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"Working Outside the Institutional Framework: Alternatives and Oppositions"Intro One of the primary tenants of contemporary art is that within the exhibition space we can focus on objects and ideas which are supposed to enter our field of vision "pure" and completely free of associations. The belief in such a sensibility, or in the possibilitiy of experience without associations, has waned because of questions of hegemonic dominance and capitalism. Artworks, like everything else, are embedded in webs of mediation. There exists a self-evident, yet hidden, relationship between the material of life and the material of art that can be called a synthesis, with the expectation of an easy crossover between the two. But what seems to happen on a continual basis is life fragments being raised from transient detritus to reified objects of art. And this is done by those bourgeois people that control, manipulate, and take advantage of all that exists in and of the art world. Artistic production has taken on a strange face, somewhere between phantom and disappearance. Far from being consumate productions, and precious materials, a great many works of this century risk everything. Artists that work outside the museum and gallery systems do not have institutional constraints binding them to the capitalist market that dominates the artworld. Thus there is some room to explore and to bring a critical analysis to bear on those institutions and capitalist market. As an ideal figure of disorder, of freedom's unpredictabilities and open-endedness, this century's art has faced three successive denials. Confinement and sometimes destruction. Then overall monetarization, back-room deals and the ruse of big numbers to compromise and enslave the forces opposing the powers that be. Art's ruse in return: constant changes and the immateriality that remains intact beneath the truckloads of money that spectacularized the art market during the 1980's. [a-h system] criteria for all "masterworks" of the 20th century a) work that is systematically organized and structured. © Onajide Shabaka - (rev. 11.92) The art of this century that has been the most influential, and considered the "masterworks of the 20th century", all seem to have had the above eight elements with the addition that all the artists are also all white and all male. There is a 'canon' defined by art historians, curators and collectors that remains out of reach like some diamond encrusted carrot awaiting the next artist in the newly opened field of applicants. If there is a point to be made by a person self identified as an artist then what is that point and why is that point being made, and to what audience? The questions begin here.... "my questions" begin here.... The one question that the contemporary artist cannot escape is what it means to be "successful" working in the world of today, and whether the image that comes to mind is one that can be supported and believed in. "Exposing the radical autonomy of aesthetics as something that is not neutral," says Suzi Gablik in her essay "Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism" [Mapping the Terrian New Genre Public Art (1995)], "but an active participant in capitalist ideology has been a primary accomplishment of the aggressive ground-clearing work of deconstruction." Autonomy has condemned art to social impotence by turning it into just another class of objects for marketing and consumption. Gablik notes that there is a greater critical awareness of the social role of art and a rejection of modernism's bogus ideology of neutrality and many artists refuse the notion of a completely narcissistic exhibition practice as the desirable goal for art. The model of the artist as a lone genius struggling against society does not allow us to focus on the beneficial and healing role of social interaction that is oriented toward the achievement of shared understandings, continues Gablik in the same essay. Questions are asked about individual viability and our notions of success. Most importantly the question is can artists and institutions redefine themselves within a new vision of what it means to be an artist. Gablik concludes by saying modern aesthetics circumscribed role of the audience with its focus on radical individualism is its mandate of keeping art separate from life. She believes we will see over the next few decades more art that is essentially social and purposeful, and that rejects the modernists myths of autonomy and neutrality. Oppositional and Guerrilla Art & Artists The work of art as a physical object singularly rooted in time and place and bearing the weight of its commercial status was redefined in the latter half of the 1960s. Two decades have come and gone and yet museums with collections of contemporary art have not met the challenge presented by the ground-breaking practice of many of the leading artists of our time. In particular, there are artists that have anticipated and participated
in the recent revision of attitudes toward the place of the art object
within and outside the context of the traditional contemporary art
exhibition by thematically examining how and where a work literally
and figuratively stands in relation to its institutional setting. In the last quarter century, the art object has broken from the bonds of conventional museological categorization according to medium, and from confinement to traditional methods of display. Now that a number of internationally acclaimed artists have, in the interest of artistic renewal, opened the door to fresh ways of thinking, the museum, in turn, needs to insure itself against narrow-mindedness and rigid inflexibility in the face of new visual ideas. Most urgently, the museum must recognize the potential for its own suffocation by the systems and values at work in a commodity-driven society. Works by artists such those mentioned below, who have succeeded in endowing art with thematic and physical parameters beyond those of the traditional, contained object, are in danger of being lost to view. Museums, which define themselves as repositories for (r)evolution and ongoing changes in visual history, must remain current and propose alternative ways of looking at the institution's own area of authority and responsibility. Otherwise, it will be too late for them to fulfill their critical social role in conjunction with the art they house.[1] Vito Acconci, conceptual artist, has produced interdiscplinary works of shrewd criticism. He is a pioneer in performance art, which integrated daily activities, personal identity, and body explorations. Acconci states: "The person who chooses to do public art might be considered a refugee, in flight from the gallery/museum which has been established as the proper occasion for art within our culture. Escape from the confines of tht space means losing the privileges of its laboratory conditions: the luxury of considering art either as a system of universals or as a system of commodities. Abdicating the accustomed space of art, the public artist declares himself/herself uninterested in art questions, and no longer involved in the development of art as we've known it. Public art might be considered not as a separable category, in its own arena and with its own products, but as an atmophere instilled, almost secretly, within other categories of life" Obviously, when he speaks of public art he is speaking of projects that are NOT part of a government agency and it's Art-in-Public Programs. Joseph Beuys (1921-86) was a pioneer in conceptual art that studied in Germany but studied in rural isolation where he developed an ideology that shaped his lifework and iconographic language unique to his sculptures and installations. He believed tht everyone is an artist and that creativity is the most powerful tool for societal transformation. In the 60's he joined Fluxus, a group of international artists opposed to art as a static commodity and committed to erasing waht they saw as arbitrary divisions between the "arts" and life. John Fekner, street artist of NYC, has been involved in direct art interventions within New York City. His best-known guerrilla works are large, stenciled, politically critical, acerbic captions applied directly to tenement walls, abandoned autos, and blighted urban infrastructures. Born in Mexico, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, writes, directs, and performs social commentary on issues of race, class, international culture and, contemporary forms of colonialism. His performances have included being caged for 3 days on the central plaza in Madrid, Spain where he was displayed as a cultural specimen for the Americas, an "Amerindian," which commented on that year's quincentennial Christopher Columbus celebrations. Group Material (1979-98) was a NYC based collaborative team that had worked with the expressed goal of including diverse groups and circumventing the elitism historically associated with curating. Team member Doug Ashford has written: "Often the social purpose of a particular artwork has been clouded by the way it gets seen within the [art] market and the museum. The juxtaposition with other practices, some not even by artists, shows that art has other possible functions and readings." The Guerrilla Girls have billed themselves as "the conscience of the art world," and were founded in 1985 as an anonymous group of feminist artists, critics, and provocateurs. They perform public political actions while wearing gorilla costumes to protect their individual identities. Their posters, press releases, and political actions are meant to "combat sexism and racism in the art world." Independent thinking sculptor David Hammons began making his art on the streets of Harlem with materials he found there: bottles, bottlecaps, and hair. He was first know for his guerrilla-type architectural bricolages, street sculptures, and actions that engaged passersby. Seitu Jones has written: "Hammons is steeped enough in African American culture and life outside the studio to be able to make critical analyses and comments on day-to-day life. He does this not only by challenging Western perceptions of what art is, but by challenging many of our own aspirations and dreams." Allan Kaprow is a significant writer, aritst and teacher. Kaprow writes: "Artlike art holds that art is separate from life and everything else, while lifelike art holds that art is connected to life and everything else. In other words, there is an art at the service of art, and art at the service of life. The maker of artlike art tends to be a specialist; the maker of lifelike art, a generalist." Fred Wilson, New York installation artist, critiques the museum environment in his work. As an artist of African American and caribbean descent, he creates installations that reveal how museums represent or fail to represent racial and ethnic minorities. His work has become a leading force in the reexamination of cultural roles of museums. The Situationists Internationale One of the important libertarian groups which came to prominence during the May-June events in France in 1968 were the Situationists. They originated in a small band of avante-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner of the group who founded the magazine Situationiste Internationale in 1957. At first, they were principally concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life. Like the Lettrists, they were against work and for complete divertissement. They felt that under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. The Situationists therefore wanted a different kind of revolution: they wanted the imagination, not a group of men, to seize power, and poetry and art to be made by all. At first, the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952). Inspired by the libertarian journal Socialisme on Barbarie, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers' councils. But they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre's critique of the alienation of everyday life. They believed that the revolutionary movement in advanced capitalist countries should be led by an "enlarged proletariat" which would include the majority of waged laborers. In addition, although they claimed to want neither disciples nor a leadership, they remained an elitist vanguard group who dealt with differences by expelling the dissenting minority. They looked to a world-wide proletarian revolution to bring about the maximum pleasure. At the end of 1967, Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life presented the most elaborate expositions of Situationist theory which had a widespread influence in France during the 1968 student rebellion. Debord, Guy Capitalism Karl Marx was the first major social theorist to conceptualize the break between modern and premodern societies and to develop comprehensive theoretical perspectives on modernity. For Marx, the emergence of the capitalist mode of production created a new form of modern society whose motor and infrastructure was organized around the production of commodities and accumulation of capital and provided one of the first in-depth critiques of capitalism's inequities. The philosophy of Marxism concentrated on political economy, calling attention to unequal power relations between classes in capitalist society. In the Marxian vision, capital created a world in its own image, one that glorified profit, greed, competition, and exploitation, and the commodity-form became a constitutive principle of social organization. According to Steven Best and Douglas Kellner (Modernity, Commodification, and the Spectacle From Marx through Debord into the Postmodern - a chapter from the forthcoming book) the emergence of Guy Debord and the Situationist International was an attempt to update the Marxian theory in the French post-World War Two conjuncture -- a project that was also deeply influenced by French modernist avant garde movements -- and that these currents ultimately produced the postmodern adventure in France.[2] Debord and the Situationists can thus be interpreted as contemporary French attempts to renew the Marxian project. Their program was to reinvigorate Marxian revolutionary practice and to supplement Marx's critique of capital and the commodity, attempting to trace the further development of the abstraction process inherent in commodity production. Influenced by Sartre and his concept that human existence is always lived with a particular context or situation and that individuals can create their own situations, -- as well as Lefebvre's concept of everyday life and demand to radically transform it --, Debord and his colleagues began devising strategies to construct situations (see Debord 1957 and the texts collected in Knabb 1981). This project would merge art and everyday life in the spirit of the radical avant garde movements and would require a revolution of both art and life. Under capitalist conditions, according to Marx, art has become, to an important degree, a form of alienated labor through its near reduction to commodity status in the marketplace. Thus the romantic mystification of art has been replaced by commodity fetishism (later developed by Lukacs into the concept of reification). Marxist critics and philosophers have been interested in what we call aesthetic sociology - the way art functions socially, politically, economically, and historically. Thus Marxist critics look for patterns and relationships that art has and shares with other social creations, and they evaluate art on the basis of its historical role and its contribution to furthering Marzist social ideals. Pracitioners of this type of contextual analysis see themselves as involved in a political struggle, not simply as theorists within a particular adademic school. Interestingly, some of the Situationist aesthetic projects anticipated postmodern culture, though Situationist practice was always geared toward a revolutionary transformation of the existing society -- both bureaucratic communist and capitalist ones. From a more strictly theoretical perspective, Debord and his colleagues synthesized Marx, Hegel, Lefebvre, and Lukàcs (whose History and Class Consciousness had been translated into French in 1960 by the Arguments group) into a critique of contemporary society published in Debord's Society of the Spectacle in 1966. Politically, Debord and the Situationists were deeply influenced by the council communism promoted by the early Lukàcs, Korsch, Gramsci, and a tradition taken up in France by both the Socialism or Barbarism and Arguments groups. Debord's analysis of contemporary capitalism developed Marx's analysis of commodification to its latest stage, which he described as "the becoming-world of the commodity and the becoming-commodity of the world" (#66). For the Situationists, "late-capitalism" is a rupture in capitalist organization, but it is still fully accessible to a Marxist interpretation. Beneath the new forms of domination there is "an undisturbed development of modern capitalism" (#65). Also influenced by Gramsci (1971), the Situationists saw the most recent stage in social control as based on consensus rather than force, as a cultural hegemony attained through the transformation of commodity society into the "society of the spectacle." In this society, individuals are thought to consume a world fabricated by others rather than producing one of their own. Paraphrasing Marx, Debord said: "In the modern conditions of production, life announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles" (#1). The society of the spectacle is still a commodity society, ultimately rooted in production, but reorganized at a higher and more abstract level. "Spectacle" is a complex term which "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (#10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. More generally, it refers to the vast institutional and technical apparatus of late-capitalism, to the means and methods power employs, outside of direct force, to relegate subjects to the critical and creative margins of society and to obscure the nature and effects of its distorting power. Under this broader definition the "education" system and the institutions of "representative democracy," as well as the endless inventions of consumer gadgets, are all integral components of the spectacular society. Unlike, early capitalism, where the structural exigencies lay in the forceful exploitation of labor and nature and in defining the worker strictly as a producer, the society of the spectacle defines the worker as a consumer and works to constitute the worker's desires and needs. In this sense, Debord claims that use value was resurrected as a referent of production: "In the inverted reality of the spectacle, use value must now be explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality is eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification" (#48). It is not that exchange value no longer dominates, but that use value is now deployed in an ideological way that exploits the needs of the new consumer self. In place of the society of the spectacle, the Situationists proposed a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State. Pseudo-needs would be replaced by real desires, and the economy of profit become one of pleasure. The division of labor and the antagonism between work and play would be overcome. It would be a society founded on the love of free play, characterized by the refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to perform roles. Above all, they insisted that every individual should actively and consciously participate in the reconstruction of every moment of life. They called themselves Situationists precisely because they believed that all individuals should construct the situations of their lives and release their own potential and obtain their own pleasure. As for the basic unit of the future society, they recommended workers' councils by which they meant "sovereign rank-and-file assemblies, in the enterprises and the neighborhoods". As with the communes of the anarcho-communists, the councils would practice a form of direct democracy and make and execute all the key decisions affecting everyday life. Delegates would be mandated and recallable. The councils would then federate locally, nationally and internationally. In their call for the "concrete transcendence of the State and of every kind of alienating collectivity" and in their vision of communist society the Situationists come closest to the anarchists. They not only referred to Bakunin for their attack on authoritarian structures and bureaucracy, but Debord argued that "anarchism had led in 1936 [in Spain] to a social revolution and to a rough sketch, the most advanced ever, of proletarian power." The Situationists differ however from traditional anarchism in their elitism as an exclusive group and in their overriding concern with coherence of theory and practice. Anarchism, according to Marshall S. Shatz, is an ideology that regards abolition of government as the necessary precondition for a free and just society. He says the term itself comes from the Greek words meaning "without a ruler." Anarchism then rejects all forms of hierarchical authority, social and economic as well as political. What distinguishes it from other ideologies, continues Shatz, is the central importance it attaches to the state. To anarchists, the state is a wholly artificial and illegitimate institution, the bastion of privilege and exploitation in the modern world. Although the roots of anarchist thought can be traced at least as far back as the 18th-century English writer William Godwin, Shatz says, anarchism as a revolutionary movement arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its immediate objective was annihilation of the state and of all authority imposed "from above downward." Once liberated from political oppression, society would spontaneously rebuild itself "from below upward," Shatz theorizes. Marshall S. Shatz believes like other radical ideologies of its time, anarchism intended to complete the "unfinished business" of the French Revolution. While battling the established order, anarchists also battled the alternatives proposed by liberalism and socialism. He adds that like Marxism, anarchism was anticapitalist and scorned liberalism's dedication to political liberty on the grounds that only the propertied classes could afford to enjoy it. They rejected with equal vehemence, however, the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat," the idea of capturing and using the capitalist state to achieve a classless society. Political institutions were seen as inherently corrupting, and even the most selfless revolutionaries would inevitably succumb to the joys of power and privilege Shatz concludes. Both the Situationists and anarchists seem to have ideals that cannot be literally projected to the general human population, even if their theories do. They speak of "utopia", a place that has seemed to less and less likely to exist. People always make choices for themselves, and being caught up in the world of consumerism, they aggressively seek out creature comforts and the dream of the "good life." Ayn Rand seems to have some of these issues worked out but, I am still of the belief that there is a "God", whatever form it may take. The basic principles of Ayn Rand's Objectivism can be summarized as something a little different from the Marxian analysis, it follows: "The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that no man has the right to seek values from others by means of physical force--i.e., no man or group has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. Men have the right to use force only in self-defense and only against those who initiate its use. Men must deal with one another as traders, giving value for value, by free, mutual consent to mutual benefit. The only social system that bars physical force from human relationships is laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which the only function of the government is to protect individual rights, i.e., to protect men from those who initiate the use of physical force." Thus Objectivism rejects any form of collectivism, such as fascism or socialism. It also rejects the current "mixed economy" notion that the government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth. Man is a rational being. Reason, as man's only means of knowledge, is his basic means of survival. But the exercise of reason depends on each individual's choice. "Man is a being of volitional consciousness." "That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom. This is the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character."Thus Objectivism rejects any form of determinism, the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control (such as God, fate, upbringing, genes, or economic conditions). [http://www.aynrand.org/] Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Deleuze and Guattari emerged from the same late 1960s intellectual hothouse as Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. They took Freudian theory to new extremes (like Lacan) by proposing that the self is fragmented and decentered, consisting of a "multiplicity" of "desiring machines" (Turkle, 1995). "Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a schizophrenic system, i.e. it makes everyone in it schizophrenic. Because it is interested only in the individual and his profit it must subvert or deterritorialize all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, the group, indeed any social arrangement. But at the same time, since capitalism requires social groupings in order to function, it must allow for reterritorializations, new social groupings, new forms of the state, the family, or the group - in other words new identities. These events happen at the same time. The life of any culture is always both collapsing and being restructured. The point of the distinction is to allow for a post-Marxist analysis which can be social and materialist without accepting the historical inevitability of the [Hegelian] dialectic." "One of their most famous works is called Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In this work the two authors tried to develop a 'political analysis of desire' (see below). The idea is that, by 'reconciling the Marxist opposition between consciousness and ideology with the Freudian opposition between consciousness and desire,' they 'sought to introduce unconscious desire as a productive feature of political economy'" (The Continental Philosophy Reader, p. 403). "Deleuze and Guattari are not considered Marxists. They argue there is no such thing as a class struggle because there is only one class, the class of slaves, some of whom dominate others. (This is not too dissimilar to Foucault's idea that we all have a little power and we all use it in varying levels to control each other.) Most so-called 'desiring individuals' can never fulfil their desires. Why? Because each individual moves between two poles, between a.) schizoid desire, which is revolutionary but anti-social, and b.) paranoid desire, which is social but codified and demands its own repression. The two cancel each other out." "They aren't Freudian, either (although both were influenced by Freud, and Guattari in particular got a lot of his ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis) because they talk about an 'Oedipal prohibition.' This produces the neurotic person who has internalized guilt in order to repress desire; however, this is not a fact of nature (as Freud would argue) but the result of social codification." Post-colonialism & Human Rights All the while the Situationists were talking and acting toward their ideal future, people such as myself were struggling to be treated as equal citizens and human beings. I saw Watts go up in flames in 1964 and returned to a Miami, FL scorched by flames in 1980. The pervasive and persistence of racism in the US and Europe and its post-colonial states have been a continual battle... one that some must be aware of consciously or unconsciously on a daily basis. Black skin is the indelible mark that visually identifies myself and my kind as an inferior species in the definition of all that is Western/ European. The very name Caucasian was given to what was thought of as the most beautiful race of humans from which all Europeans derived. Thus from the outset everyone else is inferior, and the very language we use permanently and pejoratively defines me. Even as we "negroes" were given the right set forth in the Constitution to participate fully as human beings in this country, voting rights were only allowed after a Supreme Court decision. Quoting an article from the Miami Herald: There never was any question that the Supreme Court decision was democratic in theory, particularly since it came in the midst of a war fought to liberate Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Chinese, Filipinos, and Indoneasians, among others, from the "second class" citizenship to which they has been relegated by the German and Japanese imperialism. The only question about giving the ballot to negroes in this country was the very practical question: Will it work? That question still remains. Are the negroes, by and large, ready to assume the responsibilities of enlightened citizenship? (italics mine) The very assumption of questioning the intellectual capacity and reasoning abilities of the "negro" population rests uncomfortably on the shoulders of the United States to this very day. John Jeffries, social scientist, identifies the social construction of race through the hegemonic influence of science, and its ninenteenth-century preoccupation with established modes of inquiry developed in physics and biology the "American School" of "craniometry" (the measuring of human skulls for the purposes of classifying the human species) gained worldwide notoriety. The Ayn Rand Institute views multiculturalism as racism in a politically-correct
guise. It says multiculturalism holds that an individual's identity
and personal worth are determined by ethnic/racial membership and
that all cultures are of equal worth, regardless of their moral views
or how they treat people. The Insititute further says multiculturalism
holds that ethnic identity should be a central factor in educational
and social policy decisions. Multiculturalism in their view would
turn this country into a collection of separatist groups competing
with each other for power. In recent years, the pseudoscience of genetic determinism has made significant inroads in many academic disciplines. It is used increasingly to justify the ideologies and practices of racism and sexism. An onslaught of genetic claims ride the coattails of the Human Genome Project. The rightist Mankind Organization has in its pages so-called scientific data confirming the biological basis and justification for continued racism: "Modern society has pronounced its ethical condemnation of racism, but in the long run has met with little more success than in religion and in its condemnation of sex and aggression. It is time to recognize clearly that race-consciousness is a natural tendency, with which our socio-polticial life must come to terms." (Catrell, Raymond B., "Virtue in 'Racism'", http://www.mankind.org/man6.htm) Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), calling for government policy based on alleged correlations between genes, IQ, crime, and welfare dependency, is perhaps the most alarming recent example of this trend. We are once again bombarded with blatant racism masquerading as scholarship. What can we, in the 1990s, say about the biology of human "race" differences? Looking at all the evidence, there is none. The "race" concept was developed and perpetuated to justify slavery, segregation and imperial conquest. Over the last decade, increasing numbers of anthropologists have come to agree with geneticists that "race" is not a useful way to describe human genetic variability. (Most geneticists agree that race accounts for only a small fraction (~6%) of our genetic diversity. Other traits are much more important in determining our total genetic makeup). Politicians and social scientists still use the discredited notion of "race" to sort people out and to divide us, but as a biological concept, it has no meaning. This and more is why in late 1965 David Cobb became the first black on his block when he moved his family of five to Liberty City (a section Miami, FL). His white neighbors praised the improvements that he made to his house. They envied his perfect lawn. They beamed at his beautiful wife and three well-mannered children. They called him a perfect neighbor. Then they moved out as quickly as they could, most likely to Broward County (Ft Lauderdale). [italics mine] Urban History Henri Lefebvre, the French sociologist who began writing about the "production of space" over two decades ago, provides a framework that can be used to relate the sense of place encountered in cultural lansdscape studies to the political economy. Lefebvre argues that every society in history has shaped a distinctive social space that meets its intertwined requirements for economic production and social reproduction. [Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991) Most original is his analysis is of the space of social reproduction, which ranges over different scales, including the space in and around the body (biological reproduction), the space of housing (the reproduction of the labor force), and the public space of the city (the reproductions of social relations). Lefebvre suggests that the production of the space is essential to the innner workings of the political economy. "Space is permeated with social relations; it is not only supported by social relations but it is also producing and produced by social relations," sums Lefebvre. The US population is 75% urban/suburban. Cities are very complex sites of communal history and memory which tends to obscure their primary identities as sites of immediacy, money, power and energy concentrated on the present and the future. The city dweller may enjoy anonymity and freedom but also struggles to find some emotional community that offers intimacy and comfort. By the time federal laws were put in place against discrimination and African Americans began relocating outside the communities into which there were forced, the geography of the inner city changed and the suburbs swelled. The Urban Renewal Act of 1954 was enacted, called by some the "Negro Removal Act," and the way was paved for the displacing of communities, replacing them with luxury apartments, convention centers, office buildings, and huge profits. Artists and gay men have also served as the unwilling avant-garde by revitalizing parts of the inner city. Once the inner city areas are revived big money comes in and transforms it to fill the coffers and force out the people which transformed the area. Cities such as Miami, FL have major transportation problems because of the ascendence of the automobile which socially disables those who don't, can't, or can't afford to drive. Cities are built around the car and not around people. Roads form one of many devices that serve to keep 'them' and 'us' separate. Zoning is another important factor to control all areas of urban and suburan neighborhoods. They take up where company regulations and unlegislated exclusivity left off. Zoning ordinances define the suburbs where there are usually a lack of boundaries. We live in a time of globalization, in which corporations are becoming more powerful than nations. Ours is a time in which sophisticated propaganda and the use of mass media are more powerful weapons for social control than the police apparatus of the state. Tactical Media De Balie, Paradiso, V2_Organisatie, the Society for Old and New Media and the Centre for Tactical Media in collaboration with other national and international organisations defined at the 1996 conference, Next 5 Minutes, four distinct but closely related topics which defines what tactical media, a possiblenext step, is about: 1.) tactical research; 2.) public domain and access; 3.) metaphorical languages; 4.) media criticism. 1.) The means and ends of tactical research are the theme of a series of presentations from television, radio, phone and computer networks, which question the information monopoly as practised by mainstream broadcasting organisations and individual or corporate experts. 2.) As 'democratization' is one of the central claims associated with the tactical media, [they] will have to assess critically to what extent it can actually be achieved. In this context [they] also want to discuss the effects that tactical media have on the reconfiguration and revitalisation of [their] notions of community, as well as the technical, political and ethical aspects of public access and large-scale local connectivity. 3.) For [them] the question of metaphor is not abstract. It includes and goes beyond issues of representation and asks the strategic question, "what language shall we use." [They] have therefore made the third theme of the conference the use of metaphorical languages. Current metaphors, like the socio-spatial metaphors of digital cities and electronic superhighways, or the biological metaphors of the media ecology of cyborgs and memes, will be evaluated. 4.) Finally the conference... introduce[d] the concept of Net criticism.. [They] imagine this as a form of reflexive critical consciousness about the contents and practice of the communications culture as it has been affected by the emergence of the Net. It will be an investigation of language and metaphor in the electronic age, and it should strive to formulate aesthetic and ethical categories for net and media discourse. The continuous involvement of visual artists with the interrogation of metaphors places their work at the heart of the development of a political poetics for the media age. The Next Step... a Workable Situation [?] Even though I have not personally used the internet for any artprojects at the moment, it remains a real and distinct possibility for me to work there. With all this said, the complexities of living and working as an artist today seem so limited and yet so open. A continuing series of questions that might even change with time is what one must ask in order to find those limits, and/or cross them if possible or necessary. What are the links between what one does as an artist and what ones does as a teacher, student, lover, brother, human being? How is art not separate from experience? What is authentic experience? Have I had experiences that have not been self-recognized as art far back in my personal history? [writing poetry in Baja, CA; traveling by car across the US collecting rocks along the way as markers of an unknown geology; following animal tracks in the Minnesota woods; guiding a student through a difficult moment; cooking a meal for a loved one...] It is now up to me to set up the theoretical thresholds that I will one day have to cross. The ideas and experiments that will follow are intended to test, probe, and measure the boundaries and contents of experience. Some will be subjected to rational analysis through language, some will not. Does the question return to "what is art"? This is a question about the ontological status of a work of art. Or maybe another question: What kind of thing is a work of art and what is the nature of artistic experience? Aesthetic experience seems an experience of instrinsic features of things or events traditionally recognized as worthy of attention and reflection. Aesthetic value is its capacity to evoke what is recognized as worthy of attention and reflection arising from features in the thing or event. We can identify which intrinsic properties a tradition considers worthy of sustained attention by observing and reflecting upon the vocabularies used to describe things or events when people say they are having an aesthetic experience. Our languages and what we value are tightly interwoven. To Mr. n[ ]VISIBLE: "I LOVE YOUR WORK BUT LET'S JUST KEEP IN TOUCH FOR NOW..." How has my thinking changed as a result of this study/research? My thoughts return to earlier studies of artists such as Duchamp and Kaprow and how they blurred the distinctions between art and life. I have begun to begin a new way of thinking about what my art is. It is everything I do, everything I say. If nothing else it has opened me up to myself as new material for my work. notes: [2] On the history of the Situationists, see Marcus 1989; Plant 1992; and Wollen 1993. In addition to the works of Debord which we discuss in this chapter, the main Situationist texts are collected in Knabb 1981; Vaneigem 1983a and 1983b. Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) was published in translation in a pirate edition in by Black and Red (Detroit) in 1970 and reprinted many times; another edition appeared in 1983 and a new translation in 1994, thus references are cited to the numbered paragraphs of Debord's text to make it easier for those with different editions to follow this reading.
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