There are so many artists involved in OWS and there are workgroups like Arts and Labor, Arts and Culture, Occupy Museums and more. But the official “Art World” was never that interested and now thinks it’s all over.
This morning, I click on a forwarded link for Holland Cotter’s review of The Ungovernables, the New Museum Triennial, and I read that the show is set
in the context of, among other things, the recent Occupy movement. The reference is getting old now, but you can see its point.
Here Occupy is a fashion point, referring back to last Fall’s talking points but getting a bit tired.
Why does the art world not get similarly tired of wealthy patrons dictating “taste” or indeed of the neo-liberal regime of the art market? Why is it not bored of Sotheby’s, the art auction house, locking out its union Teamsters Local 814 in order to reduce still further their labor costs? These staff are art handlers, so you would think you would want that job done well. Perhaps we get a clue when we learn that Diana Taylor, director of the board at Brookfield Properties, owner of Zuccotti Park, is also on the board at Sotheby’s.
Dahn Vo
The review is set under Dahn Voh’s We The People (pictured above). This is what passes in the art world for politics: fragments of a full size casting of the Statue of Liberty arranged tastefully in the by-now clichéd “propped-up-against-the-wall style” (indicates radicality, refusal to conform: by conforming to the new way to refuse to conform, see the last two Whitney Biennials at least). It’s vagueness leaves me, shall we say, bored.
Still from "Trainee"
To be fair to Cotter, a critic who has done a good deal to promote the understanding of so-called non-Western art, he does not miss the strong points in the show, stressing a
video piece, by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, is a triennial highlight. She made it in 2008, after taking a job at an accounting firm. After some training she took her assigned desk and sat there for a month, doing not a lick of work, just staring off into space, breaking the routine only to ride the company elevator repeatedly up and down. Her fellow employees were friendly at first, and curious, but soon grew wary, then hostile, as it became clear that her spaced-out behavior was going to continue and that she wasn’t going to explain.
[link added]
But he misses the politics here altogether. It’s not just “an accounting firm”–it’s Deloitte, the accountancy giant, with $12 billion in revenues in the US and $28 billion worldwide 2011. Because, as my grandfather used to say, accountants are the only people who work in a recession, they have actually grown since 2008. Many of their people go on to become Conservative MPs or House Republicans. In their own words:
“Deloitte” is the brand under which tens of thousands of dedicated professionals in independent firms throughout the world collaborate to provide audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management and tax services to selected clients.
This is code for one percent firms and one percent anti-tax politics.
Here you can see [not embeddable] that Takala is not completely silent but evasive with her colleagues. While riding in the elevator, Takala claims to be a student working on her thesis, and that the elevator is a congenial place for her to think.
Takala’s durational performance is a modern version of Bartleby the scrivener, who, in Herman Melville’s story, responds to all the injunctions of his Wall Street legal firm with the now immortal phrase: “I would prefer not to.” The term “prefer” becomes viral in the law office and all attempts to remove Bartleby by firing him or by force are unsuccessful.
Takala thus occupied Deloitte at a time when their work undoubtedly involved processing the ruins of the financial disaster. Instead of carrying out this task, she asserted her claim to “prefer not to” and spends her time in thought. As a trainee, she was not supposed to think. She is not supposed to be out of place.
The exhibit calls her “ungovernable.” We would call her autonomous. It’s not a fashion, and it’s certainly not a “style.” The art world doesn’t get it. Occupy it? Actually, I think I would prefer not to.