117 | 2012

JOANNA WARSZA, ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI

What Can Art Do For Real Politics?

Where is politics today? There where people are collectively manifesting their disenchantment with the structures of authority and the political class. And where they are creating a politics of their very own. A politics which means meeting, talking, and marching the city streets—voicing their outrage addressed to the European Parliament, the US administration, or the private sector. The prevailing feeling is that of having had it with all the cynicism of politicians, their indifference to people’s needs, their subservience to immoral profits, and their endeavours to develop economic doctrines which are based on social passivity and on the conviction that “the fittest survive”. So, where is politics today? Is it on the streets of the Arab cities? Or perhaps in the tents of Occupy Amsterdam? Or maybe at the New York MoMA, where the unannounced Occupy Museums actions in the art institutions are carried out? Today it is us, the citizens, who want to shape our common life. Among the citizens there are also artists. And it is with the artists that we want to seek answers to the main question of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: “Can art really function and can it substantially change reality? What is its actual effect?” Our curatorial work has not been based on selecting “the most interesting portfolio” but on reflecting on the potential of artists to trigger social and political processes. There is no final deadline where research ends and production begins. The Berlin Biennale will be an exhibition where the content grows with time, an exhibition reacting to reality and trying to evoke actual changes. Over the recent months we have been travelling to countries where artists have participated in civic movements and projects of social change. We have also visited places where democracy has surrendered to the dictatorial ambitions of the authorities, from Hungary to Russia. We wanted to find out how artists react to the deep crisis of democracy, regardless of whether they collaborate with the regime or are in opposition to it. What have they got to propose? We have been looking for art in civil disobedience, in politics, or in activities seen as art of mediocre quality. Upon the invitation of Camera Austria International, we are presenting a few interviews we have carried out—accompanied by a handful of photos we have taken. There is also the comic strip by Marina Naprushkina from Belarus, who uses art as a tool of resistance and for the dissemination of knowledge about the possibilities of social change in a country ruled by a despot. We are keeping our fingers crossed that her papers continue to be secretly distributed in Belarus, but also that she be one of those who take responsibility for the country once Lukashenko is gone.

Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza, March 2012

Text feature in Camera Austria International 117/2012, pp. 17.

JOANNA WARSZA, NOAH FISCHER, FLORIAN MALZACHER

Occupy a Museum Near You!

So, dear artists, and people who love and need art, this time we follow basic justice on our path to the avant-garde! There are concrete issues to be achieved: museums and the whole world of culture could pay artists for their labour; they could also pay the workers in the museums much better salaries. More artists could be included in an egalitarian market and earn money out of their artistic profession. We could regulate the extremely speculative art market, which helps only a handful of people—the millionaire artists and billionaire collectors. Unfortunately museums have fallen into a free-market ideology, which doesn’t recognise the importance of fairly compensating people’s labour and believes in speculation as a saviour. The first step is simply to start coming together and talking. We need to realise that it is going to be messy for a while. And that is OK, why not? Really messy, embarrassing, but potentially much more interesting experiences may lay in way. Initially, many newspapers and blogs scoffed at the Occupy Museums protest, but recently that tendency started to change. I saw opinions by journalists that for the first time dare to criticise museums for abusing their duty to serve the public. There were articles in The New York Times that talk about the money laundering of Ronald Lauder and his Neue Galerie, or about the Guggenheim’s abuse of labour in the Middle East. There were articles in The for museums that disproportionately assist wealthy white audiences. We now regularly see reference to the 1 % and the 99 % in reviews of art fairs. This is only the beginning of a change in our culture where the abuse of the commons is gradually brought out into the daylight. We have to wake up and remember that art is everyone’s inheritance. Big art fairs like Art Basel and the Armory Show have direct connections to New York’s museums. That’s a place for the wealthiest people in the world to shop. There are 100,000 artists in New York City, but museums show the same people that are highlighted in art fairs and feed the cult of art celebrities. With Occupy Museums, we are taking the first steps toward a future where our cultural commons are truly shared and celebrated, not hoarded by the few. Occupy a museum near you!

Text feature in Camera Austria International 117/2012, pp. 21–37.

MIGUEL ROBLES-DURÁN, GABRIELA RENDóN

Occupy Wall Street, Still Thriving

But the camp also functions as a model of society—a self-made state. A lot of committees deal with its organisation: in the security council, former gang members and former cops discuss how to solve conflicts without violence, while psychology professors and students seek solutions for attending to mentally ill people who want to join the camp. You discuss how to distribute donated food, clothes, how to organise the camp’s library. It is like the creation of a social structure from scratch; it is negotiating how to live together—almost in a utopian way.  The United States has a long history of homeless camps that started in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently, we may recall images from cities like Camden in New Jersey or the outskirts of Newark or the North of Philadelphia or certain areas of Detroit where there are campsites of homeless people. They are called “tent cities”. Historically, tent cities have been associated with radical social formations. Homeless get organised and create their own environment and start to demand or construct or resist certain issues. They get empowered not only by themselves but also by organisations who give them the tents or food, etc. Don Mitchell says in his book The Right to the City that the reason why tent cities haven’t proliferated is that the government has always tried to annihilate them. The moment they start creating some sort of social cohesion, they get dissolved. The government is afraid of this form of organisation. I think that the camp here mimics this. Don Mitchell argues that tent cities are centres for radicalisation. There has been an incredible knowledge transfer from homelessness into the camp, how to retain, how to survive. In the camp here there are some homeless, too. And many of the people that now give advice, for example on how to survive in the cold, are actually homeless. So, the camp might have its own verywell-working organisation, enclave-like community, where people form their own society, their own medical aid, etc. It is a site of experimentation, of resistance, and of representation of the resistance. It might be a prototypical city, but we cannot forget what this movement is about. It’s about all of us. The people in the camp, they are the 99 %, but only together with the people who live around them in the same city, in the same world order.

It seems like the 99 % still need the image of the camp. What will happen when it is gone? The image of the camp is very powerful. But the biggest efforts of the education committee or the outreach committee are about going into the disempowered neighbourhoods of New York and being present there. There is only a certain type of people who approach Zuccotti Park, which in the end is very limited. We have to reach out to those that have no access to Zuccotti Park. When we talk about the representation of the 99 %, we still have taxi drivers, we have room servers, we have construction workers from the MTA; we have steel workers around or cleaners or waitresses. And I don’t think that the Zuccotti camp does enough. The possibility to create different campsites all over the city is much more powerful than one central location in the city as a representation. I am more worried about how we can attract taxi drivers, sweepers of the park, gardeners—all those who’ve been much more oppressed than a big number of the people represented in Zuccotti Park. […]

The struggle will continue! The time has come to redefine ourselves inside the active dimensions of the urban movements: 15-M, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, The Arab Spring, ¡Democracia real YA! All of us are working on structural change in reality. It’s not about urban development, art, geography, sociology, political science, architecture, politics, health care and so on. We must struggle collectively to destroy our centuries-old disciplinary silos, to merge all separated disciplines into the dynamic ecological totality of civic action, into our precarious daily lives. Then, I believe, we might be able to conceive a new direction, together. You have my hand, how do we begin again?

Text feature in Camera Austria International 117/2012, pp. 31–37.

ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI

Artists in Occupy Amsterdam. Does the Revolution Need Revolutionaries, or Does It Need Artists as Well?

May I go back to the first question and ask again, “Why are you here?”

– I came here because the Occupy Movement is the most real political thing that I have had the chance to be associated with. That is why I came here—to find out what it is.

– I was here at the beginning of the whole camp; I slept here during the first night. And then I left, came back, and the art tent was already there. I am not satisfied with the things that I do at university, with this academic identity that is being imposed on me, but I have to impose it on myself to reach some agency, just like the identity of the artist.

– I am here because the Occupy Movement is a fascinating thing, and I wanted to be in a space where the ideas behind the Occupy Movement could be discussed. I found that very difficult in the rest of the camp—the main concern there is actually the practical question of how to keep the camp running.

– I am here because of a guilt feeling. We were working in Egypt in 2008–09, and when the revolution started there, my friends were on the streets, they were attacked, but I was not among them. When I heard about the start of Occupy Amsterdam, this feeling of guilt became super-emotional, so I came to be here. I feel obliged to work here.

– I am here because this Occupy thing is something that makes me think, “Finally we have it. Why did it not happen a long time ago? Is there a spirit of gathering in the air?” I am interested in selfempowerment—how to use abilities in groups, how to create a life together.

– I am here because I have been involved in a lot of discussions in the past years, on privatisation, public spaces in the city, citizens’ rights, and so on. I have participated in lots of conversations but nothing really happened— just this endless discourse. I wanted to have something “substantial” in my hands.

– A sense of guilt relates somehow to why I am here, too. I feel that as artists we also have to do the dirty work, and not just come along and pretend to be active, then, ultimately do nothing. For me it’s an ethical issue—

whether it is okay to be an artist. Shouldn’t I be out saving the Amazon or saving child prostitutes? How to choose what to save? And how to make sure that what I do as an artist carries enough weight to justify not doing those other things? I am not from the Netherlands, but I live here and I find myself frustrated with the political apathy in Holland. Here, in this tent, I have finally found other people who are politically engaged, and it is a great relief. Also, I have a son, so if this really turns out to be something big, later, when he asks me, “Mum, what did you do when the Occupy Movement started?” I will be able to say, “Well, I was there, among those people.”

– I am here because politics is part of my life. There is no distinction between art, politics, and activism, all of it is just my life. I am here in Amsterdam for my studies, and I think that the street is the best education for me. The world needs occupation, not just for a short time, but for a lifetime, and we need to continue and create a new commitment. I have met very different kinds of people here and, to me, they are a source of creation. Art and politics are both about creation.

– I share some of the motivations of other people here. But I also feel a responsibility and indebtedness towards my parents. We came here as political refugees from Iraq, and my parents have fought and sacrificed a lot for us. As my father is an artist as well, my life has never been separate from either art or politics. For those reasons I cannot imagine not being here. Though I actually tried not to be here. I tried to take some distance. I am also graduating from the Rietveld Academy so I went to my studio for a whole day once—but I really could not see what could be done in a studio. So I just decided to be here as often as possible. And now I am having trouble justifying this decision to my teachers and explaining my position as an artist who does not necessarily make art.

– I am here because I’m from Iran. It’s very difficult to keep a distance from politics there, when other people expect you to be politically active. But besides that, I have always been interested in how art, activism, and politics can be linked. Here in Holland, I was really frustrated because there was nothing happening. So finally this camp started and I was really happy to practice my art here, to meet people and artists, to work with them on a kind of art that does not look like art.

– My presence here has roots in the experiences of former generations of my family. I come from Eastern Europe, Serbia—where my grandfathers actually died for their ideas and utopias. In Holland a sort of “salon politics”

is taking place. It is like a velvet country where seemingly everything can be done—or everything is tolerated. I wonder if such a movement of civil disobedience like Occupy Amsterdam can offer a public space for reflection in the West.

– For me the question might rather be: Why am I not here more often? I am really interested in political experiments, and in the way that artists reflect upon them.

– Arthur, why are you here?

Text feature in Camera Austria International 117/2012, pp. 41–51.

JAN VERWOERT

Image as Witness 1/4 For Your Eyes Only

What does an image want of me? That I look at it. Me? How am I supposed to know that an image is intended for me? Its addressee is seldom noted within the image, in the form of the unambiguous dedication: For Your Eyes Only. And even if it were so, this wouldn’t mean that only this pair of eyes would ever alight upon that which was solely intended for it alone. An image is quick to find other recipients. A coincidence, a mouse click, or unprotected mobile phone memory are enough to have an image circulating on a grand scale. Doesn’t everyone who makes private photos today secretly expect this consequence? “You can watch me on your videophone,” sings Beyoncé: you is the one individual to whom she is offering herself up for intimate viewing. Yet you also includes all who are going to feel addressed by this offer. When the small screens of our phones light up, no one can help but thinking: Is it her? A message for me? Really?

What does the message say? The message I received yesterday from a museum said: “This email is intended solely for the named addressee or for his or her representative. The content of this email is confidential and may contain legally privileged information, in particular information that concerns trade and/or business secrets or copyrighted content, which its intended recipient is required to safekeep. Any form of inspection, publication, duplication, or dissemination of the email content by unintended recipients is strictly forbidden and may result in penalties under civil and criminal law. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy this message.”

Digital messages circulate at a speed bordering on telepathy. And the law dreams of messages that are as “weighty” as a lost wallet, which the truthful finder will want to return to its owner. How can he do so discretely? In any case, he must open the wallet to search for some way to identify its rightful owner. Who knows what he might discover in the process. Likewise, I can’t discern that a message is not intended for me until I have already read it. So what is the point of deleting it? If its contents were so secretive that I must “notify the sender”, what can I do but let him know that his secret is no longer one. PLEASE DO NOT READ THESE WORDS. Already done. Too late.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 117/2012, pp. 79–80.