Sholette & Thompson - The Interventionists, User´s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

7/28/2019 Sholette & Thompson - The Interventionists, User´s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

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Nato to write – Karl HinArtists Center, Jeff BarnumPope.L), Jessica Barthel, ABerkshire Community Coand their classes, Kathy fofolks at Creative Capital,



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Artists Center, Jeff Barnum, GJessica Barthel, Al Bushevk

Community Coalition, The S

Kathy for the shack, Gene Ca

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Center, Jeff Barnum, Gilly Ba

Barthel, Al Bushevkin and th

Coalition, The Smith College

shack, Gene Carlson, the gre

Karl Hinojosa, Rebeccah U

Barnum, Gilly Barnes, Sean (

Bushevkin and the folks at No

Smith College professors an

Carlson, the great folks at

Hinojosa, Rebeccah Uchill,

Gilly Barnes, Sean (help on W

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College professors and their

By Joseph Thompson



Ready

to Wear : Ar t i s t s

c lo th ing to augmen t p e r sona l au tonomy . Afo r Tac t i ca l Med ia ,LuYo Mango

Nomads :Ar t i s t s who p rod uce

work t ha t encou rages i nd i v id ua lau tonomy such as mob i le hous ing . A r t i s t s

i nc lud e : N55, K y r zy s to f Wod i zko , Rub én Or t i zTo r re s , M ichae l Rakowi t z , D ré Wap enaa r .

The

Expe r imen ta l

Un ive rs i ty Ar t iaes the t i c s t ra teg ie s d i s cou rses i nc lud ingu rb an geograp hy . A rsub Rosa , C r i t i ca l A r t

Rec la im the S t ree ts :Ar t i s t s who p rod uce ac t ions t ha t occu r w i t h in the p ub l i c

sp he re ( s id ewa lk s , p a rk s , s t ree t s , ma l l s , e t c . ) A r t i s t si nc lud e : Peña , B io t i c Bak ing Br igad e , Su rv e i l l ance

Camera P la ye r s , S t ree t Rec , I nd y Med ia , the Yes

Men .

A

1

3

4

5 6 7

2

11

Biotic Baking BrigadeStreet RecSurveillance Camera Players

YesMen

Rubén Ortiz Torres

Michael Rakowitz Dré Wapenaar The Atlas Group

Yomango





User17

Krzysztof Wodiczko is inter-nationally renowned for hislarge-scale slide and video pro-jections on architectural facadesand monuments. Since the lateeighties, he has developed aseries of nomadic instrumentsfor both homeless and immigrantoperators that function as imple-ments for survival, communica-

tion, empowerment, and heal-ing. Wodiczko has coined theterm, “Interrogative Design” todescribe his works which bothaddress social issues as well asprovide a band-aid to them. Likea band-aid, the works both tem-porarily help a wound as well asbring attention to it. Wodiczkoearned his MFA in 1968 from theAcademy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,Poland, with an emphasis onarchitecture, industrial designand the visual arts. He taught atseveral Universities around theworld before coming to the

Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology in 1991 where he is theacting director of the Center forAdvanced Visual Studies.

Project DescrNew York homeleHomeless Vehicleurban nomads’. Tpractice of interrodesign needs for while additionallytion of homelessn

ified shopping cavide a temporary social service instlessness to public

K r z y s

ztof W o d i c z k o

K r z y s

ztof W o d i c z k o

1 9 4 3 B o r n

B o st on, U S AB o st on, U S A

Krysztof Wodiczko - Homeless vehicle prototype , Poland 1974

Krysztof Wodiczko - Homeless vehicle in front of Trump Tower , United States 1984

Krysztof Wodiczko - Home



User19

Project DescrUnits (M.I.U) arealuminum parts. Wporary refuge for Orta produced thwhere she producfaces of cows (replight of Rwandanwere then placedSummit in Triesteongoing interest i

Lucy Orta is trained as a fashion /textile designer but her works nowrange from sculpture to performancesto actual dinners. Disillusioned withthe consumerism of the fashion indus-try, in 1992 she installed her first“Refuge Wear” (1992-1998) seriesunder the Louvre Pyramid during ParisFashion Week. The clothes weredesigned as a response to the GulfWar and combines fashion withportable architecture. She designedRefuge Wear to highlight and assistthose in need of refuge. During thisperiod, Orta was working with a col-lective called Casa Moda whose goalwas to investigate links between textileresearch and experimental design. Her“Collective Wear” sculptures in theform of tent domes with protrudingappendages, exhibited in the ModernArt museum in Paris in 1994 wereplaced into urban contexts for a seriesof interventions in housing estates,subway stations... and later developedinto a human chain, “NexusArchitecture” which has since becomethe emblem of her work and has beenpresented in site specific performanc-es such as the Venice Biennale in 1995,Johannesburg Biennale 1997, Museum

of Contemporary Art Sydney 1998,Bolivia, Berlin, New York, Mexico City.She is currently the Rootstein HopkinsChair at London College of Fashion atthe London Institute.

1 9 6 6 B o r n

Or t a Or t a L u

c y L u c y

E i n d ho v e n, T h e N e t h e r l

a n d s

Krysztof Wodiczko - Homeless vehicle prototype , Poland 1974

Krysztof Wodiczko - Homeless vehicle in front of Trump Tower , United States 1984

Krysztof Wodiczko - Home



User21

Michael Rakowitz is an artistbased in New York who has pro-duced numerous interventions in var-ious media. In his 2000-2001 projectClimate Control at P.S.1 in New York,Rakowitz tapped into the existingheating system of the building withan elaborate network of ducts andfans. The extraordinary arrangementof pipes filled the gallery space forthe sole purpose of bringing theroom temperature down to a climate

control level in winter. His interest induct work continued in his 2001 proj-ect, Rise, in which he extended acentral oven duct of a Chinese bak-ery into a 9th floor gallery space.When one entered the gallery, theentire space smelled of fresh pas-tries. Rakowitz developed Rise as areminder to visitors of the originalneighborhood inhabitants and inaddition, of the gentrifying desireswhich accompany art exhibitions inlow-income areas. His work hasappeared at P.S.1 Contemporary ArtCenter, the Queens Museum of Art,the Storefront for Art and Archi-tecture, the Cooper-Hewitt Design

Museum, and the Fabric Workshopin Philadelphia. He is currentlyProfessor of Sculpture at theMaryland Institute College of Art inBaltimore.

Project DescrparaSITE, is an invents outside buiexisting infrastruc1998, Rakowitz deto several homelehe was a graduatthe homeless indiFreddie Flynn, Rafrom plastic bags inflatable. As Rakto the buildings, materials elicited completely take owake up one mor

M i c h a el R a k o w i t z

M i c h a el R a k o w i t z

1 9 7 3 B o r n

Bo s t o n, U S A

Bo s t o n, U S A

Michael Rakowitz - Climate Control , New York City 2002




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William Pope.L was born inNewark in June 28, 1955. WilliamPope.L is his birth name (the Lstands for Lancaster, abbreviatedby his mother and according toPope L. hated by his father.)He has been a member of thedepartment of Theatre andRhetoric at Bates College for 13years. He attended Mason GrossSchool at Rutgers University for

graduate work working withpainter, Leon Golub and Fluxusartist Geoff Hendricks and BobWatts. He also studied with RuthMaleczech and Lee Breuer ofMabou Mines at Re. Cher. ChezStudio in New York City. Pope.L’swork addresses contemporaryissues such as class, RACE andconsumerism. His work migrateseasily between studio work andoutdoor activities. His perform-ance work includes his famous“crawl” pieces in which Pope L.literally crawls across a city. Hisart installations use unconven-tional materials such as peanut

butter, mayonnaise, and Pop artsto provoke a closer examinationof the “stuff” of everyday life andto raise questions about art as acommodity and community.

Project Descripance/installation ppanel truck. Accorcontradictions of dthe Black Factory ment and exploratBlack Factory, is eqrear of the Black Fafloor, through the wvisitors can see itePrevious to its dispinstitutions includiseries of performahad the option to refers to both the iculture when the

objects that speakone of two ways: toWeb, or be chosetour with the BF whFactory’s gift shop

W i l l i am P o p e L .

W i l l i am P o p e L .

1 9 5 5 B o r n

N e w Y o r k C i t y, U S AN e w Y o r k C i t y, U S A



Michael Rakowitz - Clima

A U



A Use25

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User27

Based in Berlin and New York City,the collective e-Xplo consists ofthe members Heimo Lattner, ReneGabri and Erin McGonigle. Astheir name might suggest, theartistically explores cities acrossthe globe. The tours are devel-oped by conducting interviews,gathering field recordings, re-searching local libraries and thencomposing a site-specific score toaccompany the ride. In Decemberof 2000, e-Xplo developed theirfirst bus tour for Willaimsburg,Brooklyn. In May 2001 they pro-duced 65 MPH which traversedthe bridges and highways of NewYork City. More recently, e-Xplohas been working with an onboardcomputer and GPS system whichcan use the location, heading, andspeed of the bus to determinewhich sounds can be triggered(based on a programmed score).Since developing their tours forNew York City, they have pro-

duced projects for Torino, Italy,Berlin, Rotterdam and London.

2 0 0 1 E s t

B e r l i n , G e r ma n y &


N e w Y o r k Cit y, U S AN e w Y o r k Cit y, U S A

Project DescriXplo travels a languFrancine Clark Art IMoCA, located in Nduces visitors to a uing a sonic environmenvironment.



User29



9

Haha is a collaborative teamthat came together in 1988 outof an interest in addressinggaps between artists and audi-ences. In fourteen years Haha’smembers, Richard House,Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer andJohn Ploof have created twenty-four projects incorporating awide range of media - videoinstallation and broadcast, bill-boards, audio tours, communitygardens, live performance andinteractive installation. In 1988Richard House moved to NewZealand for research and tolearn bungee jumping, now thegroup is comprised of threemembers.

Haha’s work has focused on theexploration and articulation ofsocial positions relative to par-ticular sites. Each project isapproached uniquely, throughinteraction and frequently col-

laboration with individuals andcommunities, as well as the con-stituent physical and historicalproperties of a locale.

2 0 0 1 E s t



N e w Y o r k Cit y, U S AN e w Y o r k Cit y, U S A

Project DescriIllinois, the Taxi pspeech. The mechdigital sign on toppost messages. Oborhood markets,messages with topThrough the wintegathering suggest

class to a YMCA thoughts on the toby the Holiday Innthe local court ho



User 31



Rubén Ortiz-Torres works in avariety of media to explore culturalrepresentations and collisions asthey appear in everyday cultural life.While his work predominately focus-es on the Chicano experience, hispurview includes all forms of cultur-al connection and collision. He hasproduces numerous photographs,paintings, hats, trucks and even leafblowers as media to investigate sig-nature materials and images of thiscultural experience. The son of LatinAmerican folklore musicians, Ortiz-Torres was born in Mexico City. Hewas trained in architecture atHarvard Graduate School of Designand studied art at both theAcademy of San Carlos in MexicoCity, and at the California Instituteof Arts in Valencia California.

Project Description: Text for high/low goes here.

High/Low2003 Project Descrartist based in Soatic of the situatiobe specific, it is aA culturally recogCalifornia is the lblow leaves; mow

In Garden of Eartmachinery, the laflashy paint, and a very different, p

u b é n Or t i z To r r e

s

R u b é n Or t i z To r r e

s

1 9 6 4 B o r n

M e x i co Cit y, M e x i c oM e x i co Cit y, M e x i c o

A Use 33



User 35



“I think tents are great meetingpoints for people. To work ondirecting the quality of meetingis something I couldn’t do somuch with sculpture. I use tentsbecause tents speak a lan-guage, which is well known allover the world.”

Based in Rotterdam, The Ne-therlands, Dré Wapenaar is a

designer and sculptor predomi-nately known for his creation oftents. He says of his work that itis a public art meant to provokea response. Wapenaar believesthat a properly designed tentcan alter human behavior bymaking people feel secure, calmand friendly. Throughout hiscareer, Dré Wapenaar has pro-duced numerous tents includingthose for selling flowers, playingpiano, hanging on trees, and inthe exhibition at MASS MoCA,giving birth and paying respects

to the dead. His work has beenexhibited in the Netherlands,Italy, England, Japan, Franceand the United States.

Project Description: The Birthing Tent is, at the titleindicates, a large bol structure designed for giving birth andfor the celebration of this intimate moment. A large openingin the ceiling provides a view to the stars and the tent isequipped with benches for husbands, family, friends andnurses to participate in the experience. Dré Wapenaar saysof his work, “In my latest tents the theme of the loner versusthe group, and or the other, comes into a phase in which theinteraction, and the expectations that come with it, will bedirected even more. This was already at stake in the workswhere I used a, so called, necessity which you could hardlydeny. Here, things are dealing more with emotional issues,with intimacy and distance, with attraction and repulsion,

with respect for respect and disrespect. Then again, this isalso to blame to the lack of power, or independency, of theordinary public.”

Birthing

Tent1987-88

…Project Descrexperienced manyhour of your time,the end, and thenthe grave. No emchanges, but onlyis still left with the

The Dodenbivak incorporated the incorporating a seboth projects at Mdeceased belovedcy that can go ove

1 9 6 1

User 37



Based in Copenhagen, N55consists of four members. Thename, N55, comes from theaddress of their first projectspace Nørre Farimagsgade 55.The collective integrates aes-thetics and ethics into their var-ious designs which include aSpaceframe (which they live in),a home hydroponic unit, chairs,compost machines and bizarre

public address systems. Theirprojects are designed for use inthe real world and in general,they live and work with the proj-ects they produce.

…Project Descricost mobile home. Scovered with rubberthrough the streets works on both land comes equipped wipan, kettle, alcohol gests the Snail Sheltection for someone

1 9 9 4 E s t

K o p e n h a g e n,

K o p e n h a g e n,

D a n ma r kD a n ma r k

N 5 5 N 5 5





User 41



In Temporary Occupations, AlexVillar makes visible the “uses” ofpublic space. The video shows Villarignoring the city’s spatial codes andtherefore resisting their effects uponthe organization of everyday experi-ence. He jumps fences, slidesbetween railings and squeezes intothe corners of buildings. While atfirst appearing somewhat Dada, theactions make visible the organization

of space that is so critical to inter-ventionist work.

In Temporary Occupations, AlexVillar makes visible the “uses” ofpublic space. The video shows Villarignoring the city’s spatial codes andtherefore resisting their effects uponthe organization of everyday experi-ence. He jumps fences, slidesbetween railings and squeezes intothe corners of buildings. While atfirst appearing somewhat Dada, theactions make visible the organizationof space that is so critical to inter-

ventionist work.

Project DescrVillar makes visibleVillar ignoring the effects upon the orgslides between railinfirst appearing somspace that is so criti

In Temporary Occupshows Villar ignoringorganization of everinto the corners of bthe organization of s

Craig Baldwin's

Billboard Outla

wsCraig Baldwin's

Billboard Outlaw

s

1955 B o r n

N e w Y o r k C i t y, U SA



User 43

US



“Drawing from interdisciplinary theo-retical sources and employing video-performance, installation and pho-tography, I have developed a prac-tice that concentrates on matters ofsocial space. My interventions aredone primarily in public spaces. Theyconsist in positioning the body of theperformer in situations where thecodes that regulate everyday activitycan be made explicit.”

Born in Brazil in 1962, Villar latermoved to New York where hereceived an MFA from HunterCollege. He was a studio fellow atthe Whitney Independent StudiesProgram. The focus of his photo andvideo work is the social use of space.He intervenes with his body in thoseareas of outdoor urban spaces that,while remaining visible, retain a mar-ginal status. He is the recipient ofthe Community Arts Fund Grant bythe Lower Manhattan CulturalCouncil. Past US exhibitions include

presentations at the Art Container,Highbridge Park and VacancyGallery in New York, Bona FideGallery in Chicago, the New ArtCenter in Boston and theJacksonville Museum of Contem-porary Art.

Project DescrVillar makes visibleVillar ignoring the effects upon the orgslides between railinfirst appearing somspace that is so criti

N e w Y o r k C i t y, U S

1962 B o r nUpward Mobility

Upward Mobility

Upward Mobility

Upward Mobility



User 45



Project Descrbelieves that under of economic fascismlarge toolbox of resibroadened the scoalso claim, ‘It’s far b

The Pie is the Limit known as the Biotic enduring prop, the ures in the world. TFrancisco Mayor WTrade Organizatin R

1988 F o u n d

e d

New York CityUSA

The God Bless Graffiti

Coalition, Inc. was founded in 2000in Chicago in order to combat grow-ing national and international anti-graffiti trends. We first published our“Give Graffiti the Thumbs Up”brochure to help educate the publicabout the Truth of graffiti. Thisbrochure has been distributed onthe streets by way of re-ordainednewspaper boxes in Chicago,

Columbus OH, San Francisco andLos Angeles. It has also been distrib-uted by hand via an undergroundnetwork of street artists. The successof our initial brochure has led us toexpand our activities, including sub-way ads and our latest endeavor,graffiti bible tracts. We hope in thenear future to make connections topilgrims on similar roads in otherparts of the world as well as bringour message to larger audiences onthe radio and television via publicservice announcements. “For Graffitiso loved the world that it gave itselfto the sole purpose of giving to eartheverlasting beauty.” Rusto 3:16.

For more information, go to:www.counterproductiveindustries.com/gbgc



User 47

SA



The God Bless Graffiti

Coalition, Inc. was founded in 2000in Chicago in order to combat grow-ing national and international anti-graffiti trends. We first published our“Give Graffiti the Thumbs Up”brochure to help educate the publicabout the Truth of graffiti. Thisbrochure has been distributed onthe streets by way of re-ordainednewspaper boxes in Chicago,

Columbus OH, San Francisco andLos Angeles. It has also been distrib-uted by hand via an undergroundnetwork of street artists. The successof our initial brochure has led us toexpand our activities, including sub-way ads and our latest endeavor,graffiti bible tracts. We hope in thenear future to make connections topilgrims on similar roads in otherparts of the world as well as bringour message to larger audiences onthe radio and television via publicservice announcements. “For Graffitiso loved the world that it gave itselfto the sole purpose of giving to eartheverlasting beauty.” Rusto 3:16.

For more information, go to:www.counterproductiveindustries.com/gbgc

Project DescrCoalition, Inc. has c200 wheatpaste powhich generally adomost common and c

2000 F o u n d

e d

C h i c a g o, U SA


User 49



User51

N Y



Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA)was founded in 1998 as a technolog-ical research and developmentorganization concerned with individ-ual and collective self-determina-tion.Their mission is to study the forcesand structures which effect self-determination; to create cultural arti-facts which address these forces;and to develop technologies which

serve social and human needs. TheInstitute for Applied Autonomy (IAA)is an anonymous collective of criti-cally-engaged artists, engineers,and researchers. The IAA has exhib-ited and lectured widely since itsfounding in 1998 at such diversevenues as the Zentrum fur Kunst undMedientechnologie (ZKM), Hackerson Planet Earth (HOPE), and theIEEE International Conference ofRobotics and Automation.

1988

N ew Y or k Ci ty , U SA

Project DescrTheir video documeand one project fromGraffitiWriter, and San IAA research inistreet protestors. Csupport or replace hincreasingly hostile writing robot disguismessages that are h

iSee was developeditor state and corpoavoiding CCTV camZKM, Rhizome.org,

the 2002 World EcoLjubljana, Slovenia.



User53

Italy



Project Descrtizes the Disobbedie

direct action on the movement. The Disodemonstrations agaBianche” were the wby foam rubber, tireand demonstrationsappeared in Italy in who had played a cally replaced in the mit in Genoa the Tuthem their name andsition from the Tute “civil disobedience”Genoa brought the In the video, the Disexperience and a sm

M i l a n, I t a l y

1955, 1956 B o r n



User55

York Ci t y, U SA



Project Descrlective that existed They were born out (WEF) in New Yorkcultural organizing Reclamation event hsome of the tacticalin New York City in Fthey produced sati

Donald Rumsfeld. IAgencias, and Affec

2003

N e w Y o r k C i



User57

New Y o r k C i t y



Project Descris a group formed inthe use of surveillanthese cameras violaSCP manifests this oin front of these caminterviews with the who are “guilty of sBrown from the SCP

in New York City an

1996

N e w

U SA



User59

New York City USA



Project Descripreacher who leads

sumerist communionthe actor Bill Talen, preachers in Times Sreligious theology toStore on 42nd Streeconsumerism that emand sky-cracking grcredit card exorcismmade up of “recoverthe $5 latte. We waand join with the Rely in Union Square Reverend Billy, has Times and The Obse

1955 B o r n

N ew Y or k C i t y , U SA



User61

New York C i t y, U SA



Valerie Tevere is a multidiscipli-nary artist working in New York City.In different forms – video, perform-ance, collaboration, activism, micro-radio broadcasting – Tevere’s prac-tice has looked to the public sphereas a condition and framework forinquiry and discourse. Her work isdriven by discursive practices andconstructions of representation, siteand the public sphere. Current proj-

ects permeate the urban environ-ment as temporal public works andperformances that rely upon struc-tured yet spontaneous encounterswith city inhabitants. Valerie Teverewas an Artist-in-Residence at SmartProject Space in Amsterdam (2001),recipient of a Mellon Humanities fel-lowship at the CUNY GraduateCenter (2002/2003), and an Artist-in-Residence with the LowerManhattan Cultural Council(LMCC, 2002).

Project DescriA Preliminary guide Project DescriptionPreliminary Guide tocratic mapping of Apublic space. Throumined by (seeminglalternative routes thPiper, Tevere explor

well chance encounaudience, navigatinthe city.

1955 B o r n

N e w Y o r k



A Use63

N e w Y o r k C i t y

USA



For Biographical Info see page 45

W ILLIAM P O P E

L.W ILLIA

M P O P E L.

1955 B o r n

N U SA

Project Descr



User69

L ucy O

L ucy O

E i n d h o v en Th



For biographical info see page 45

L yO r t a O r t a

B o r n1 9 66

ve n , T h e N e t h e r l a n d s

Project Descrlarger Refuge Weacommunity, shelter tent and clothing.

Michael Rakowitz - Climate Control , New York City 2002Michael Rakowitz - Climate

Ortiz R u b én

M e x i c o C i t y , M e x i c o

User 71



O rtiz Tor r e s B o r n

1 9 6

For bigrahical info see page 45

For bigrahical i

2004

HATS

Project Description: Rubén Ortiz-Torres has produced aseries of baseball hats that, through the re-arrangement of theirinsignias, produce new, culturally charged meanings.

Project DescrHiroshima City Mustechnological prostthose who feel aliensists of a series of Lof the wearer to thespeaker in the backthey are communicaessence, Dis-Armorthus acts as a cataly

In the manifestationtheir experiences sisense of personal sa

User 73

T h eYes M

T h eSea t t l e , U S A

Yes M99



The Yes Men are an ambiguouscollective consisting of a numberof individuals they are reluctantto reveal. Currently their twomost visible members are MikeBonanno and Andy Bichlbaum.Mike and Andy previouslyworked on the website RTMarkand in 1999 were approached byZack Exley who had registeredthe domain www.gobush.com.Reaching back into your memory,you might recall a scandal duringthe 1999 elections regarding thewebsite that caused George W.Bush to say, “There ought to belimits to freedom.” This scandalwas developed under the tacticaltutelage of the Yes Men whoseproject was to simply use theweb site to satirize the positionsof the future president.

Project Description: In 1999, as an interventionist contribu-tion to the upcoming anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the Yes Mendeveloped a web site titled www.gatt.org which many web surfersconfused as the official site for the General Agreement on Tradesand Tarrifs. The confusion was exactly what the Yes Men wanted andthey continued to satirize the World Trade Organization through thecontent of the site. What they did not count on, however, was thatvisitors would soon be inviting the Yes Men to present on behalf ofthe World Trade Organization. Since then, they have appeared innumerous classrooms and business conventions on behalf of theWTO. Through the use of absurd power point presentations and cos-tumes, they have managed to baffle and astound their audiencesaround the world. They have recently produced a series of playingcards as a reaction to the “Most Wanted” playing cards made pop-

ular during the 2002 Iraq War. A film by American Movie directorDan Olman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith on the Yes Men is due outin theaters in 2005.

Y e s M e n Y e s M e n

F o u n d e d

1 9 9 9

Project DescriBreakaway BusinesYes Men’s most meinvited to speak onof the Future” confgave a stunning lecket. The most astouwhich slavery becaslavery (imported latem of remote labor

To conclude his talkwith a three-foot phallow managers, noUsing a video intertric shocks when the

User 75

YomaYomad d 2001

B a r c e l o n a , S p a i n



The name YOMANGO is thecombination of two distinctlySpanish terms. Mango is a popu-lar Spanish clothing chain cur-rently expanding across Europe.YOMANGO, in Spanish slangmeans ‘I steal’. For this Spanishanarchist collective, who has arotating cast of members, theirname YOMANGO is a brandname as well. “Like all othermajor brand names is not somuch about selling concretestuff, but more about promotinga lifestyle. In this case, theYOMANGO lifestyle consists ofshoplifting as a form of socialdisobedience and direct actionagainst multinational corpora-tions.” As a particular part oftheir struggle, YOMANGO pro-motes the tactics of illegality andin particular, stealing.

Y o m a n g o Y o m a n g o

F o u n d e d

2 0 0 1

Project Descrdisappear. It’s ergoing utensil. It is simpthe devices used bygoing to the mall in

YOMANGO has ping interest in illegacan make their ownobedience.”


Michael Rakowitz - Climate

User67

Tactical M C e n t er f o r

Tactical M C e n t er f o r N e w Y o r k C i t y , U S A



What is the Center forTactical Magic (CTM)? TheCTM defines “tactical magic”as: A fusion force derived fromseemingly disparate “art” para-digms and invoked for the pur-pose of activating the socialimaginary with notions of res-ponsible citizenship through cre-ative action. They appropriatethe behaviors of the magician,the ninja, the artist, and the pri-vate investigator to make con-nections amidst an illusion oforder, control, and restriction. Inthis way “magical thinking”drops its cloak of transcendentalescapism and materializes as asocial, political, and culturalcounter perception - an alterna-tive worldview that summons thecreative and prophetic power ofthe multitude.

Project Descrmany of the tacticsadvocates: surprisesabotage, stealth, erange of actions forities that encompasapparent to us thatpockets in their day-to develop the Ultiless than fifty secreinterdiction, the Ultable, waterproof ma

F o u n d e d 2 0 0 3

Tact i c a l M a g i c Tact i c a l M a g i c


Michael Rakowitz - Climate



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N e w Yo r k C i t y USA



16Beaver is a network of artists,curators, writers, thinkers and acti-vists who converge on a regularbasis at a space in Lower Manhattanto discuss issues, exchange ideas,and raise questions. Some peopleare “regulars” and involved on a dayto day basis, and others come in andout at their liking. The arrangementremains open to anyone who is inter-ested. Some collaborative projectsare born out of discussions; in othercases people take the discussions asa starting point for their individual

pursuits. In addition to artist presen-tations, political discussions, organ-ized happenings, lunches, walks,parties, screenings and the like, par-ticipants regularly share and discussreadings with one another, openingthe space for what Joseph Beuysreferred to as an “ongoing confer-ence.”

An ongoing conference that com-bines the most pressing social, polit-ical, artistic, and philosophical ques-tions within the framework of theeveryday, the routine, the quotidian.

Fo und ed 2003

Project DescrGroup acts as a coof talks will be heldthe broader socio-pto present ideas.



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B e i r u t L e ba no n



“The Atlas Group is an imagi-nary, non-profit research foundation,founded by Walid Ra’ad in 1999 inBeirut to explore the contemporaryhistory of Lebanon and, in particular,some of the unexamined dimensionsof the Lebanese wars (1975-1991).”

Walid Ra’ad is a media artist andAssistant Professor at the CooperUnion in New York City. The AtlasGroup focuses specifically on theLebanese Civil War with particularemphasis on the visual aspects of

this war. Their archival material ispredominately “imaginary” which isto say, they make it up. The concep-tion of imaginary research may atbeguile a viewer, until the imagesthemselves and their captivatingvisual iconography actually manageto provide insights into the visual his-tory of the Lebanese Civil War.Walid Ra’ad’s work has been includ-ed in the 2002 Whitney Biennial,New York, and Documenta XI,Kassel, 2002. His critical essays havebeen published in Third Text, and heis a member of The Arab ImageFoundation, Beirut/New York.

Fo u nd ed 2003

Project Descrments at The Atlas Gof The Atlas Groupon a particular file fments consist of al

film/videotapes, an



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I r v i n e U SA



“Tactical Media is situational,ephemeral and self-terminating. Itencourages the use of any media thatwill engage a particular socio-politicalcontext in order to create molecularinterventions and semiotic shocks thatcontribute to the negation of the ris-ing intensity of authoritarian culture.”

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), foundedin 1987, is a collective of five tacticalmedia artists of various specializationincluding wetware, computer graph-ics and web art, film/video, photogra-phy, text art, book art, and perform-

ance. CAE’s focus has been on theexploration of the relations and inter-sections between art, critical theory,technology, and political activism.Their influential 1994 book, TheElectronic Disturbance, along withtheir other books and cultural actions,has made the collective synonymouswith the term “Tactical Media.” Thecollective continues to write and pro-duce projects, and over the past eightyears has focused on the social andpolitical implications of biotechnolo-gy. Since the summer of 2000, CAEcollaborates with artist/researcherBeatriz da Costa. De Costa is a

Machine Artist and Tactical MediaPractitioner who is currently AssistantProfessor of Studio Art, ElectricalEngineering and Computer Scienceat U.C. Irvine.

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Project Descrthis one, we hopeby focusing on isdirect interest to ing of scientific ithe vague abstra

Free Range GraKunsthalle in FraThrough the useGenetically Modbrought in by viscould be maintainmass produced gbeen adapted fotionable label, “o


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N e w Yo r k C i t y U SA



“In a certain sense, our worksare all, to one degree or anoth-er, centered on the question of,as Deleuze calls it – the produc-tion of a people still to come –and in this manner the produc-tion of publics and publicspace.”

Spurse is an internationalhybrid architectural collectivecomposed of individuals withexpertise in a wide variety offields – statistics, urbanism,

dance, architecture, metal-smithing, computer program-ming, biology, geography, phi-losophy, BMX, cultural prac-tices, etc. The motley groupingof so many various talentsreflects their unusual researchmethodology as well. The collec-tive is dedicated to deliberatelyavoiding hierarchies and thustheir research moves fluidlybetween categories and materi-als. They use interviews, pickedup ephemera and a form of wan-dering to capture the “urban”aspects of a city.

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Project Descrbased on randomsounds will be plarchival material well as recorded



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“subRosa practices a situational em-bodied feminist politics nourished byconviviality, self-determination, and thedesire for affirmative alliances and coali-tions.” The cyberfeminist art collectivesubRosa, consists of five members: FaithWilding, Hyla Willis, Lucia Sommer,Laleh Mehran, and Steffi Domike. Thename subRosa honors other politicallycharged Rosas of history, including RosaLuxemburg, Rosalind Franklin, RosaParks, and Rosie the Riveter. subRosa’sperformative and discursive work focus-es primarily on the uses and implicationsof biotechnology as it applies to sexualdifference, race, and transnational laborconditions and power. Their research/production takes many forms includingperformance, video, publishing, webprojects and teach-ins. This broad rangeof tactics allows subRosa to explorecomplex questions of reproductive andbio- technologies in a dynamic inter-active manner that in many regards con-founds classic definitions of art. In 2002,subRosa produced a project at BowlingGreen State University titled “US GradeAAA Premium Eggs.” Under the guise ofa recruiting campaign set up in theStudent Union, subRosa performed aneducational demo about sex and genderin the Biotech Century, and then askedstudents to estimate the dollar value oftheir eggs, sperm, and organs. Studentsemployed a computer program that cal-culated the ‘flesh-worth’ of their geneticmaterial on the basis of factors of race,

illness, gender, sexual orientation,national origin, and “abnormalities.”subRosa’s first book project, DomainErrors! Cyberfeminist Practices (Auto-nomedia) was published in 2003.

Fo u nd ed 200 2

Project Descrtemporary art museelectronic capacitowhich closed in 198primary employer inproject at MASS Msome connections Ciudad Juarez, Meand political issues ing the (often invisitwo geographically



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“The main reason for using thesetechniques is that they put people atease. Rather than telling peopleexactly what I think, the art experi-ence becomes a platform for a dia-logue, even if it’s solely an internaldialogue.”

Tana Hargest is a computer-based artist whose work flagrantlyconfronts questions of race. As atactic for blurring her identity (ormore appropriately confounding it),she has created a fictitious corpora-

tion called Bitter Nigger Inc. (BNI)of which she is CEO. Readingthrough BNI’s literature and letterfrom the CEO, one finds that theongoing selling point for BNI is arace-free future. Emulating thepromises that permeated the 1990sregarding a race free internet, BNIappears to be capitalizing on it. Oneof their products includes the drug

Bo r n 1960

Project DescrTana Hargest produ“Bitter Nigger Inc.”pharmaceuticals anBitter Nigger Inc. hNew Negrotopia. hoping to tacticallyfor investors, a webed as a virtual islatourist travelling thconsists of several experience of the Institute of Thinking


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J. Morgan Puett grew up inrural South Georgia. Her fatherwas a third generation beekeeperand her mother was a painter. In1988 after receiving her MFAfrom the Art Institute of Chicago,she moved to New York City.After graduate school, Puett de-veloped a series of boutiques inManhattan that “focused on thedesigning of clothing collections,and in the recreation of environ-ments reminiscent of southernrural contexts.” Her dynamic

combinations of business, fash-ion and installation art havesince been concrete staples inher work.

She continues to develop elabo-rate constellations in her workwhich move through, past andaround stories of fashion, indus-try and above all, poetry.

Bo r n 1960

Project Descrproject, J. Morgan references the textiArnold Print Works.massive shell of a fabrick exterior face tnotice a burnt out, aed with a real workLtd. Amongst a cornArnold Print Works tailor is measuring pagement? Or is it thvisitors are welcome



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Project Description:In this ambitious site-sensitive project, J.Morgan Puett produced a participatoryinstallation that references the textile his-tory of the MASS MoCA campus when it

A ld P W k A h

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was Arnold Print Works. As one enters thegallery, they are confronted with a mas-sive shell of a factory. An abandonedchimney and crumbling two story brickexterior face the viewer. As one peeksaround the crumbling façade, they noticea burnt out, abandoned shed. Entering

the shed, they are quickly confronted witha real working business: That Word ThatMeans Smuggling Across Borders, Ltd.Amongst a cornucopia of textile swatchbooks, papers referencing the old historyof Arnold Print Works and a televisionplaying Rod Serling’s gripping play calledThe Suit, a tailor is measuring people forsuits. The suit, it appears, is the site ofinvestigation. Or is it management? Or isit the destruction of manufacturing in gen-eral? The tailor is open for business andvisitors are welcome to have a suit mailedto them at the cost of its production(which isn’t cheap).

That Word That Means Smuggling AcrossBorders, Ltd. Amongst a cornucopia oftextile swatch books, papers referencingthe old history of Arnold Print Works anda television playing Rod Serling’s grippingplay called The Suit, a tailor is measuringpeople for suits. The suit, it appears, isthe site of investigation. Or is it manage-ment? Or is it the destruction of manufac-turing in general? The tailor is open forbusiness and visitors are welcome to havea suit mailed to them at the cost of its pro-duction (which isn’t cheap).Or is it thedestruction of manufacturing in general?The tailor is open for business and visitors

are welcome to have a suit mailed to themat the cost of its production (which isn’tcheap).

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maneuver within it. Drivingtations about race is just o

In an era shaped by the pbeen more warmly receivein the United States obv



B y N at o T h o m pso n

You had heard about its arrival but never expected it to operate like this. Earlier in the month,

flyers had been circulated asking you to, “Get the black out. Bring three to ten items that youassociate with blackness to the Black Factory on this appointed day.” Now you stand therewatching a white box truck pull up to the local YMCA and w onder what on earth this truck wantswith your coffee grounds, dominos and Missy Elliot CDs. As you watch the crew get out of thetruck, you see them unload a large table adorned with blenders, scissors and pulverizes ontothe sidewalk. Then suddenly, a white parachute begins to inflate from the back of the truck. Toyour freakish surprise, the balloon inflates into a massive KuKluxKlan hood where you can faint-ly see the workers setting up display booths inside. Instead of the Black Panther Willie Wonkayou expected, the artist, William Pope L, begins to talk and laugh with people as they begin tobring their items of “blackness” for p ulverization or documentation. You nervously approach andhear Mr. Pope L say, “Well, the Black Factory is here to provide oppo rtunity.”

Quite possibly, the Black Factory is the central work in the exhibition, Interventionists: Art in the

Social Sphere . The Black Factory is a truck that goes on tour, “Bringing the politics of differencewhere it is needed most.” At each stop, the Black Factory engages a local community with a setof tools for disrupting their expectations. People wait in line with their items of blackness only tohave them transformed into some of the most unlikely, and unexpected objects: rubber duckies,prayer rugs, drinking water. The experience is as far away from didactic as possible, yet one can

not help but think that in that ambiguous experience, they received the one thing Pope L. prom-ises the Black Factory will provide: opportunity.

The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere is both an exhibition and a limited survey of tacti-cal practices in contemporary visual culture beginning in the late 1980s. The timing of this exhi-bition is not without a sense of urgency as the entire world feels ‘unsettled’ (to use a term ofglobalism theorist Saskia Sassen)1 with no small part due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.In such turbulent political times, artists operate as both a social conscience for the politics oftoday and a harbinger of the politics for tomorrow.

If one were to survey the surface of what represents American art over the last ten years fortraces of this urgency, one would not be too encouraged. It would appear as though “politicalart” has fallen out of fashion since artists like Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke , Leon Golub andJenny Holzer took center stage in the early 1980 s.2 Fashionable or not, however, political art hascontinued, albeit off the art world screen, throughout the 1990s. The most telling po int of depar-ture for this “off the radar” political art would be the increasing emphasis on the tactics of inter-vention. Instead of representing politics, many political artists of the 1990s employ the tech-niques of art to engage real life situations.

The term “tactics” is important when thinking about interventionist practices and this essay willgo into this term in more depth. However, for now, let us think of the term tactic as a maneuverwithin a game and for the interventionist, the game is the real world. Their projects are made tooperate within various systems of power in the real world and they use the techniques of art to

practices in U.S. museumpart through the use of thed a fluid exchange acrosvey to the American nationlight this switch to tactics.

Tactics can be thought of they are means for buildi

are informed both by art aand cultural experiences. 3

cal issues to an audience they appeal to a viewer wvisual world. Humor, sleigtion and bring socially impartists are interventionists

If one had to make a genethe 1990s, it would be the of violence and exploitaticonspicuously absent. Inhomes and bags designethings “present” as opposart” are spoken, most prefugee photographs, or ignorant complicity. The laimportant now, but rath

changed. The symbolicallcommunicative device.

In understanding why thisvisual culture over the lasvisual landscape has inadotal factors as the rise ofincreasing privatization ofthe cultural landscape of

The 90s: A Taco Revolutio“A taco revolution, I am th

“The various analyses of “on the political importancethat minimize their signifiselves because, just like standings of the economi

profound economic poweguishibility of economic aEmpire.

The Black factory, William Pope L.

Barbara Kruger Your Body is aBattleground

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toward an unchecked internatiin 1999, the global justice movinternational finance: the InterWashington DC (2000), WorldG20 meeting in Quebec (200Switzerland (2001), FTAA Sum

“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are acommercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the con-struction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despairinto consent.” – Thomas Frank, Conquest of Cool.

In 1992, Bill Clinton assumed the U.S. presidency to the rock and roll

hippy, the dragqueen, the revolutionary) were to become the posterchildren of the 90s.

A particularly telling point occurred in December 1991 when under-ground band Nirvana reached number one on the pop charts.Alternative music had officially become mainstream. Black culture,



(2001), EU Summit, GothenbGenoa, Italy (2001), World EcoEU Summit, Barcelona (2002)name a few. Power and resista

While cultural content was inctural industry, physical urban spIn the major American citiesChicago, as well as internationof globalism in their neighborhword to describe the efforts btowns into inviting hot spots foown housing habits as complicilower income families in laDeutsche writes in Evictions: Aleries and artists, assuming theof gentrification, moved into aments, they aided the mechaning residents.”8 While housing ed privatization, so to did the aThe space for non-commerciallsupporting and legitimating poAs Brian Wallis, Chief CuratPhotography in New York writedrawal and relocation of NEDarwinian ethos in the world

smaller and more fragile spacbecome ‘virtual spaces.’ Thoslarger and more like those inWhile political representation seemed, was becoming radicalturn.10

The 60s malcontents speakThis is not to say that these corevolutionary images coupledurban space – arose out of theall the more acute during this pwritings of the Situationists (19inspired by, if not past membeing: Co penhagen, Br ussels, anMovement for an Imaginist Bshifts. The Situationists includ(1914-1973), the Dutch urban de

- ), theorist Raoul Vaneigem (19ers including the eminent philowhom the group eventually disbConstant and Asger Jorn). In hthe Spectacle , Guy Debord, t

sounds of Fleetwood Mac. The baby boomers had gained ascen-dancy, and Clinton raised the horn of victory with a saxophone in hishands. The moment was prescient. J ust three years earlier, the BerlinWall fell and the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama had sofamously described it, was upon the world. The 1990s were a com-plex decade known for the rise of the dot-coms, the generationalswitch in power to the baby boomers, the end o f the Cold War, andthe end of revolutions. Yet, revolutions were occurring. They weremarketing revolutions, as the most popular marketing campaign ofthe 1990s, the Che Guevarian clad Taco Bell Chihuahua so glam-orously made known. The United States officially shifted toward an“information economy” with the often contested but frequently usedterm ‘globalism’ as its dancing partner.

Globalism and the culture industry combine to form a fertile groundfor the growth of interventionist practices. The fact that “culture”became the primary industry of global capitalism was not lost onmany of the artists across the globe. Theodore Adorno, the genuine-ly cynical member of the German Frankfurt School, saw this shiftearly on when he castigated the consumer-oriented turn in music inhis 19XX essay, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and theRegression in Listening.” He dubbed the commercialization of cul-ture “the culture industry,” a catchall term for everything from film totelevision to music to advertising to fashion to, of course, art. Inshort, the culture industry comprises most of the service industrymarkets we encounter everyday. Through the 1990s, the branding of

culture took an especially strong step forward. As Naomi Klein writesin her insightful book, No Logo , “The effect, if not always the origi-nal intent, of advanced branding is to nudge the hosting culture intothe background and make the brand the star. It is not to sponsor cul-ture but to be the culture.” 4

The fact that the visual and cultural apparatuses of the globe werehoning in on the once rarified niche of artistic practice could onlyhave dramatic affects on the terms in which artists saw themselves.According to bla bla, spending on advertising between the periodsof bla and bla grew bla. [get a good quote here nato]

A signature element of this growth of the culture industry is theemphatic co-opting of all forms of America’s counter culture. Themajor powers in the US economy were now standing side by sidewith the likes of the beatniks, the ravers, the punks, the gangstersand the revolutionaries. The culture industry found resonance in pro-moting the likes of Jack Kerouac and Mahatma Ghandi for the Gap

and Apple Computer respectively. Thus, when Stevie Nicks begansinging, “Don’t Stop” to a captivated audience with Hillary and Billclapping in the background, we saw a clue as to the tenor of the nextdecade. We were entering a period of rebels. The heroic alternativeculture of the 60s (the easy rider, the beatnik, the lonestar, the

feminist culture, and queer culture were quick to follow. For the firsttime in music history, in October 2003, none of the artists on the topten singles charts were white.5 The music industry embraced allpoints of view and happily represented the cornucopia of Americandifference.

It may appear that we are off course and we have strayed too longin the realm of the music, television and advertising industry. Butthere are reasons for this. This switch in the role of cultural produc-tion radically affected the way in which cultural producers, includingvisual artists, saw their “content.” “In 1915, a person could go entireweeks without observing an ad. The average adult today sees somethree thousand a day.”6 The dramatic increase in popular visualinundation coupled with the growing use of symbols of politicalaction (like Che Guevarra or Bob Dylan) for commercial purposes,meant that artists needed to reconfigure their tactics to make them-selves heard. How could any artist compete with vi sual machines likeNike, Gap, Starbucks, McDonalds, MTV, etc? Terms like “contentprovider” became common as anything resistant and edgy was usedto sell an underlying not-so-hip consumerist agenda. If CheGuevarra could be turned into a marketing-Chihuahua for Taco Bell,no left leaning political artist was safe. Counter culture was runningout of steam.

At the same time, globalism became a household word. Whilearguably interconnectedness between nations had been increasing

over the past century, the 1990s saw a rapid acceleration of theseprocesses. The Treaty on European Union signed in Maastricht(1992), the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement(1994), and the introduction of the Euro (1999) are just a fewnotable examples. Accompanying these processes was the nowfamiliar movement of factories to nations with cheaper labor pools,the increased hybridization and displacement of cultures and theunexpected boom of the global cities like New York City, BuenosAries, Tokyo, Berlin, London to name a few. 7 The sudden conclusionof the cold war elicited from leaders in the West a “full steamahead” approach to neo-liberal economic models across the globe.And, in the art world specifically, the rise of biennials created thesense that art was being de-centered and this de-centered qualitywas big business.

Activists across the globe had to dramatically switch gears to reactto the changing political climate. The effects of globalism were notwithout its oppositional political responses as the Seattle protests in

November 1999 against the World Trade Organization made clear.The Seattle protests marked a socially critical moment in progressivepolitical history as the rallying cry was not against a specific govern-ment, but against the intangible and relatively abstract internation-al finance organizations that so perfectly represented the shift

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An interventionist’s tools/tactirework, rectify, or reclaim vaSituationists reworked the givetique the “bourgeois Marxists”Paris, so too does an interventioduring the current period.

the extraordinary yippies, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, whosepranksterish antics foreground much of the interventionist work ofthe 1990s. One of their most enduring actions took place on August24, 1967 when Hoffman l ed a group to the New York Stock Exchangeand dropped dollar bills down to the traders below. The suddenappearance of money flittering down from the sky caused eager

d l f h h h ll ll h d

real world as the game Monopoly. In this case, the interventionistplays on a board generally owned and operated by someone else.The ‘tactics’ are the methods used to dismantle and communicateacross these power regimes.

For the purposes of clarity, it is helpful to look at the writings ofM h l d C D C h b k Th P f



This exhibition moves betweeorder to illustrate a broad fieldare categorized into four sectReady to Wear, and the Experimevery project in the exhibition Generally, the combination of aa result. This categorization is

tor’s entry into a different form

In fact, this is why the catalogThis decision harkens back toMayakovsky’s (1893-1930) boo(1890-1941) that had tabs allowpoem. It also incorporates the ist practice into the media of its

Reclaim the Streets“Today, steet action groups suclar forms of conflict and theatricas climbing up a huge crane abanner.” –Encrico Ludovici, froRessler and Dario Azzellini, 200

The streets have long represent

all citizens can participate demartists operate with the desire public and so, the streets are ition “Reclaim the Streets” (RTSprotest begun in London in 199logging protest that re-arrangedjs, dancing, wild costumes anstreets. Influenced in large parture in England, the combinatence has since become a signaipation in the 1990s. Art and under the famous anarchist Edance, I don’t want to be in yo

This pageantry takes on a remamons of the Reverend Billy. A dstreet activist, Bill Talen dawnfanatical priest to preach his ancapitalism: Disney Stores and Augusto Boal’s invisible theatewhether it is a corporate chain delivers diabolical sermons agaand the privatization of daily lif

traders to pile on top of each other as they all instinctually chasedthe money. As planned, the small event spread and grew across themediated globe. As Jerry Rubin states, “You can’t be a revolutionarytoday without a television set – it’s as important as a gun! Everyguerilla must know how to use the terrain of culture that he is tryingto destroy!”12 The Yippies understood the connection between thespectacle and political action and the influence of his tactics can beseen in much of the work in the exhibition.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin understood (probably more so thanthe Situationists who didn’t have much of a sense of humor) theimportance of mixing humor with drama in their actions. Their poli-tics, while just as heartfelt and real as the Students for a DemocraticSociety, were tempered by an understanding of how they would beinterpreted on a national media front. Humor was a tactic. Humorwas a tool. Their actions were a manipulation of visual codes in aspecific time and in a specific place which produced a critical result.In a sense artistic techniques were a resource for manipulating thesituation of everyday life. The codes are re-designed whether theyare in the streets, on a billboard, on one’s body, or in a classroom.

Games, Tactics and StrategiesJerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman thought of life as a game and theyplayed that game well. As stated earlier, their “tactics” gainedmeaning from how they were positioned with the game. How clever,witty and flagrantly media friendly were important factors in their

success. Key to the interventionist sensibility, is the understanding oftactics and how they gain meaning by operating within a game.

When the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)stated, “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysicalto their everyday use.”13, he indicated that language is not aboutmeaning, but about ‘use’. A word’s use came from how it was posi-tioned in a “language game.” The idea that language operated as agame was important to him as he understood that words operatedas maneuvers within a system of meaning. The sociologist PierreBourdieu (1930-2002) expanded this notion to interpret social sys-tems (ranging from knitting clubs to art to Bedouin tribes) as gamesand knowledge itself as maneuvers within it. To investigate this claimfurther, he radically turned sociology onto the field of sociologyitself. That is, he was interested in discovering how sociology oper-ated as a system of maneuvers designed to enhance the partici-pants’ power. Unsurprisingly, he discovered that academic papers,meetings, and books were more often than not used to expand theprofessor’s position of power more than to actually expand the usesof sociological knowledge. This logic becomes apparent when wethink of politicians that use rhetoric and spin to gai n public approval.

To bring this into an interventionist understanding, let us think of the

Michel de Certeau. De Certeau, in his book The Practice of Everyday Life , made a useful distinction between “strategies” and“tactics.” “I call strategy”, he writes, “the calculation (or manipula-tion) of power relationships that become possible as soon as a sub-ject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific insti-tution) can be isolated.” That is to say, a strategy is a plan made bythose who have the power to predict and change the lived land-scape. To go back to Monopoly, the player who owns Park Place

tends to be able to control the flow of the game. On the other hand,a tactic “operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advan-tage of “opportunities’ and depends on them, being without anybase where it could stockpile its winnings build up its own position,and plan raids.” “In short, the tactic is the art of the weak.”14

Interventionists could have the wonderful opportunity to have astheir tag line, “the art of the weak” as their projects do in fact comefrom a ‘trespassing’ into the territory of a dominant system.

As an example, let us take a project from the exhibition: Critical ArtEnsemble with Beatriz de Costa’s Free Range Grain . In Free Range

Grain , the collective has transported a GMO (genetically modifiedorganism) testing lab into the gallery space. With the research facil-ity on-hand, they will test “organic” foods bought from stores forGMOs. They anticipate that many of the foods labeled “organic”are in fact chalk-full of GMOs. This revelation is not meant as anexposé on inaccurate packaging of “organic” foods so much as anamateur science experiment that makes visible the extent to which

industry has inserted itself into something as basic as the food chain.

For a number of years, Critical Art Ensemble has made the field ofbiotechnology their focus. Let us think of biotechnology as a game.It is a system of knowledge that has particular rules and advantagesfor those who have control over it. Critical Art Ensemble as amateurresearchers are operating in a game owned by someone else. Theyare “intervening” in the game of biotechnolo gy. In doing so, they aretaking the given expectations of how this protected field should workand are rearranging them. They are trespassing into this field and asa tactic, reworking the premises of what the science shouldresearch. This is the point where the reworking of that language(whether visually, linguistically or spatially) becomes quite political.When Critical Art Ensemble, present their own amateur researchinto the field of genetically modified foods, they do so in order tochallenge the role of those individuals and systems determining thegame of biotechnology. Their project provides a series of tools forrearranging this system. However, as Gregory Sholette states, “Oneshould be cautious about how far reaching/how available thesetools are and to what extent an art-based practice, and it still is interms of venue by and large, can ‘re-arrange the system’ no matterhow much it may wish to.”15

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Looking through the lens of disdance of tents in the exhibitionand is easy for one person to cvides a home for those trespaslike a bandage, points to the nexcept Buckminster Fuller has

project in and of itself as in the work of HaHa and their Taxi Project, North Adams (2004) pro-duced with the help of MASS MoCA. HaHa collected submissions from North Adams residentsand community groups relating to specific sites in their neighborhoods. The taxi then providedfree rides for community members as well as displaying, with the assistance of flash animationon lcd screens atop the taxi, site-specific statements. HaHa encouraged North Adams to talkto itself.



except Buckminster Fuller, has er Dré Wapenaar. Wapenaar haing off trees and this exhibitionhave surely come a long way.

Ready to WearTrained as a fashion designerextend and perpetuate her soc

well as nomadic clothing. In Ovated. Among many of her radlines that almost literalize tendWear series (1992-1998), whichinternational attention. The worhigh design tent/jacket with whple, of clothing making visible clothes are literally spaces of re

Clothing is not only a space ofthe age of globalization clothipractices in the form of sweatshhas produced a site-sensitive21

Print Works (1861-1942). Puett astores in New York City called JMeans Smuggling Across Boreand wood, a loan industry surviin producing suits made from th

poetic, participatory, and straformed a cottage industry in th

Fashion also acts as camouflagto conceal, to hide away in thenifiers in the minds o f onlookersGoing “under cover” is not so a necessary tactic when trespainto a different game. The CentAs a center strongly influencedetective, magician, ninja), theact in various situations. The jationist to slip from the identity o

“Although their name containswhat they do: they use any meacommerce, ask questions, and provide a public glimpse at the site, www.gatt.org

The art of being undercover finthe Yes Men. Their project stem

NomadsThe Situationists may have walked the streets of Paris allowing their desire to reveal new hiddentreasures buried in the urban environment, but today, many artists prefer to use a set of wheels.These interventionists are nomads and they travel through space to discover and provide disso-nant forms of existence in the urban landscape. As d escribed earlier, William Pope L.’s extraor-dinary Black Factory (2004) must serve as one of the most elaborate forms of the Situationist’sderivé existing today. This tradition of deployed vehicles and technologies must pay homage to

one if its most important artists, Krzysztof Wodiczko.

For over thirty years, Polish born Krzysztof Wodiczko has expanded the Russian Constructivist’snotion of utility and technology for the public good. As Wodiczko acknowledges himself, hiswork is a mix of Situationism and Constructivism with design. “Designers must work in the worldrather than ‘about’ or upon it.”18 His preferred term is “Interrogative design” which he has incor-porated into his ongoing teaching at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. (His essayfrom 1994 is included in this catalogue). With a shift away from representation and an empha-sis on “use” in the social sphere, it should be no surprisethat Krzysztof Wodiczko is one of theinterventionist’s seminal figures. By emphasizing use over representation, Wodiczko’s projectsreveal his inherent suspicions of capital and control. The projects tend to augment individualautonomy and make visible social oppression. As a émigré from Poland, his political affinitiesare tempered with a suspicion of communism as well as capitalism.

Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle Project , 1988-89 is a critical point of departure for much interven-tionist political art of the 1990s. The design of the vehicle was inspired by the 1987 mandate byNew York Mayor Ed Koch declaring that all homeless people of in New York must undergo psy-chiatric evaluations and if they failed, must be hospitalized. Wodiczko decided to focus on the

issue of homelessness and used the shopping cart as a media. In conversations with homelesspeople, Wodiczko designed this project for multiple purposes. The Homeless Vehicle not onlyprovided a user-friendly place for sleeping and can collection, but also provided visibility for theissue of homelessness. Wodiczko is under no illusions that he is incapable of acting as a socialservice agency. He sincerely believes this is the job of a properly functioning government.However, this project brings a dynamic visibility to the issue.“ The oldest and most common ref-erence to this kind of design is the bandage. A bandage covers and treats a wound while at thesame time exposing its presence, signifying both the experience of pain and the hope of recov-ery.”19

Since Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle , many “mobile” projects have built upon and departed fromWodiczko’s work. Michael Rakowitz, a student of Wodiczko’s at CAVS, is the author of one suchproject called Parasite . Parasite, as the name implies, literally feeds off the urban environment.Using the existing HVAC air exhausts of buildings, the homeless shelter inflates. Rakowitz pro-duced many Parasite projects in consultation with homeless individuals and unlike Wodiczko’sHomeless Vehicle , Parasite could be wrapped up into a small bundle and placed in one’spocket.

It is not far fetched to state that many of these “mob ile” projects find affinities in d isplaced pop-ulations. The mobile nature of the work points, in function, to a nomadic populace who are, tosame degree, parasites of the urban environment. Displacement is an increasingly commonpoliticized position. Tools for mobility find increasing prescience in a world continually forced tostay on the move.

Taxi Project, HaHa

Homeless Vehicle Project,

Krzysztof Wodiczo

ParaSite, Michael Rakowitz

I could confront and debaIn this way I could engagethe relationship between theoretical assumptions bwith Nicholas Bourriaud,

“But these experiments c

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took control of the website www.gatt.org. The site copied the officialsite for the General Agreement of Trades and Tariffs with a few crit-ical modifications. The collective has a history of producing thesesites such as their previous web creation www.gobush.org. Usingthese domains as public terrain, the collective produced their ver-sion of the positions of these various political entities. While theyexpected some people to confuse their site with the official one, they

setting of North Adams on spaces of refuge for women. This studytook a number of forms including assistance from both an engineer-ing and feminist studies class at Smith College. The collective setout to “Uncover and map the intersections of women’s material andaffective labor in cultures of production in North Adams and CiudadJuarez, Mexico.” Their interest in Ciudad relates to the fact thatSprague Electric, the capacitor manufacturing company that previ-



pthe open, evolving contecliques and clienteles of thPoker23

Yet, while tactics are a usesarily the best place to eprojects gain their resona

nant systems, some of thegically about changing thdefines it, tactics depend tactics constituted small smeandering walks throughested in whether or not thally revolutionary.

However, political artists De Certeau’s term, straresults. Frustrated with pohave catered their projectonate across a wide-rangdifferent social games froto the “biotechnology” wodifferent things to differenstep the argument that thnot politically effective. Th

ences and methods, sucpeople allows their specifdichotomy between activneed not be such a devainterventionists operating see in the documentary Dand Dario Azzellini that tpopularly used in the growsay there is a connectionpractices and the collectiting it lightly. Interventioand, in fact, are part of a

That is why New York-baincluded as both a signpoIt would be difficult to conlective does as “art”, yet ttionist practice can not beply a reading group that hthe course of five years, tthe war and have conneactivists through their humThis connectivity, and theis crucial in blurring the d

p p p , ydid not expect the visitors to actually invite them to different speak-ing opportunities as representatives of these organizations. Yet, thisis what happened.

In October 2000, the Yes Men found themselves in the confoundingsituation of agreeing to speak in Salzburg, Austria on behalf of theWTO at a conference of international trade lawyers. The group

wrote that unfortunately the General Director of the WTO, MichaelMoore, would be unable to attend but they would happily send arepresentative, Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer. Dr. Bichlebaur arrived with asecurity guard and cameraman and proceeded to give an audaciousPowerpoint presentation on the need to streamline voting in theUnited States by selling votes on-line, and the need to ban siestasas an inefficient holiday. After the talk, the cameraman claimed Dr.Bichlebaur had received a pi e in the face by an angry anti-WTO pro-tester. Since their first foray into speaking, the Yes Men have givenseveral talks with increasing absurdity as representatives of theWTO. The gold leotard with a three-foot phallus on display here isthe result of one of the Yes Men’s most bizarre forays in Tampere,Finland. The group, represented this time by Hank Hardy Unruh,presented a lecture to a group of Finnish college students on theinefficiency of the Civil War. Slavery, Unruh argued, would haveinevitably been replaced by the much cheaper economic solution ofsweatshops. At the end of his lecture, Mr. Unruh’s assistant rippedoff the lecturer’s clothes. Underneath his suit, Mr. Unruh wore a

golden “Management Leisure Suit” which came equipped a large,inflating phallus. At the head of the phallus, Mr. Unruh explained tothe astonished class, a satellite-fed monitor allowed the manager tocontrol and punish workers across the globe while retaining thepleasing comfort needed for the managerial class.

The Experimental UniversityThe range of interventionist tactics may at first appear to take a slidedetour when it comes to the “research” projects in the ExperimentalUniversity. Although the Experimental University is a dramaticdeparture form the more literal forms of intervention as tool it alsopoints to a critical departure in thinking about what art is and howart can be used. In the Experimental University (Nicholas Mirzoeff’sessay goes into this in detail), the artists have decided to interveneinto a discursive space. T hat is to say, they are interrupting a partic-ular field of study (whether this is urban studies, biotechnology,anthropology or ethnography) in order to present different criticalperspectives. We can recognize these practices as “art-inspired”because they skillfully manipulate visual and spatial codes in orderto produce criticality. As previously described, the work of CriticalArt Ensemble with Beatriz de Costa makes this evident.

In their Can You See Us Now? (2004) project at MASS MoCA, thecyber-feminist collective subRosa produced research on our local

p g , p g p y pously existed at the MASS MoCA site for 50 years and closed in1986, moved its production there. Their installation includes a seriesof trap doors that reveal associations between the maps of NorthAdams and Cuidad as well as a series of kiosks placed at localplaces of refuge for women, including women’s shelters, coffeeshops and knitting clubs. This interweaving web moves between the-oretical abstractions of globalization and distinct sites of production

in the local community. Through utilizing techniques of art, the col-lective produces a dynamic pedagogical experience on the effectsof globalization on women.

While subRosa might produce factual correlations, the Atlas Grouppresent imaginary findings. In their archival display titled The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead: Documents from the Fakhouri File at the Atlas Group Archive , the experimental archivistorganization Atlas Group presents imaginary research. The AtlasGroup investigates the contemporary landscape of Lebanon withparticular focus on the history of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991)through the development of an imaginary archive. If the term imag-inary research doesn’t immediately make sense there is a good rea-son for this. The “imaginary” part of the Atlas Group research is thatit is culled from their collective imaginations. That is to say, the factsare not necessarily “true”, but then again, as the project implicitlyasks whose perspective is? This project, like many projects in theExperimental University, problematizes truth claims. Like the title

says, the truth will be known when the last witness is dead. So whatthen, does research look like if it doesn’t particularly trust assertionsof truth? The research is open-ended and lets the viewer make uptheir own mind. In particular, when investigating the imagery andhistory of the Middle-East, the Atlas Group is careful to not repeatthe use of neocolonial techniques. They do not assert. They do notdefine. Yet, this technique does not slip into the postmodern rela-tivism that many rigorous scientists accuse cultural studies of. Theresearch is grounded in the history of the Lebanese Civil War.

The research conducted in the Experimental University possesses anurgency that aligns it with more traditional activism than hobbyistresearch. Their seductive visual displays highlight a dramaticallychanging political landscape whether this is the lives of women, thetechnologies of race, the biotechnology of agrobusiness, or the pol-itics of Arab visual representation. These interventionists manipulatethe visual field to create a learning environment in which we, asviewers, participate. To use the correct term, it is a form of peda-gogy. It is in this regard that many museums c ould see the supposedline between art and science blur productively together.

Conclusion“I came to the conclusion that I would have to be active in twocamps: both ‘inside’, in the museum and art centres – vitrines where

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1 From a lecture given Nov. 6, 2003 at the Rethinking Marxism’s5th International Gala Conference, University of Massachusetts,Amherst.

2 In 1994, the Boston ICA produced the exhibition, “PublicInterventions” curated by Eleanor Heartney and then ICAdirector, Milena Kalovska.

3 See Nicolas Mirzoeff’s The Visual Culture Reader, (Londong:



, ( gRoutledge, 1998)

4 Naomi Klein, No Logo, (New York, Picador, 1999), p. 30.5 Elizabeth Jackson, The World Today , Tuesday, 7 October, 2003.6 James B Twitchel,. “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz,” Signs of Life, eds.

Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon. (3rd. eds Boston: Bedford/ St.Martins, 2000) p. 202-221.

7 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, (New York:New Press, 1999)

8 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics,(Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1998), p. 151.

9 Brian Wallis, “Public Funding and Alternative Spaces”Alternative Art in New York, 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault.(Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)p. 178.

10 For more information see the burgeoning field of critical geography spearheaded by the writings of David Harvey, MikeDavis, Edward Soja, Neil Smith and from the art writingsRosalyne Deutsche and Miwon Kwon.

11 Definition found at www.angelfire.com/ar/corei/SI/SIsecc.htm12 Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution, (New York:

Ballantine Books, 1970), p. 108.13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, p. 4814 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven

Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California and London:University of California Press, Ltd., 1988), p. 37.

15 Gregory Sholette, Personal Interview, 11 Nov. 2003.16 According to Alix Kates Shulman in “Dances with Feminists”

Women’s Review of Books,Vol. IX, no. 3, December 1991, EmmaGoldman never actually said the above quote. This popularquote paraphrased a much longer quote from Emma Goldman’sbook Living My Life .

17 Bill Tallen quoted in Jason Grote’s , “The God that people whodo not believe in God believe in: taking a bust with ReverendBilly”, in Cultural Resistance Reader, ed. Stephen Duncombe(London: Verso, 2002), p. 366.

18 Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Interrogative Design”, Critical Vehicles,(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), p. 17.

19 Ibid.20 subRosa’s project, Refugia, investigates sites of refuge for

women. The prominence in the exhibition of the term “refuge”correlates directly to larger social conditions such as the shrinkage of social services and the increasing displacement ofglobal populations.

21Puett prefers this term to site-specific.22 From the website, www.tacticalmagic.org

23 Brian Holmes, “Liar’s Poker: Representation of Politics: Politics ofRepresentation”, Springerin (Vienna, Austria: January, 2003:http://www.springerin.at/en/

From the collection of th

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ry art wi t h o u t t h e r e v

o l u t i o n ?

Predictably, the definition ifesto. Yet, around one ppragmatic art would cast aIt would aim instead at soed, under the fast changiof all creative activity, inclobject” would inevitably practical, everyday things



By Gregory Sholette

O r : c a n t h e r e

b e r e v o l u t i o n a

r y a r t w i

“Art into Life!”…”Art into Production!”…”Liquidate Art!…,” proclaimed the slogans of the Soviet

avant-garde. They likened themselves to engineers standing “before the gates of the vacantfuture,” 1 as several hundred years of Russian monarchy collapsed in a matter of days. Men andwomen of diverse artistic temperament including, El Lissitzky, Klucis, Stepanova, Popova Tatlin,Rodchenko, Gabo, Pevsner and the Stenberg brothers described themselves variously asConstructivists, Objectivists, Engineerists, and Productivists. Their goal was nothing less than a“universal human culture” founded on reason, collective production, and technological utility 2.Some expressed loathing for conventional artists describing them as the “corrupters of thehuman race.” 3 Others abandoned their studios and sought to enter factories, extolling stan-dardized production processes modeled on Henry Ford’s assembly line. They developeddesigns for workers clubs, portable propaganda apparatuses, and art laboratories where exper-

imentation with new Constructivist principles ideally preceded real world implantation. The artistTatlin, who is credited with coining the slogan Art Into Life, even designed a flying bicycle thatwould grant every Soviet citizen aeronautical mobility.

More than eighty years after Mayakovsky proclaimed “the streets shall be our brushes - thesquares our palettes,” a discordant collection of interests once again seeks the liquidation ofartistic detachment by staging a fresh assault upon the tenuous boundary between art and life. 4 These forces include not only artists and intellectuals, but also philanthropic foundations, gov-ernment agencies and above all global corporations; the contemporary locus of hegemonicpower, a point I return to below. For the moment it is enough to note that within this constella-tion of interests a particular subset of individuals understand this conflict as a site for critical,artistic engagement within the public sphere. Those gathered here under the rubric ofInterventionists represent compelling examples of this tendency. And because the subsidiarytheme of the exhibition is artist as tool provider, comparison to Constructivist and Productivist,post-revolutionary Russian art is unavoidable. Needless to say, this essay steers directly into thispotentially turbulent correlation. It asserts that despite far more modest ambitions and radical-

ly different circumstances, the contemporary, so-called interventionist reveals a definite congru-ence with the historic avant-garde program, enough to make qualified comparisons worth pur-suing. 5 At the same time there is significant variance raised by the comparison and this com-plicates the thesis in ways hopefully generative of future research.

The Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1920s and early 1930s sought to intervene directly into lifeby developing an art that would be useful for the advancement of an unprecedented revolution-ary society. If the magnitude of this task did not lessen artistic arguments and mutual denunci-ations, it nevertheless inspired a surprising degree of harmony regarding one objective: artwould never again be treated as mere décor or serve as a luxury item for the wealthy. It wouldinstead be integrated directly into the lives and labor of the masses as a useful activity, an orga-

nizational tool, and a universal “mathematical consciousness of things.” 6

practical, everyday thingsing that, “Contemporary aAny person who has organ

El Lissitzky states, “The prators and there is no reas

Such sentiments argue for

society rather than the lomasses. They also echo targued that:

“The exclusive concentratin the broad mass which isIn a communist society thamong other activities.” 10

Therefore, if socially usefuas toolmaker must, by nec

the logic of her work. It alof art is ultimately measuObviously, in a revolutionbilities. It also presents risguard aesthetics appearsdoubt this same, extraorautonomous movements centralized and aesthetic1930s, most of the radical dox forms of industrial derealism. Yet while Construthe outright displacemenremained central to most 2the Situationists and Fluxof prototypes, theories anorms, but at reinventing h

into its familiar, rarified, asserted.11

Nevertheless, the radicatoday, much in the same universe. Take the test youticipant who is not compeical, personal or through time however, if all one caas an artistic theme or cur

olutionary art alongside itstrait. Fortunately, there is tation of, as well as an alt_______________

Garden of earthly delights,

Rubén Ortiz Torres

Fig 1.

Flying Bicycle,

Tatlin. ca. 1930

Fig 2.

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Nigger Inc. There is even a “factory” that simulates industrial processes and public service work-ers who monitor potentially hazardous forms of production such as genetically modified food.Meanwhile, the Critical Art Ensemble describes i tself as a “cellular collective c onstruction” exer-cising “solidarity through difference.” 14Yet, contrary to early 20th Century art movements, con-temporary art groups, as if reflecting the plasticity of identity formations in the post-industrialworld, might be said to perform or enact collectivist modes and organizational forms rather thanembody them. Incongruity, pluralism and informality have come to supplant notions of unanim-ity and revolutionary discipline Tactical conditions not grand unifying principles compel their

Fig 10.

ment for revealing to a btional, political, and histordemonstrations against th1960s, The Art Workers Cforcing this and other Newsion day. Group MaterSubculture encouraged ridrhoid cream to reflect on



ity and revolutionary discipline. Tactical conditions not grand, unifying principles compel theirformation, which explains perhaps why so many engage in self-mockery and irreverent play.

Logically, discrepancies also emerge in terms of the audience for this art. While theConstructivists, following Lenin, believed rapid industrialization held the key to radical, socialtransformation, and therefore understandably looked towards factory workers as the ideal audi-ence/participant for their program, by contrast, no contemporary artist volunteers to enter the

work place any more than they anticipate mass-producing utilitarian artworks. .15 Gone is thepositive expectation that modernization once inspired and with it the privileged role o f the labor-ing class. Michael Rakowitz and his cohorts Bill Stone, George Livingston and Freddie Flynn forexample focus on the urban indigent rather the industrial proletariat by creating polyethyleneshelters for homeless people that are i nflated by heat exhaust from city build ings and subways.Similarly, the Danish group N55 offers individuated sanctuary with their Snail Shell System. Itrolls as well as floats and can tap into the city’s electrical grid through the base of street lampslike some municipal parasite, but the occupant it is aimed at is not the worker but an alienatednomad. Yomango’s line of shoplifting positive apparel and accessories allows the plebeian con-sumer to perform everyday acts of sabotage against the homogenizing effects of trans-nationalcorporations. In each case, the intended audience for this work is less working class than sim-ply the masses. But equally significant is the way this new wave of useful artistry functions as anideal model for acts of civil disobedience rather than a practical strategy for defeating globalcapitalism.

If, for the Constructivists, experimenting with the mundane routines of labor promised some-thing far grander than well-designed teapots, then redemption of utilitarian art was uncondition-

ally linked with the immanent rebirth of humankind: living and working collectively, creativelyand rationally thanks in large part to avant-garde art itself. By contrast, the ostensibly practicalsolutions for civic negligence offered by contemporary interventionist art are a symbolic and attimes farcical comment about specific social problems. In other words: to the degree this workis pragmatic, it is also ironic, and to the degree it is aimed at public intervention, it cedes notransformative powers to any one group or class. Not that this represents a deficiency so muchas the logical response to current political and economic conditions. Still, it is a departure fromthe earnest teleology of classical avant-gardism as well as from much of the art activism of the1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

PAD/D: demonstration art circa 1985, Washington DC, first PAD/D newsletter 1981, Not ForSale anti-gentrification street project on New York’s Lowe East Side, 1984; Group MaterialEducation Part One, Dia Art Foundation NYC, 1988; Group Material Da Za Boas, 1982,REPOhistory’s Civil Disturbances in the New York Post, (Marina Gutierrez artist), August, 1998.

The Art Workers Coalition, Red Herring, Artists Meeting for Social Change, The Los AngelesWomen’s Building, Heresies Magazine Collective, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Paper Tiger,S.P.A.R.C. (Social and Public Art Resource Center), General Idea, PAD/D (Political Art

Documentation and Distribution), Border Arts Workshop, Group Material, Gran Fury, Godzilla,the Guerrilla Girls and later REPOhistory to name only some of the artists’ groups foundedbetween 1969 and 1989 certainly had no unified program or aesthetic. 16 They did generallyshare however, an analytical approach to cultural criticism and a desire to use art as an instru-

Yomango

rhoid cream to reflect on military involvement in Cenwrote the rulebook regardby appropriating sophisticthe public about the polit1990s REPOhistory instastreets with images and te

ic window into historical ignored by dominant cultuand minorities. And the Tiger and S.P.A.R.C. are thactive today, have since 1reveal the numerical absemainstream cultural estab

Along with this strong pthese groups also sharedespecially in terms of the land its de-emphasis on themost significantly these around the cultural politicof feminists, progressive lthat, despite increasing frto be capable of coalescimovement. PAD/D went s

arts network linking a vargalleries, community centsort of shadow art world toriented activists. 17 VeryPAD/D sought to transfobona-fide, counter-culturathe rhetoric surrounding th

Not that this history is losStill, as curator Nato Thom“do not preach. They do na literal political message, er/participant to develop political content is found iities as opposed to solutioPerhaps the softer politicahealthy disillusionment witedgement that even wheremain a privileged class

align themselves with theGenoa, Quebec, and so fing, as informal and fragcounter-globalization mov

Fig 11.

IBM New York TimesAdvertisement 1/1991

Fig 12.

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within prominent museums, journals and biennials. But why shouldthis surprise us when the leading lights of the art world, fromMatthew Barney to the managers of the Tate Modern, present highart as a spectacle of abundance, even of excess, in which success ismeasured by how many fabricators one commands and who throwsthe swankiest openings? And all of this shock and awe appears tobe thanks to the marriage of high culture and corporate largess. Interms of artist as tool provider, therefore, the boasting of Thomas

time, can one not afford to attempt the radical transformation ofpresent art and society, with or without a revolution immanent?

The author wishes to thank Nina Gourianova for her generosity andvaluable comments on the essay.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, art organizer and foundingmember of Political Art Documentation and Distribution and the

1 From the “Realistic MSecond State PrintingRussian ConstructivismArt Gallery & Rizolli: 1

2 K. Medunetskii, V. SteConstructivists AddresInto Life, p 81.



p , , gHoving, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artsums it up decisively:

“Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy -social-climbing-fantastic!” (Wu, 127).

———————————————————————————————-Figure 13 Krzysztof Wodiczko’s drawing for a vehicle in which therider must walk back and forth on a see-saw platform to power it togo forward from 197?.

The call for art to merge into life returns today under the mostimprobable of circumstances. Not only has the decrepit SovietUnion completely vanished, but, as if history were a glove pulledinside out, so has the once widespread aspiration that society begrounded in equanimity, fraternity and reason rather than profitabil-ity, competition, and market speculation. Socialism, the driving forceof the Russian avant-garde, has become, in the words of as JacquesDerrida, a specter. It haunts the totality that is, at the start of the 21stCentury, global capitalism. What is so very odd, therefore, is thedegree to which current historical circumstances are exactly oppo-site those surrounding the Soviet Avant-Garde, and yet simultane-ously analogous.

The current wave of artistic utilitarianism does indeed produce use-ful, tool-like art. And, these acts of resistance practic ed within every-day life are witty and at times inspiring. Nevertheless, they remaindisconnected from comprehensive visions of radical, social transfor-mation. their politics vague or at best subdued.i23 It is worth notingby way of an admittedly oblique answer to the question raised aboutradical art and revolutionary politics that some of the most ambitiousprojects in the USSR in the 1920s, including Tatlin’s Monument tothe Third International and Rodchenko’s Workers Club, never left theprototype stage. Perhaps foremost among these unrealized socialinterventions was the “people’s air bicycle,” or Letatlin, a peculiarcombination of the pragmatic and the fantastic that Tatlin fabricat-ed in the seclusion of the Novodevichi Monastery in the early 1930s.The personal flying machine at once signaled the possibility thatevery Soviet citizen could be mobile, travel freely; even temporarilywithdraw from the collective. But more than that, one can read into

Letatlin a sly, critical stance towards the increasingly bureaucraticand centralized Soviet state. 24 In other words, is it possibly Tatlin’smerging of autonomy and critique, rather than his call of art into lifethat most clearly prefigures today’s interventionists? At the same

REPOhistory. This essay was written in the Spring of 2004 at whichtime he was the Distinguished Batza Family Chair of Art and ArtHistory at Colgate University i n Hamilton New York.

p

3 Ibid. 4 Mayakovsky from his p

Camilla Gray, The Rus(London: Thames & H

5 Note that both my ca

historical comparison and writings of BenjamLodder on the revoluti

6 V. Stenberg from Art I 7 Popova,”Commentary

Into Life, p 69.8 Rodchenko, “Slogans

p 71.9: El Lissitzky, “Suprema

El Lissitzky: Life, Letter1967), p 333.

10 Karl Marx and Frederi 46, (New York, Intern

11 See especially B. BucRegression,” reprintedRepresentation, editedMuseum of Contempo

12 Art Into Life, p 38.

13 Nina Gurianova, “TheReconstructing the JouMalevich:SuprematismNew York, 2003, p.44

14 Observations on ColleThe Critical Art Ensemhttp://www.criticalart.

15 At least this is true in exceptions from an earlier

Mierle Laderman UkeCity Department of Sanitamore than twenty years as

Lonidier, Mike AlewitzToronto, Canada: Car

16 For more about these Decade of Art for SociE.P.Dutton, 1984); Bu

ed. Nina Felshin, (SeattleNew York: 1965-1985,

of Minnesota Press, 20Pieces: Community an

coming from University of

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B y N i c h o l as Mi r z o ef f

the legal state of minority instance “Man”—by whicEuropean, free,able-bodieself by the public use of Recept of emancipation is thathe barriers to its enactmethe category of “Man.”To make an assertion that imental university would b



Imagine for a moment that you do not know what a university is—or

more exactly what it might have been. Imagine that you set aside allthe reams of boilerplate and platitude produced by today’s universi-ties in search of a purpose for themselves to ask yourself what a uni-versity will have been by the time this exhibition is over. The futureperfect—the ‘will have been’—is the tense of the ghost, which willhave returned. The ghost in this case is precisely the imagined uni-versity that haunts the ruins of the university as it is today.i The lateEdward Said used to declare that the university was the last utopiain Western society. The slightest glance at any report by a senior uni-versity official will quickly make it apparent that no hint of utopiaremains, with its language of incentivizing the faculty, naming stu-dents as customers and claiming the benefit of the institution to beits function as an economic multiplier. Did that utopia simply evapo-rate to join the long list of unfulfilled millenarian dreams? The new‘realism’ among university administrators would say so, but this exhi-bition suggests otherwise. For as the ghost of the university contin-ues to return, it demands that we consider that the university is infact yet to come. The utopian university is not the ghost in themachine but rather, as Deleuze and Guattari might put it, it is a

machine. This machine produces knowledge, not information, andthere is a difference. This university-machine did not die but hasbecome dispersed into the expanded field: beyond the museum,beyond the lecture hall and into everyday life. Experience the inter-vention of the experimental university and realiz e that the dream wasnot necessarily about those places with the name university on thedoor. The existence and emergence of utopian spaces to eat, live,dream and imagine takes place in-between the ruins of the museumand those of the university. It is not a revolution. It is a moment ofclarity.Instead of thinking of the university as a locus of national policy bywhich the elite recruits new members, perhaps it might be a place inwhich people encounter each other. This sideways encounter isinspired by the German writer and critic Walter Benjamin’s vision ofthe Arcades, the nineteenth-century covered iron-and-glass arenafor shopping, strolling and perhaps above all observation. Benjamintook this social and architectural innovation and transformed intowhat he called a dream-image. The dream-image expressed his

sense that the Arcades were an especially important site in whichpeople were trying to dream the future into being. Taking Said’ssense of the university as a utopia seriously would make it the 20th

century equivalent of this dream, trying to create tools, images and

ideas for the 21st century. Of course, this kind of rhetoric is close tothat used by universities themselves with their insistent claims to pre-pare people for the future and improve the world we live in. Said’sview was far more expansive than the narrow socio-economic ame-lioration now offered to students and their parents in exchange fortheir ever rising tuition fees. This university might be a place ofemancipation, rather than instruction, formed by critique rather thanthe transfer of information. The emancipated university was notaccomplished in the past but dreamed by it. Like the Arcades, it wasa vision of the refiguring of social space or, more exactly, the render-ing of space such that its social nature becomes apparent. That is tosay, there is no such thing as empty space because all space, or thesensation of space, is socially produced.Unlike the Arcades, the university is a space of production ratherthan consumption, in short a machine. Here is the connection withcontemporary art, which Sarat Maharaj has called a form of knowl-edge production. In this view, the distinction between the university(each with its own musem) and the museum (each with its own edu-cation department) is getting productively blurred. In this interface

of artwork, museum and university, knowledge is produced as adream of an emancipation that is yet to come. The emancipated uni-versity in the expanded field is, then, a dream machine.There is much work to be done in developing this idea. Let’s beginwith the question of emancipation. Emancipation is the legal or bio-logical process by which a minor attains status as a subject. To beemancipated, one might come of age; or be set free from bondagein slavery or indentured servitude; or have the legal burdens of civildisability set aside, such as those prescribed against Jews and otherminorities in European nations prior to the French Revolution. Inshort, emancipation is an act of what French philosopher MichelFoucault called “biopower,” the intersection of life with power.Biopower sets the age at which one attains subject status at 30, 21or 18; figures the “age of consent” to sexual relations; renders cer-tain forms of sexual practice not just illegal or immoral but as a sep-arate species, such as the “homosexual”; permits children to be tried“as adults”; determines what forms of embodiment are “disabled”and which are not, and so on. In the European Enlightenment, the

philosopher Immanuel Kant answered the question posed by aGerman newspaper “What is Enlightening?” as emancipation, or“Man’s quitting the nonage occasioned by himself.” Nonage was

imental university would btive deployment of criticismcircumscribed by this limcussing Kant’s essay on Enicism was now to be framevents that have led us to c

we are doing, thinking, sayaffirmation or the empty dthis historico-critical attitudBy this, Foucault meant thacific rather than seek to crical systems have repeatedempty affirmation of freedits local and specific forms spread erasure. In the connotable omission from Fousubject: seeing. His work tion” of the subject, devein 1960s Paris. Althusser something “which can be commonplace everyday there!’”iii When we respoing “do you mean me?”recognition is the means time and space. Inherent

veillance that leads to a mactions of the subject are sRather than an exchangesumed in Althusser’s theorJacques Rancière has recetacle now dictates that thone must keep moving, k“The police are above alrather, about what is not see.’” One of the new camin a remote area of the cobject of visuality which is are not just the uniformedFoucault called “an admiwith the judiciary, the armygeneralized sense of theRancière continues: “the ping happening, nothing to

ing; they say that the spacof circulation. Politics conslation into the space of thpeople, workers, citizens.

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the 1890s to the “theocratic anarchism” of the young WalterBenjamin in Weimar Germany, the Situationists of the 1950s and 60sand many contemporary strands of theoretical practice, perhapsespecially those connected with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.This is not to suggest that the artists here should simply be thoughtof as anarchists because many of them would disagree. At the sametime, it is not to adhere to the violence committed as “anarchism.”The point is to bring that strand of concern with the politics andpractice of e er da life that as addressed b anarchism and often

as farmers is less than one per cent of the working-age population,for all the endless evocation of the needs of farmers by the govern-ing class. When they say “farmers,” hear “agri-business.” Now thatnearly all but the most dedicated of us take home our bread readycooked, Critical Art Ensemble with Beatriz de Costa plan to make usreexamine that connection by testing loaves for the presence ofgenetically modified grains. We are told that these are safe. Exactlywhat knowledge will be produced by this experiment is unclear. Thisis the difference bet een an artistic e periment and a scientific one

in the hope of forming Babylon. In this case, theAdams that connect gendin which MoCA itself is hobe controversial because gis exemplary of the experihas clear links to art and pnew future. But that new where ideas identities an



practice of everyday life that was addressed by anarchism, and oftenoverlooked by other forms of the political, back into the practice ofthe experimental university.The possibility of an experimental university has emerged in consid-erable part thanks to the emergence of digital culture. Computertechnology blurs the distinction between amateurs and profession-

als and threatens to make information available as simply as photog-raphy did for the image. It is intriguing in this context to recall thatEric Raymond’s famous essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” oneof the classic texts of digital culture, concludes with a passage fromPeter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Raymond’s essay high-lights the creative possibilities of “open-source” programming usingthe Linux operating system with the top-down, all-controlling in-house system (implicitly that of Microsoft). After hailing the “bazaar”of open source as superior to the “cathedral” of in-house (and with-out addressing his own Orientalism), he turns to Kropotkin.Kropotkin had turned away from a career as a government reformerto that of a radical and revolutionary in Tsarist Russia of the 1860s.He had witnessed what he considered the failure of government-ledreform in Siberia, while gaining a devotion to the peasants and ordi-nary people that was to shape his subsequent career. The passagecited by Raymond turns on Kropotkin’s reflecting on his life within aserf-owning family—a serf being a person “owned” by a landowneras the labor for that land—only to then experience emancipation in1863. Having lived through this emancipation, Kropotkin came to“appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of com-mand and discipline and acting on the principle of common under-standing. The former works admirably in a military parade but isworth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can beachieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.”viiiThat effort of many converging wills was what sustained the anarchyof the internet before it was reined in by Microsoft and AOL. Seenmore broadly, it is perhaps the first theory of everyday life as a formof resistance and as an alternative to centralized power, for all itsnineteenth-century baggage of “civilization” theory. More widelystill, this is the ethos of the experimental university. Indeed,Kropotkin used museums and libraries as examples of the principleof “to every person according to their needs.”ixYet needs can be met in a variety of ways. Discussing the growth ofpublic kitchens in the 1890s, Kropotkin shuddered that “to make aduty of taking home our food ready cooked, that would be as repug-nant to our modern minds as the ideas of the convent or the bar-rack.”x By connecting mass-produced food to the d isciplinary institu-

tions of church and state, Kropotkin linked everyday life to powerthrough the basic means of subsistence. It has recently been esti-mated that 10 corporations supply over half of all the food and drinkconsumed in the United States. The number of people now working

is the difference between an artistic experiment and a scientific onethat is created to demonstrate a theorem. It challenges the cosinessof the “museum visit” with its promise of quiet viewing, rewarded bya visit to the gift shop and café. In the experimental university thathas taken its place, it remains to be seen what happens next. Thepoint at which this will start to get interesting will be when the artist-

educator loses the edge of surprise over the experimental student.Learning curves are very short these days.The cybernetic hope of anarchic freedom implied in Raymond’s cita-tion of Kropotkin had already been imagined as a cityscape by theSituationist architect Constant in the 1960s. He called it “NewBabylon.” A Dutch painter who had come to abandon art in favor ofthe new practice of urbanism, Constant has a good claim to haveinvented the strategy of the situation. Inspired by his vision of a massculture freed from the routine of subsistence labor by cybernetics,Constant imagined that automation would generate huge amountsof “so called free time.” Rather than think of this time as “leisure,”Constant and the other Situationists were inspired by the Dutch his-torian Johann Huizinga to think of it as play and to consider play asfreedom.xi In elaborating his theory of New Babyl on, Constant quot-ed the cybernetic theorist Norbert Weiner who “compares the elec-tronic machine to the imported slaves of antiquity.” This new eman-cipation from the necessity to work would be for all, rather than theminority supported by slavery. It will generate “unprecedented free-dom, an undreamt-of opportunity for the free disposal of time, forthe free realization of life….The freedom won as a result of the dis-appearance of routine work is a freedom to act,” which he called the“lived work of art.” In this society, traditional forms of art would berevealed as a “surrogate” for this kind of freedom.xii New Babylonwas to be the site of “the real practice of freedom—of a ‘freedom’that for us is not the choice between many alternatives but the opti-mum development of the creative faculties of every human being.”xiiiFreedom was not to be seen either as an absence of constraint or asthe self-enobling choice among variables which is presented byAmerican apologists today but as the possibility to play.Constant envisaged New Babylon as a world without frontiers, thathe called “a camp for nomads on a planetary scale.” Rather than anexclusionary camp that seeks to detain and deport the nomad, likethe new detention camps for migrants and refugees created in theEuropean Union, Australia and the US borderlands, New Babylonopened a space for them to play as they chose without having tobecome settled to do so. This new cityspace was inspired by the oldBabylon of the ghetto and marginal space: “these areas of the his-

torical cities, where the outcasts of the utilitarian society sticktogether, these poor quarters where racial minorities, artists, stu-dents, prostitutes, and intellectuals are living together.”xiv ThesubRosa group creates maps of cities from alternative points of view

where ideas, identities anreinforced. The risk is thatknowledge commodificatmuseum and the everydayestablish itself. Both musevade the charge of elitism

ever larger numbers of psense of a piece with on-lpromotion of life-long leapolitical significance to thof numbers, then the chaand utopia presented by t

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Professor, Art History and

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Enceclopedic EntriesEnceclopedic Entries



Collectives

Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson

The desire to speak in a collective voice has long fueled the socialimagination of artists. Futurism, Constructivism and Surrealismshared this aim early in the 20th century as did collectives such asCoBrA, the Situationist International, Gutai and the Lettristes afterWorld War II, Fluxus, the Art Workers Coalition, Art & Language,and others in the 1960s, Group Material, S.P.A.R.C. , PAD/D, andGran Fury among many in the 1970s and 80s and organizations suchas The Guerrilla Girls, RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, TemporaryServices and Las Agencias more recently. At any given moment, theparticular form of collectivism has varied depending on specific his-torical conditions. For example, if the earlier ambition was, asMondrian once put it, to struggle “against everything individual inman,” or to become, as Malevich termed it, “world-man,” then theaspiration of collectivism after the Second World War has beenimagined differently. The governing artistic posture or identificationof this collectivism after modernism, as it might be called, has rarely

claimed to find its unity as the singularly correct avant-garde repre-sentative of social progress but instead has gathered itself into acoherent program around decentered and fluctuating identities thatutilize the inevitably heterogeneous character of any group formationrather than fighting against it. In keeping with Theodor Adorno’s crit-ical judgment that modern collectivism and modern individualism“complete one another in falsity,” artistic collectivism in the last 50years has found its purpose in skirting both untruths. This aim torework social imagination has become all the more pressing and allthe more prescient in light of the various social, economic and polit-ical pressures that have been lumped together under the label“globalization.”

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LaughannilingusWilliam Pope.L

Despite (and probably because of its) enormous and enduringpopularity, comedy has never enjoyed the critical prestige of, say,the so-called serious forms such as drama or the documentary orthe novel…

Comedy can be both anti-authoritarian and socially transforma-tive. However, just because a person is against authority doesnot mean he or she is pro-society. And even if so, which society?Maybe the only society worth being for is that which one is will-ing to stand against.

When comedy shifts from its proper focus, that is, against con-vention, the law, the uppity and the socially powerful, and turnsits attack on the weaker and the oppressed, it keeps things the

same and assists in maintaining the status quo.

Comedy then becomes a strategy to keep people in line, theirdesires in their panty and their pleasure routine.

Some feminist historians consider comedy a feminine form:‘ancient, tribal, [and] used to celebrate’ the wank of a thing;always moving dramatically toward conclusions in which peopleare united through divorce and lots of parties; made hole throughdissipation and so on and so on…

Benedict Anderson’s notion of nations as ‘imagined communities’comes in handy when thinking about comedy. Why? Becausewhen a nation has its mouth open, anything can happen…

Adapted from: Comedy, Melodrama and Gender: Theorizing theGenres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe in Classical HollywoodComedy, ed. K. B. Karnick and H. Jenkins, 1995.

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Notes on the Archive

spurse

The archive is often seenpast event – an event tha

be only accessible throughThe archive becomes thuand contested productionsense the archive is the sito turn history upon itself acursive regimes of what isThe Foucaultian archive bhaps heterological investigCritical to this form of the graphic function to the aweaknesses, aporias, newing latent in the mass of questions of the present). shift into genealogical mtermed the cartographic).a morphogenetic shift to in the production of what ization of the “commons”

tization.

Here in the development of inquiry one finds intereroot of the word archive —lic gathering – the space a space for the productiostrategic zone of stoppingof ideas, things, events, pscale and forces to fold iproblematization of the giving to allow the givennesmode of acting and doing

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The AmateurCritical Art Ensemble

The word “amateur” is vedisciplinary term used to ditable professional and soteurs are second-class cittion. However, in the contamateurs have a significathe ability to spot contradthe dominant paradigms, adigms thought dead or experience to their delibecialists. In this manner amthe terms of action withinimportantly, however, amized systems of knowledgand hence do not have irr

their efforts, such as mainfunding hierarchy or mainsay that amateurism shouThe amateur’s relationshmany ways. For the sake ofundamental processes angood ideas, dialogues witteur’s process.

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The Bus Toure-Xplo

Preface:It is a difficult assignmentlar strategy or medium, because of the collaborat

Touring is more than just atacle” or for the increasinculture for economic purp

The tour conjures more thplay numerous forms of mnot just of people, but of iital, of labor, of culture.

It is more than a pointed ing/implicating ourselves rain of frames such as pubity, land art, sculpture, arance of music.

It is more than a tactical “public” space, in which wloitering.

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Thoughts on illegalityYOMANGO (Spanish for

You must realize that YOindividuals who dedicate tcollective. Second, therYOMANGO is everywhe‘the followers of YOMANYOMANGO. YOMANGwhen YOMANGO occursrity personel or store workit, thus making visible the moment. This person, at tha thief. But nothing is fartYOMANGO is a gesturadvertising promises, butfrom having: the prospect sharing, community...YOmagic. It does not recog

acknowledge definitions sognize borders or securitand liberates your desire. within objects which are tsame place where you yopact between coprisoners

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Détournement

Nato Thompson

“Since opposition to thegenius has become prettymustache on the Mona Liinal version of that paintingUser’s Guide to Détourne

Originally conceived by thment can currently be consay, existing and making msystem is a popular form oof a billboard manipulatioto say what they like or to inal intent. Yet, it can aderives its meaning by trengagement. The radicameaning is connected to a

temporary corollaries in “(billboard advertisementslar music) is modified guetations. The popular Canaradial marketing niche for

However, as the above qvisuality of a dominant sysuccessful détournement.concretize that relationshpower relationships behinproductive, potentially am

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Chameleon

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