political situation” and who counts as a political subject are marked to begin with. In this respect, there is no “political situation itself”—we might even say that it only in ceasing to be itself that a situation can become political.10

Spaces are complicated assemblages of architectural, economic, discursive and administrative forces which present curators with different limitations and tactical possibilities in each case. Thus there cannot be any golden rule for curators aspiring to create what artwurl.org “active spaces” and to “affect a larger social fabric.” It is precisely because spaces are always already entangled with the “social fabric” in unforeseeable ways that curators should not take the meaning of activism for granted. The Interventionists exhibition itself was a rather modest detournement of a mainstream museum which became, involuntarily, a highly active node of conflict with the advent of the federal case against Steve Kurtz. Yet the multilayered institutional, organizational, legal, financial and media work involved in this conflict belies the politics of immediacy posited by Thompson in his influential catalogue essay, which provides the epigraph for this edition of artwurl.org.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, from Landmark (footprints)
(2001)

As a counterpoint, I would like to consider a photograph by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. While their practice bears certain affinities with interventionism, they insist on working through formal aesthetic problems in a manner that complicates the supposed shift from artistic "representation" to activist "presentation." The photograph in question is an investigation of the indexical structure of photography itself. This investigation proceeds by way of the vestige, which is to say, the remains or traces of something that has come to pass—a trail of footprints (vestigium) impressed in the precarious medium of sand. Rather than evidence of generically human activity, these frozen, photographically displaced prints are themselves marked by a range of linguistic and pictographic marks, calling out to be read while dissolving from legibility. Marked marks, they are suspended between inscription and erasure, appearance and disappearance, memory and oblivion, preservation and destruction—a set of terms that take on urgent significance in the context of Vieques, a bomb-scarred, ecologically contaminated island off of Puerto Rico that was used by the U.S. Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 until 2003. In fact, the photograph is one of a series called Landmark (footprints) (2001) that emerged out of a tactical collaboration with a civil disobedience campaign calling for the Navy to vacate the island: activists were invited to design protest graphics, which the artists then had mechanically engraved onto specially designed rubber shoe-soles that could be attached to normal footwear; with each step taken into the restricted zone of the island, these pedestrian prosthetics would leave a singular reproduction in the sand, symbolically reterritorializing the militarized landscape.

Bombing Range, Vieques, Puerto Rico

After three years, the globally publicized campaign succeeded in forcing the Navy out, but this victory was precarious: the land was transferred to the Department of the Interior, which re-marked it as a Wildlife Preserve, purportedly to protect the natural environment from human exploitation in the aftermath of the bombardment. But this official preservationism has involved its own violence, marginalizing the demands of island residents that the ecosystem be repaired and returned to the local municipality, where its future use could be democratically debated. This is a predicament in which physical civil disobedience has ceased to be pertinent, giving way to the question of how citizens, scientists, lawyers and politicians will negotiate with and demand accountability from a governmental organism devoted not to the dropping of bombs but the management of the biosphere.

In light of this predicament, Allora and Calzadilla’s photographs show up as something other than a “mere representation” of a flesh-and-blood intervention. In their temporal structure, they allegorize what Vandana Shiva has called a “right to survival.” “An Earth Democracy cannot be realized,” she writes, “if the survival of the planet is used to deny the right to survival of those who are poor and marginal today because they have borne the accumulated burden of centuries of subjugation.”11 Marking survival as something other than bare biological life, Shiva implies that this right is an aesthetic claim that unsettles what Jacques Ranciere would call the “partition of the sensible” 12 —the limits of what can be said, seen, heard, and recalled in a given sociopolitical configuration. Material survival, Shiva suggests, is inextricable from the survival of memory--“the accumulated burden of centuries of subjugation”--which is always precarious and in danger of loss. This is certainly the case in Vieques, where the land now marked as being restored to “nature” was in fact expropriated from peasants and fisherfolk by the Navy in 1941. Thus, the present-day claims of island residents are made in terms of ancestral inheritance and restitution. 13

While it forms part of an ongoing “interrogative design” project concerned with contested discourse of sustainable development in Vieques, this photograph is infinitely reproducible, cut off from its origin to circulate through unforeseeable contexts of interpretation, including a forum such as artwurl.org. 14 At a moment when artists, critics, and curators are preoccupied with making ourselves and our spaces active and effective in the here-and-now, the photograph exposes us to the remains of others from the then-and-there, marking the present with an incomplete memory-trace that is not our own but to which we must nevertheless respond. Assuming that most readers of artwurl.org will not have the will or way to specifically engage the land-use stuggle in contemporary Vieques, one response to the photograph would be to consider it in relation to the discourse of Environmental Justice in the continental U.S., especially to groups such as the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association, which recently mobilized its own photographic ruins in a rally for the “right to return” in Washington D.C.15 Not unlike the disposessed people of Vieques, the claims of poor black New Orleaneans (a large portion of whom now live in the diaspora) are at risk of being forgotten as certain structures and neighborhoods are officially marked as “unviable” and in need of bulldozing for the “life” of a class-cleansed city to return. (The Common Ground Collective has called college students and others to join a series of “second freedom rides” this Spring to New Orleans to assist in the defense and rebuilding of nieghborhoods such as the Lower 9th Ward).16 An appropriate exhibitionary format for staging a linkage between such activites and the politics of survival in Vieques might be that developed by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) a collective of experimental architects and educators who take a distance from interventionist tactics on account of their frequently short-term horizons and gestural refusal of the policy domain. 17

ACORN Katrina Survivor's Association demonstration, 02/09/06

Rather than platforms for the launching of Yomango-style guerilla raids into the circuits of consumption, CUP uses exhibition spaces to historically diagram the dense networks of technology, economy, discourse, and government which unevenly mark the built environment and citizens’ relation to it. CUP often collaborates on a sustained basis with young people from programs such as City as School, consulting academics, policy-makers, and activists from across the political spectrum on topics such as public housing, waste-management, business improvement districts, zoning codes, and risk assessment techniques. While insistent that the environment be read as closely as possible in all its determinations, CUP draws on playful, experimental design strategies to render these forces legible in such a way that they can become sites of informed debate, critical-utopian speculation, and practical mobilization.

Center for Urban Pedagogy, The Programmable City (2001)
Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY

Thought together, the counter-memorial address of Landmark (footprints) and the unpretentious rigor of CUP point beyond neo-situationist rhetorics of immediacy toward what might be called a politics of indirect action, in which aspirations to “effectivity” would be tempered with an acknowldgement of vulnerability and uncertainty in relation to both the “field of action” and to the claims of others on the margins of that field who do not necessarily identify with “us.” Contemporary appeals to activism in art often understand the political more in terms of counter-cultural disruption and self-organized creation than untranscendable limitations and interminable responsibility to those who are not present. Curatorial practice has a crucial role to play in negotiating the tension between these terms, spatially, organizationally, and ethically.

Foot Notes:
1.“Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” OCTOBER (Fall 2004) p. 65.

2.Ibid. 67

3.Notes from Nowhere, ed. We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (New York: Verso, 2003) This book is a key example of the neo-situationist impulse which I have in mind; conceived as a hybrid between “an activist anthology and a grassroots history, agitational collage and direct-action manual” it weaves together stories from array of social struggles around the globe on the basis of a common resistance to the neoliberal privatization, understood as a principle of subjectivity as much as a policy regime. In the introduction, the collective writes, “One of the great strengths of this movement of movements has been its capacity to rekindle the idea of a global political project defined by notions of diversity, autonomy, ecology, democracy, self-organization, and direct action. This activism is an attempt to intervene directly in the process of corporate globalization.” (29) The cover explicitly posits a shared terrain between the “direct action” of street protesters in the North and poor people’s movements in the South, conjuring up a globally expanded “we.” While the anthology has only few direct references to art, the importance of “culture” as a subversive, creative intervention in everyday life is stressed throughout, from the section on the “culture jamming” tactics of @rtmark and the Billboard Liberation Front, to the “carnivalesque” milieu of the street demonstration and the Yes Men’s corporate “identity corrections.”

4. “Contributions to a Resistant Visual Culture Glossary” available at http://www.readysubjects.org/tactics/thompson.html This journal describes its mission as “Documenting the collapse of political and aesthetic practices into the field of ‘media’ as a function of globalization, with aims to facilitate the meeting of artists, activists, theorists, and media makers.” For an early elaboration of some of the ideas in the present essay, see my text on Thorne and Ressler’s dysfunctional protest banners: http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/boom/index.html

5. Nato Thompson and Greg Sholette, eds. The Interventionists: A User’s Guide for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (Cambridge: MIT, 2004) p. 16.

6.Ibid. p. 17

7. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/safe/ See especially curator Paola Antonelli’s text “Grace Under Pressure” to get a sense of how something like Rakowitz’ paraSITE can be understood as responding to the the same essential human drive for “comfort and security” as a Crye Associates, a young design firm contracted by the U.S. military to develop new forms of camouflage.

8. ibid.p.13

9. ibid. p. 14

10. See Rosalyn Deutsche, Agoraphobia: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT, 1997). Ironically, Thompson cites Deutsche’s writing on gentrification yet disregards her central theses concerning art, representation, and power.

11. Vandana Shiva, “The Greening of the Global Reach” in Jeremy Brecher et al., Global Visions: Beyond The New World Order (Boston, South End: 1993) p.60.

12. Jacques Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London, Infinity: 2005)

13. For archives of the civil disobedience campaign and updates on the current struggles for environmental justice in Vieques, see http://www.viequeslibre.org/

14. Entitled Landmark, the project has worked to address what Allora and Calzadilla call the “transitional geography” of Vieques through experimental architectural workshops, videos, and a freely distributed publication including oral histories, archival photographs, ecological maps, and interviews with activists and legal advocates concerning the future of the island.

15. http://acorn.org/?9703 For the ground-breaking National People of Color Environmental Leadership Conference’s “Principles of Environmental Justice” (1991) go to http://www.16beavergroup.org/MIT/readings.htm, where it is situated in relation to other activist, legal, journalistic, and artistic documents pertitent to the Steve Kurtz case in particular and biopolitical justice in general, including the struggle of communities of color in Boston to stop the location of a high-level bioweapons lab in their South End neighborhood.

16. For volunteer opportunities in New Orleans organized around “solidarity, not charity” see http://www.commongroundrelief.org “Common Ground's mission is to provide short term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the gulf coast region, and long term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area. Common Ground is a community-initiated volunteer organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support. The work gives hope to communities by working with them, providing for their immediate needs and emphasizes people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways.”

17.www.anothercupdevelopment.org

Yates Mckee is a writer in New York City. He co-curated the exhibiton Empire/State and has written on contemporary artists such as Alia Hasan-Khan, Allora & Calzadilla, and Thorne & Ressler.