Delirium and Resistance , livre ebook

Delirium and Resistance
Delirium and Resistance
Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism
Gregory Sholette
Edited by Kim Charnley Foreword by Lucy R. Lippard
First published 2017 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Gregory Sholette 2017
The right of Gregory Sholette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978 0 7453 3688 6 Hardback
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For Olga
Contents
List of Figures
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Is Another Art World Possible? by Lucy R. Lippard
Art on the Brink: Bare Art and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy Kim Charnley
PART I ART WORLD
Introduction I: Welcome to Our Art World
1 Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: Within and Beyond the Post-Cold War Art Museum
2 Let s Do It Again Comrades, Let s Occupy the Museum!
3 Bare Art , Debt, Oversupply, Panic! (On the Contradictions of a Twenty-first-century Art Education)
PART II CITIES WITHOUT SOULS
Introduction II: Naturalizing the Revanchist City
4 Nature as an Icon of Urban Resistance on NYC s Lower East Side, 1979-1984
5 Mysteries of the Creative Class, or, I have Seen the Enemy and They Is Us
6 Occupology, Swarmology, Whateverology: The City of Disorder versus the People s Archive
7 Art After Gentrification
PART III RESISTANCE
Introduction III: Critical Praxis/Partisan Art
8 Counting on Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice
9 Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere
10 On the Maidan Uprising and Imaginary Archive , Kiev
11 Delirium and Resistance After the Social Turn
Postscript: December 2016
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures
1
Activist and media artist Bree Newsome removing the Confederate flag from outside the South Carolina State House, June 27, 2015
2
The Illuminator/GULF, public intervention NYC, April 18, 2016
3
Uncle Sam Pac Man demonstration inflatable artwork by PAD/D, circa 1984
4
Protester with Damien Hirst sign during the first week of Occupy Wall Street, September, 2011
5
Support Black Liberation/Free Assata Shakur/Free Sundiata Acoli , Madame Binh Graphics Collective, 1978-1979
6
Dan Peterman, Universal Lab, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2006
7
Blackstone Bicycle Works at Experimental Station, the South Side of Chicago, 2016
8
Aaron Burr Society s Jim Costanzo and Occupy Museum protesters outside the Museum of Modern Art, New York during the Diego Rivera Murals exhibition, January 17, 2012
9
Art Workers Coalition, circa 1971
10
Debtfair installation at the Art League Houston, 2015
11 12
Top graphic by BFAMFAPhD; bottom by Andrew Persoff / Caroline Woolard
13
Decolonize This Place action at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, May 7, 2016
14
Every Crack is a Symbol , a mixed-media video installation by Emanuel Almborg
15
Gentrification , drawing on paper, Peter Kuper, 1984
16
Becky Howland s photocopied flyer for The Real Estate Show, 1980
17
Anton Van Dalen, Abandoned Car with Dog and TV , pencil drawing, 1977
18
Seth Tobocman, WE CAN , linocut on paper, 1988
19
Cover of El Diario newspaper showing Marina Gutierrez s controversial REPOhistory street sign, 1998
20
The People s Library, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), Zuccotti Park, NYC, October 1, 2011
21
A painting on cardboard carried aloft up Broadway by OWS Zuccotti Park demonstrators, October 1, 2011
22
Assemble collective s Yardhouse studios for London creatives under construction, 2015
23
Theaster Gates, Bank Bond , limited edition artwork, 2013
24
Fight for 15 take-away cup o noodles pro-union project, 2016
25
Page from An Anti-Catalog by Artists Meeting for Cultural Change in 1976
26
Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man , performance, 2009
27
Karl Lorac, Red Pill/Blue Pill , ink on paper, 1999
28
Take Collective Action , a poster by Gran Fury, circa 1986
29
Yomango Tango, Barcelona, Spain
30
PAD/D anti-gentrification street art exhibition at the Guggenheim Downtown, 1984
31
Nordic Live Action Role Play (LARP) with Palestinian refugee children, Beirut, 2012
32
Imaginary Archive , Kiev, Ukraine, April 2014
33
Improvised barricades, shields and other protest equipment in front of St. Michael s Church downtown Kiev, Ukraine, April 2014
34
Demonstrators demanding housing rights for immigrants, refugees, students and working people organized by Marina Naprushkina, Berlin, Germany, 2014
35
Page spread from Users Manual for The Interventionists exhibition
36
Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)/b.a.n.g. lab: Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2009
Abbreviations
AAND
Artists Against Nuclear Destruction
AMCC
Artists Meeting for Cultural Change
AWC
Art Workers Coalition
CAE
Critical Art Ensemble
CETA
Comprehensive Employment and Training Act
CK
Conflict Kitchen
CLT
Community Land Trust
CMU
Carnegie Mellon University
COLAB
Collaborative Projects
DDoS
Distributed denial-of-service
DIY
Do It Yourself
DSLR
Department of Space and Land Reclamation
EK
Enemy Kitchen
EU
European Union
FIRE
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
GULF
Global Ultra Luxury Faction
GAAG
Guerrilla Art Action Group
IA
Imaginary Archive
IDNS
Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety
LAPD
Los Angeles Poverty Department
LARP
Live action fantasy role-play
MAVAN
Marxism and Visual Art Now
MBA
Masters of Business Administration
MFA
Masters in Fine Art
MoMA
Museum of Modern Art
NYLPI
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
NYPD
New York Police Department
OWS
Occupy Wall Street
PAD/D
Political Art Documentation/Distribution
SPARC
Social and Public Art Resource Center
UL
Universal Lab
WAGE
Working Artists and the Greater Economy
Acknowledgments
This book would simply not have been possible without Kim Charnley. I am beholden to him not only for his smart and meticulously researched introduction to this volume, but also for the generous labor, encouragement and insightful assistance he provided throughout the process of its development as it grew from a vague idea to a completed work. Likewise, I recognize the luminous contribution of my friend and fellow cultural activist Lucy R. Lippard, whose concise, superb preface opens Delirium and Resistance with precisely the right mixture of verve, history and critical analysis. It is equally not possible to overstate the importance of Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, whose continuous insights and discerning analysis, together with the valued critical appraisal of Professor Jeroen Boomgaard, shaped these essays into a dissertation submitted to the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). I am indebted to both the UvA and to the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, for financial aid during the development of this project, as well as to Helen Carey and Liz Burns of the Fire Station residency in Dublin, Ireland for endowing me with time to think and work on this project. I wish to extend my great appreciation to David Castle, Sophie Richmond and the entire editorial and design team at Pluto Press, as well as to Imogen Charnley, Larne Abse Gogarty, Eric James Triantafillou, Noah Fischer, Aaron Vanek, Jennifer Avril and Ottie Theires for their assistance and input on the manuscript, and also to Chloe Bass and Jeff Kasper who kept the Social Practice Queens MFA project moving forwards while I concentrated on these writings. And finally, though listed last, my devoted and extraordinary wife, Olga Kopenkina is thanked for keeping me from succumbing to delirium without resistance, before this book was completed.
Record of Publication
A number of the essays in this book were previously published either in their present form or in a comparable version and they are presented here with the acknowledgment of these sources: Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: Within and Beyond the Post-Cold War Art Museum, Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices , edited by Melanie A. Townsend for Banff Centre Press (Canada, 2003); Let s Do It Again Comrades, Let s Occupy the Museum! Texte Zur Kunst , a special issue entitled Art History Revisited (Berlin, March 2012); Nature as an Icon of Urban Resistance: Artists, Gentrification and New York City s Lower East Side, 1979-1984, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (Rochester, NY, Sept./Oct. 1997); Mysteries of the Creative Class or I Have Seen the Enemy and They Is Us, MUTE magazine (London, 2004); Occupology, Swarmology, What-everology: The City of Disorder versus the People s Archive, for the College Art Association Art Journal, Internet Edition (NYC, Winter 2011/2012; and this essay has also appeared in the Critical Digital Studies Reader edited by Marilouise Kroker and Arthur Kroker, University of Toronto Press, Canada, 2013); Counting on Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice, also from Afterimage (NY, November/December 1999); Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-public Sphere, As Radical a s Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century , edited