Category Archives: aesthetics

Mapping Strike Debt

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Lately everyone has been telling me how tired I look. In part, that’s the cold that everyone in New York seems to have. Partly, it’s a way of saying that I am middle-aged. It’s also that Strike Debt is in full gear and it has been throughout so everyone is, in fact, wiped out. But it continues to be interesting and provocative so we keep doing it.

Over the course of two long discussions yesterday and today, one within Strike Debt and the other at Occupy University, the figure of Strike Debt as a set of intersections arose. It’s not “just” about the debt in other words. It’s about using debt to open new conversations and new approaches that make it possible to organize and conceptualize differently.

So the figure of Strike Debt above is both a map of how debt and debt resistance plays out, and a configuration of how the group might be organized. There are four poles: mutual aid and resistance form one axis, while the local and the (inter)national forms the other. Each site and each axis is in itself a place of intersection and none exists independently. Debt itself, after all, is a set of agreed or compelled relationships. It allows us to explore questions of human interaction, as well as the interface of the human and non-human.

Sets of related terms arise as a result of the interplay across the axes.

Cluster one: Modes of Engagement

Mutual Aid/Jubilee/Gross Domestic Product/Growth/Abolition/The Commons/ Bankruptcy/Refusal/Resistance.

These are different ways of configuring relationships to debt, credit, interest–in short, mediated human interaction in terms of value. They are not linear but reconfigure according to which term in the cluster you stress (like mind-mapping software if you get the geeky reference). So if you stress bankruptcy, it might be as refusal or resistance but it might also have to do with GDP. It might be a way of talking about Jubilee. Growth becomes a question rather than a solution. It might not be growth in conventional terms but growth of leisure time or social services.

Cluster two: Politics of Affect

Calm/Love/Radicalism/Encouraged/Healing/Smile/Feminism/Trust

These are all terms used by participants at the end of the OccU session on Debt and Climate this evening. They are not words often associated with either debt or climate change. The ways in which people worked together to see intersections and commonalities, as well as emerging tactics to engage with these issues, generated this positive sense. Just as it has been crucial to make people feel better about being in debt by talking about it, so does climate change need to seem scaleable. Presenting debt abolition and climate change mitigation as mutually reinforcing solutions–because debt cancellation reduces the need for growth and allows for lower emissions–was more successful than dealing with the two issues separately.

Cluster three: Tactics

 Mapping/Aesthetics/Organizing/Social Cost Accounting/

Stop Shopping/Countervisualizing

Some of these terms might be interchanged with Modes of Engagement and vice-versa: they are intersecting. Mapping, though, emerged repeatedly as a key tactic for debt resistance and climate change mitigation. In short, it’s a fundamental mode of countervisuality. Aesthetics, both in the formal sense relating to artworks, and the generalized sense of bodily perception was also something we wanted to reclaim from the banner to the performance and the street action.

Want to see what this intersection looks like? Check this video promoting the 14N International Strike in Europe:

In Search of Wilderness

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The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains National Park. Credit: WikiCommons

A thousand feet down, a flight of cockatoos makes its way across the green canopy, clearly visible through the bright mountain air. Loud calls of unseen birds echo across the forest. The sandstone cliffs are steep and challenging, plunging the walker from time to time into rainforest, where the footing is damp and muddy, only for the trail to then climb almost vertically.

I’m a city boy, born and bred, and I’ve lived in London or New York for the greater part of my life. So why do I find such moments so appealing? Even though I know that they are fake? There’s a learned urban desire for mental renewal by being outside, a middle-class Disneyland.

In the past year, those of us in the Occupy movement have spent a great deal of time outdoors. Radical politics in eighteenth century Britain was known as “out-of-doors.” So if the presumed “public sphere” is in fact largely indoors, in coffee houses, theatres, meeting halls, and the like, its radical supplement is often outdoors. We’ve drawn much energy from being outside in the urban interior–for cities, as Benjamin taught us, are all interior.

For the most part, however, conservation has been, as the name suggests, a conservative movement. It was tied to the sense of nation as the land and a particular kind of embodiment that resulted from having been born on that land. The obvious contradictions in such views, such as the exclusion of indigenous peoples from that nationhood, never troubled conservationist nationalism.

It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that the realignment of the environment as a “left” issue was contemporary with the Civil Rights Movement. In the U. S., the 1964 Wilderness Act, defined the condition poetically rather than quantitatively and to the exclusion of questions of belonging:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Is there such a place? The Blue Mountains have been lived in by the Gundungurra, Darug, and Wiradjuri people for over 20,000 years. But when the British arrived in Australia, they declared the entire continent terra nullius, unclaimed or empty land–wilderness.

In 1813, a British surveyor noted coal in the region. Two years later, a group of convicts were compeled to build a road into the area. Actual mining began in the 1870s and continued until the end of the Second World War. The traces of mining are not apparent to the untrained eye but the shale oil formations give shape, I learned, to some of the distinctive topography. It was not until 1967 that the modern Aboriginal peoples gained full citizenship in what has become Australia around them.

Indeed, the walk that I took in the Blue Mountains was made possible by the Herculean construction of steps and paths in the cliffs, beginning with the Federal Pass walk created in 1900 to celebrate Australian Federation. While the Federal Pass is still celebrated, the “White Australia” policy that went along with it has been omitted from the story. Now the presence of the indigenous is well acknowledged and their account of the region’s history is presented to all visitors.

Like so many hilltops in colonized nations, the Blue Mountains were once a retreat for colonial administrators away from the summer heat of their domains. Recast as wilderness for tourism, the mountains still tell useful and important stories. Even the clear water that rushes past and falls so dramatically down waterfalls is, despite appearances, polluted with urban run-off and you are warned not to drink it.

Wilderness was a modernist fiction designed to create set-aside regions of physical space to provide mental contrast for urban workers. The very fact of its palpable “contamination,” its complex and challenging histories and consequent impossibility makes for a different kind of appeal. There’s no reason not to go, enjoy a walk or a climb. It’s just not “wilderness.” It’s outdoor Disneyland.

 

Another World: for slow politics

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Today a symposium at Artspace, Sydney, called Another World drew together art practice and activism. The talk ranged from Sydney to Germany, New York and elsewhere. There was a notable retreat, I’m glad to say, from such terms as “global art” towards questions of politics, debt, ecology and situatedness. We learned about time, to take our time, that this is our time and it is, of course, past time.

Zanny Begg, poster for Lucern

An artists panel in the morning featured an interesting contrast of global and local. Zanny Begg talked about her video with Oliver Ressler What Would It Take to Win? (2008)–the link leads to the entire piece. It covered the global justice movement protests in Heiligendamm (June 2007). What was interesting from the current perspective was to see the force of making no demands: wanting “wins” undermined the global justice movement. Whereas Occupy has been able to reclaim space and, crucially, time.

In that long time that it takes us to get anything done, an aesthetic relation is created between the people doing the action, whatever it may be. A project like the Rolling Jubilee, to buy and abolish debt in the name of OWS, might be an art work. Indeed, the curator Tom Polo mentioned a work in his show There’s a Hole in the Sky, now on in Campbelltown called “Commerce.” The artist purchased items from local bankrupt people, using his art budget, is currently displaying them and will give them away at the end of the show. There’s something very evocative about that action, in a part of Western Sydney that is known for high levels of bankruptcy.

In his afternoon talk, art historian Terry Smith contrasted different approaches to evoking the planetary. He called on Jorge Macchi’s work Blue Planet currently being used as the emblem for the Sydney Biennale as exemplary such refiguration. Macchi creates a “figure of the planetary” (Spivak) by emphasizing the oceans over the continents.

Macchi, “Blue Planet”

Elsewhere in in the Biennale, Smith found little to like with the exception of several projects, such as Jananne Al-Ali’s video project Shadow Sites II (2010) [see below],

a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and manmade activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures.

By comparison, Smith suggested that Documenta 13 in Kassel stresses the multiple temporalities of the contemporary. One claim caught my attention: that being on stage (I would say in public) actually creates time. The exhibition includes historical artifacts on this theme, like Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?,  her immensely powerful treatment of National Socialism.

Salomon, “Life? Or Theater?”

I do worry a bit about this, about always using National Socialism as “history” but the exhibition is in Germany and does feature work describing Kassel during the Third Reich.

The center of the show, according to Smith, is an installation called The Brain, centering on works impacted directly by war:

objects like two wonderful Giuseppe Penone stones, small Bactrian princess figures (2500 b. C.), six Giorgio Morandi still lifes, damaged objects from the National Museum of Beirut, a towel stolen in 1945 from the apartment of Adolf Hitler or masks made from iPad wrappings by Judith Hopf.

They even had a token Occupy space, a segment of the Documenta grounds turned over to a small encampment.

Together with the Berlin Biennale use of Occupy as a sideshow, this represents a clear, if not terribly important, attempt to co-opt the “cachet” of Occupy to render an art exhibition “political.” An occupation that is limited in time and space is just a zoo.

What did I take away? Moving past the politics of the “win” to a politics of transformation is a slow politics. It moves paradoxically quickly but it consumes time, takes time away from labor and leisure time alike. More pertinently, it tries to abolish that distinction. For the artist or the writer, there is no greater pleasure than “working.” A slow politics would allow that privilege to all.

Disappearing Like Ice: The Middle Class

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The artists Ligorano and Reese have made a new ice sculpture project to confront delegates at the Democratic and Republican conventions. About 2000 pounds of ice will be carved to read: MIDDLE CLASS. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, it will melt away, leaving only memories. It’s a combination of earth, language and performance art, creating a striking hybrid. For whereas land and environmental art has tended to create permanent forms out of rock, earth and water, this piece is time-based, like performance. In the tradition of language work, it relies for its impact on the material form of language but here the words are transitory and ephemeral, like conversation rather than print.

One of the oddities of the United States to an outsider is the insistence that there is no such thing as class here, only a “middle class” that covers almost everyone. Any attempt to point out that government policy over the past three decades has enormously benefited the wealthiest, those now known as the one percent, is nonetheless immediately described as class war.

There is a way to make sense of the “middle class.” We might describe it as the assemblage of all those people able to improve their lives by debt financing. That would extend from the lowly store credit card via student loans to the mortgages that made the “American dream” of home ownership possible. Excluded from the debt middle class would be those at the bottom unable to qualify for credit, except at places like Pay Day loan sharks or pawn shops. At the top, there are those who use debt to make more money, whose personal well-being is not at risk.

As we all know, this middle class is indeed in dire danger. Student loans now total an absurd $1 trillion, while outstanding credit card debt is not far behind at $800 billion. As secured loans, mortgages were supposed to be the smartest investment a person could make. Today, some ten million homes have been foreclosed or are in the process of foreclosure. So what would be left of “America” if the middle class disappeared, as Ligorano and Reese suggest? The melting will leave us drowning in debt.

The disappearing ice sheet in Greenland NB this is surface melt, not total melting

Melting ice is of course also suggestive of the palpably accelerated pace of human-caused climate change. This Northern summer has seen unprecedented ice melt across the Arctic and Greenland, prompting only an unsightly squabble among nation states as to who gets the mineral rights to the newly exposed land and sea bed. Neither political party has anything of substance to say about the planetary disaster, for fear of alienating Big Oil. Perhaps the very melting of the art work recognizes that its message will not be seen, let alone heard.

Let’s propose an alternative ending: the melted water should be collected, refrozen and carved to read: “We Are The 99%. S17. Join us.”

 

The Whites and the Whale

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Why are there white people in the Americas? One way to answer that question would be: fish. Cod and other fish drew early visitors here, especially to Newfoundland. Later sailors reached Massachusetts, where the cod were so plentiful that to catch them you only had to throw a bucket over the side of the ship. They called the place Cape Cod. All those fish are gone.

We are now in the midst of what scientists call the sixth Great Extinction. Unlike earlier disappearances, this one has a single cause. Human actions in the pursuit of industrial capitalism have put at least 20,000 species on the high-risk “Red List” for extinction. Yet when the New York Times ran an op-ed on this today, the biologist Richard Pearson felt the need to render this as an economic problem:

the total economic value of pollination by insects worldwide was in the ballpark of $200 billion in 2005. More generally, efforts to tally the global monetary worth of the many different benefits provided by ecosystems come up with astronomically high numbers, measured in tens of trillions of dollars.

If we cannot find better ways to imagine why the total eradication of tens of thousands of living creatures should be prevented, we make the case for our own disappearance. That “we” hides something, though: those that did this from the industrialized nations, mostly “white,” are visiting this on the entire planet, mostly not “white.”

Over the course of the visual culture conference, the visualizations that stayed with me most were two videos presented by the performance artist Patty Chang. In 2011, Chang had a residency on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, one of the most Easterly places in the Americas. It was for a long time home to a major fishing fleet but as a result of overfishing, that’s all but gone. Instead, tourism and, of all things, art are being promoted as alternatives.

Fogo is a place that is also known for its whale populations.

St Brendan saying mass on a whale near Newfoundland

On her visit, Chang walked to the far side of the island, where she encountered the beached corpse of a sperm whale. The body was white, which she later revealed was due to decomposition. Nonetheless, she went into the shallow water where it was lying and washed it, a ritual for the dead common to many religions. From the place where she shot the video the whale seemed at once whole, uncanny and spectral. The performance was riveting.

Dead whale, Fogo Island

Photographed here by the artist Tonja Torgerson, the whale was clearly decaying and Chang said in discussion that it smelled appalling. In her talk, though, she linked this white whale to Moby-Dick and Melville’s great allegory for capitalism. In the conjuncture of fishing and whaling, we might want to break this up, so it reads “the white(s) (and the) whale.” Among many references, she showed the poster for the classic film starring Gregory Peck:

There are so many odd things about this, it’s hard to know where to start. The 1950s were saw mass whale hunting for food and oil that brought many species of cetaceans close to extinction. We think of whaling as a remote form of environmental damage. Rather, it was nuclear. It was A-bomb devastated Japan that turned to whales as food and refuses to abandon them now as a mutant form of decolonial resistance. The caption appears to anticipate that audiences for the 1956 film have already seen Jaws, Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 shark movie. The White Whale is represented as a hybrid between the phallus of the male gaze and the castrating vagina dentata that haunts its dreams. At the same time it proleptically anticipates the creature in Alien (1979) as it emerges from its human host.

Here comes the creature

Alien was haunted by capital (The Company), insurgency and empire. And that form of alienation is about to return as Ridley Scott cranks up the franchise once more with Prometheus.

Chang’s performance ended with another extraordinary visualization. She took a journey across Central Asia, encountering among many other things, a legend that all Uighurs are descended from wolves, like the legend of ancient Rome. All these creatures, these compound beings, were part of Hobbes’ evidence for the representational power of the European colonial imaginary (discussed last week). It seems to have lost control (of itself).

Chang finds herself at the Aral Sea, a formerly immense inland lake that has been turned to desert by engineering projects diverting water for human needs. Just like in Newfoundland, there is symbolic death and the disappearance of a primary food source. Chang showed boats now beached on flat endless sand. Once again, in a powerful repetition, Chang set about washing the boats, mourning the loss of natural environment, human livelihood and unknowable numbers of non-human species.

In this photograph of a similar scene from the Aral Sea, the boats look the same but the sand seems slightly less flat–but you’ll get the idea:

The Russian Empire has followed its Cold War partner into a hallucinatory present that it cannot imagine to itself.

The Aesthetics of Occupy

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If it seems surprising to talk about the aesthetics of Occupy, it shouldn’t. This is a movement that uses the term “beautiful” as one of high praise in a non-ironic way. Nonetheless, this is not the beauty so prized by the art world. Occupy has made an aesthetic from being out of place that has come to have a noticeable affect in the run up to May Day.

I’m describing Occupy as aesthetic in the sense of Rancière and, as he would say, the Greeks. Rather than signifying beauty, as it would for Kant, he intends

an “aesthetics” at the core of politics …as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.

That is to say, if politics is the determination of relations between the visible and the sayable, there are certain forms that determine what can be “seen” and what is kept out of sight; between what may be said and what cannot; between what is said and understood, and said and not understood; and, finally, how we determine what it is to call something visible and sayable.

It is, then, not for nothing that the sign became Occupy’s first and perhaps most noticeable form. The classic Occupy sign is made on cardboard torn from a box and not bought specially from an art shop. It’s written in felt tip or Sharpie. The point is that it says something distinctive and interesting. One of my favorites:

This sign expresses what many were feeling at the time of the Liberty Plaza occupation and does so with wit and intelligence: it makes you smile and it makes you think. For some art world people, this is a “hand-made” aesthetic, perhaps a little past its sell-by date. My guess is that the person who made this is utterly unaware of that narrative and if they were, they could care less. This object was made to be seen but not displayed, let alone sold.

To really understand the aesthetics of Occupy, you have to get into what it means to say, for example, that the OWS library was beautiful.

OWS Library October 2011

Which it most certainly was. In part, that’s because it was a library that did not discipline its readers. It knew what it had, and what it had lent, but no one was under obligation to return a book if they liked it. There were no fines or people telling you to be quiet. More even than that, there was a sense that this was beautiful because it was out of place, unlikely and untypical. It challenged our sense of “what there is to see there” and, like all the Occupy sites, turned drab anonymous space into a place that had a certain magic to it.

You need to have felt that magic, which I’ve discussed before as being the gift economy of Occupy that worked even though it wasn’t supposed to do so, to get the varied ways that May Day has been imagined. On the lovely Occuprint May Day site, there are noticeably no Social Realist images, other than a few clenched fists, mostly from Oakland, where there is a historical tradition of radicalism and Black Power. More typical is this popular poster in NYC at the moment by Ethan Heitner (by the way, I don’t know any of these artists):

The hand-drawn image of kite-flying in a park on a sunny day nicely sets off the crisp graphic. It’s not whimsical, though. It’s after that “magic” that the aesthetics of Occupy offered: you shouldn’t be in the park flying a kite–an odd American insult is “go fly a kite”–you should be doing one of those things you’ve decided not to do for one day.

The image chosen for the most widely disseminated May 1 leaflet shares this aesthetic:

Detail of Nina Montenegro's poster

In this image, Nina Montenegro turns the “daily grind” into a visual image out of which new shoots of Spring are growing. The received image of the general strike, whether from Seattle on 1919 or Russia in 1905, could not be more different than such feminist imagery. It says a lot about what OWS thinks itself to be that it was selected.

Last, and perhaps by a short head my favorite, is one I’ve already posted but here it is again:

Elizabeth Knafo and MPA

Elizabeth Knafo and MPA have created a visualization of a theme that I’ve often discussed here–the sense of “movement time,” the way in which we’re reclaiming our time, both day to day, hour to hour and in general. The combination of a simple hand painted sun eclipsing the clock by which our lives are dictated and bringing a warm yellow light to a mass direct action: “Whose Time? Our Time.”

The posters tell a story of a movement that has indeed moved: seeds, flowers, women, the sun, kites, machinery only as the past, clenched fists to recall past actions. I’d rather see no fists at all, true, but it’s only been six months.