I am excited about the potential of In Protest, an event organized in tandem by the Kadist Art Foundation and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, to be held Wednesday, May 9th at 7pm.
Artists have been asked to design posters with a specific or abstract political message to be given away at this one night event. The list of artists includes many whom I instantly associate with politically charged practices such as Rigo 23, Martha Rosler, and Natasha Wheat and many whose posters may help recast their interests in a more political light.
The artists are Zarouhie Abdalian, John Baldessari, Amy Balkin, Dodie Bellamy, Charlie Dubbe, Amy Franceschini, Doug Hall, Kevin Killian, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Shaun O’Dell, Rigo 23, Piero Golia, Jordan Kantor, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mungo Thomson and Natasha Wheat.
Questions of art praxes’ political potentials and limitations are constantly swirling, all the more so in these highly charged times of active protest movements. The world has yet to come to terms with the revolutions recently transpired or those still afoot. And the future is less than settled in nations whose ‘completed’ revolts in the Arab Spring have left them in a terrible and dangerous state of flux. A military government is still in control of Egypt and in advance of elections, vying political factions are falling victim to massacres such as the one in Cairo on May 2nd. Closer to home (and much tamer despite the press’ over emphasis on its outlying criminal element) we have our local Occupy, revitalized in its May Day general strike. In each of these protests and in the more everyday ones (usually in the grand tradition of labor struggles, but also against abortion and pro or against various political personalities and parties) the arts play a major role, both as means of message production (signs, banners, et al.) and as a foothold for giving the myriad people some cohesiveness (ex. the various strains of music performed and DJed).
During a March 31st talk at the Kadist curator Nato Thompson, whose excellent exhibition Living as Form is about to finish its satellite run in SF, discussed various ways in which art could engage with a wider audience, purpose and potential, noting (I’m paraphrasing) the worst thing we could do is commission a bunch of posters. But is such a curatorial proposal so untenable? In the introduction to Dorathea von Hantlemann’s excellent How to Do Things With Art (2010), she describes her theme as, “How does art become politically or socially significant and what preconditions must be fulfilled in order to enable artworks to attain such significance?”
In Protest will raise these questions anew, confronting Thompson’s challenge and interrogating Hantlemann’s question. Each artist will address both the specific audience in attendance and the vitality of their medium (the poster and art as a whole) in the context of the museum and the wider political conversation. And we, the viewers, will walk away with works of art.
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It is not my intention to negate this event and am interested to see the pieces produced by the roster and hear the planned talks, but I can’t help but feel a contradiction of things here. The quote being used as the opener for said event (“How can the arts participate in a creative and collective production of our shared future? How can we make visible our shared concerns about the political landscape of this country?”) as well as your above mentioned quotes make me a little skeptical of what real success resides in this effort.
I am not attempting to argue Nato’s intention, but I feel to truly answer Dorathea’s question, one has too. That the “worst” in commissioning a bunch of posters is not the commissioning, but everything else that follows suit. The programming and events that have taken place as part of Living as Form exhibition have involved a level of “getting out into the world”, working pass the walls of where “art” typically lives, but I do not understand why this endeavor is failing to do so.
Dorathea’s question and Nato’s action seem to be at odds here, but for me they are technically allies. I feel the real strength in the politics of this work would have been better suited out in the common world and not the confines of the museum. To experience these commissioned pieces in a museum for me instantly wipes them clean of any real current political capability. Why aren’t these posters simply being hung everywhere in the Bay Area? Being handed out at a real rally, protest or fair? Why isn’t an actual political event being formed for these works to meet the intended possible political strength they were commissioned for?
Basically I feel the answers to these question being asked exist within the actions of the individuals asking.
May 8, 2012 @ 5:46 am
BDH? What’s nice is that posters will be given away at this event. We can hang them up anywhere we want. And if we’re not satisfied with the ready-made posters available at this event, we can make our own–and give them away to people at BAM, the night of the event, if we want, or hang them up wherever.
May 9, 2012 @ 7:31 am
I think it’s a mistake to think that art should be instrumentalized to achieve, more successfully, the aims of activism, but it’s also a mistake to think that art has no potential to achieve legibility as a public voice. The museum is also a place that needs transformation and the distribution of these posters to political organizations (as part of the project) is a way for the project to have lives in other non-art domains of action. It’s important to recognize what’s happening here as a publishing project, rather than an exhibition (thus the one night distribution event). Ultimately it’s the responsibility of the visitor to understand their agency in relation to the posters, as much as it’s the responsibility of the artists and organizers to establish or explicate that potential. Those who treasure the posters (very cheaply printed) as special art objects will miss their raw potential as participating in a public political statement. In other words, it’s not the museum’s fault that this happens, but our own.
May 11, 2012 @ 11:31 pm
I disagree, JdP. The museum, the curators, and the private funder can and must be held accountable, as must the artist-participants, poster-collectors, and other event attendees. We were all willing participants in an event that “aestheticized politics” at a time when real action is needed and stakes are high.
It is first important to note that the event at which the posters were distributed/collected was an exclusive event and was not public: it was held at the Berkeley Art Museum and admission ($7) was charged. If we are, as you suggest, to recognize this as a publishing project, rather than an exhibition, it is still similarly exclusive: only artists were asked for their words; the posters are printed in limited editions; and they are being “selectively” distributed to “relevant” groups. So, how do we understand this publishing project?
This project ostensibly seeks to build a bridge between the museum and activists. The artist is used to build this bridge. However, the museum’s nod to political participation risks very little – if a poster incites ire or actual action or controversy, the museum can remove itself easily and just defer to the artist who made it. (Further, if we find fault in the conceptualization and format of the project itself, JdP asks us outright to let the institutions involved off the hook and blame ourselves for this project’s failures.)
The May 9 event felt much like any other one night show. Though the objects on view were all giveaways, this is nothing new for a museum setting as we have had decades to grow accustomed to Gonzalez-Torres’ stacks, for instance (though unlike the near-limitless Gonzalez-Torres stacks—to which the stack presentation of the posters was compared—these posters were in limited edition). Janey, though I would like to agree with you that this museum poster giveaway event was just a nice thing to do, I cannot.
These posters, “cheaply-printed”, acquired value that was entirely divorced from any use value one might expect given their format as protest posters. Unlike actual protest posters that gain value and significance through their use in events, these posters were presented dislocated from protests, as art objects. Their value, instead, came from the authority this publishing project guaranteed: the posters were presented by a respected arts intuition and a reputable arts foundation and by a roster of artists, many with long-established careers. By co-opting the format of the protest poster for this publishing project, the project and its presentation risk confusing action with its ‘mystified’ authorizations.
May 14, 2012 @ 3:40 am
You’re absolutely right ZA. It would have been much better if the museum completely ignored the real world like in the good old days when art was for and about art. Thanks goodness the left can count on real radicals like you to be able to put your finger right on the problem: other people’s efforts to contribute to understanding. This museum project will probably set the resistance to corporate capitalism back 20 years.
May 20, 2012 @ 10:22 pm
Okay, a few comments. First off, ‘rp’, are you being sarcastic (it reads as such, its hard to get ‘tone’ online…)? I don’t think ZA is suggesting that the museum has no potential roll outside of being ‘art for and about art’ (which it never has or can be), only that this instance/event fails on the terms she describes and/or it self-ascribed.
Perhaps the good old days you are referring to are the ones when artists went along with high profile locations and projects without question (for the sake of having their name/resume loaded with ‘also showed with’ gems), when the acts of the museum by the very fact of their institutional status sat beyond critique?
Or a time/place when a project was a success just because it happened without regard to any consideration to gaps between potential and result, effects and affectation?
Surely we’re better off as a community when the questions ZA asks are valid, and also where such projects as ‘In Protest’ can come to pass as successes in some people’s eyes, and failures in the eyes as others. The monolithic voice, happy to be ‘helping’, is the enemy of real discussion, political and artistic.
Maybe if you expanded your response to include your opinions of how this event succeeded further, responded to specific points in ZA’s comments you have contention with? It would be very welcome here or anywhere really…
this is the review I posted the next day:
Berkeley Art Museum//In Protest= Co organized by the Kadist foundation, this was a one night give-away of artist designed protest posters. Though it is to be extended via further iterations and gifts of the posters to ‘protesters’ , there was no relevant text specifying this or details (which protesters? where? always in art spaces?). The posters themselves varied from explicitly political to abstract, and as individual units ranged from good to excellent. Best: Anonymous’s ‘This Sign is Subject to Fetishization’, an accurate description of any item in a museum (like these) which felt all the more real as certain posters ran out early (no free Baldessari for me…) and other, simple ones (Paul Kos’s ‘ENOUGH’, Natasha Wheat’s barely visible ‘Lets Go’ though I bet she wanted it even fainter…) I love the posters (especially those I snagged), but can any event one pays to attend in a museum have a political potency without context as to its origins and future, burdened by institutional history and commodificational tendencies? Can the revolution be branded? Its easy to imagine these posters left namelessly at the May Day Protest, posted as PDFs for all to print and distribute… I’ve heard that there will be an ‘Occupy’ show at another bay area institution this summer, about which I can only sigh and hope for the best.
May 21, 2012 @ 6:14 pm
Honestly after attending this event I personally feel like it’s whatevs. Some pretty posters were made and some people that all know one another got to stand around and know one another some more. I never expected it to be anything more or less. I will admit that I was frustrated that there was a cover charge, but I got in for free so whatevs. I could go into how turned off I was by the atmosphere and my peers willingness to become all obsessed with the posters/objects themselves and who made them as opposed to the messages written to go on them, but whatevs. I could go into how I wanted to slap every person who was sad that they didn’t get a itty bitty witty Baldessari, but whatevs. I could go into how I didn’t hear any of the talks because I was unaware that they were happening, but whatevs. I could go into the level of irony that was dripping down the concrete walls of that building, but whatevs. I could go into how the poster done by “Anonymous” was my favorite and the only one I took, but whatevs. I mean there are a ton of things that one could go into when discussing this endeavor, but whatevs.
I feel that one can produce (or attempt to position the work of someone else as) a political statement, but I’m personally more interested in someone just doing something political. The reason why “Anonymous’” poster stood out the most for me is that it was an actual political statement/action existing within this endeavor. I believe I said it in my earlier posting, but for me it is the action that is “truly” political and not the intention. This overall endeavor is too caught up with being creative, artful and sincere to truly be political (for me). It does not throw caution to the wind, but slightly hints at how great it would be if we did. And if we did it with artists that everyone likes and/or considers intelligent.
For me what could make a work truly political (and also successful in it’s communication/existence?) is the action that goes around it. The effort is what is political, not the physical work itself. Those posters do exist as “political” work. I am not going to argue that, but they have not been “charged” by anything. They sat on the floor in an aesthetically pleasing installation and are now either on someones wall or stacked underneath the other remnants of someones life on their coffee table. I don’t look at this event as a attempt to be political, but one that unfortunately talks about something that it could easily do. This event and work did not really do anything for me in a drastic sense, but it did make me think for a bit. I think in the end we should just acknowledge is as something that might inspire us to be political or at least somewhat more poetic in our statements.
May 23, 2012 @ 7:31 pm
“Every time we speak of the ‘institution’ as other than ‘us’ we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship–above all, self-censorship–which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it… It’s not a question of being against the institution: we are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.” A. Fraser
June 12, 2012 @ 6:03 am