Occupy Wall Street sign making area in Creative Time’s Living as Form exhibition (Sept 24-Oct 16, 2011, Historic Essex Street Market)
I made a six-hour stopover in NYC this past weekend with the singular intention to visit Living as Form and with the hopeful desire to join the Occupy Wall Street march through Manhattan. This is the major exhibition on socially engaged art—those diverse practices from “the growth of alternative schools, to the production of skill-shares and self-organized economies, to the emergence of community supported agriculture and guerilla gardens”—to quote the Curator Nato Thompson’s exhibition text. “All around the world,” he writes, “people-including artists-are redesigning the forms that constitute their lives”
Of course, the close relations between the exhibition and the Occupy Wall Street movement that exploded during the exhibition’s run were not missed by organizers. The artists and projects intentionally cross artist-activist realms, and Thompson frequently posted on FB about events taking place at Zucotti Park, encouraging others to join the movement. On the day I visited, Gabriela Rendon and Miguel Robles-Duran (of “Co-habitation Strategies”) led a walking tour titled “Occupying the Lower East Side, Occupying Wall Street.” “The tour,” they write, “will take a cross section of the most significant neoliberal urban development and discuss its imminent logic as we traverse the links in the lower Manhattan corridor between the Lower East Side and Wall Street. The tour will end at LIberty Square to join NYC call for an American revolution.”
Had you forgotten to make your protest sign, there was a place to do that in the exhibition. Scraps of cardboard and supplies were made available to visitors, and a collection of signs was hung on orange net material, which resembled that material used by police to pen protestors. I recognized this visual cue from the viral video from late September of Sgt. Bologna pepper spraying penned female protestors, an early event that garnered attention for the movement. Here I was in the exhibition that I had come to see, being encouraged by the exhibition’s signs, tours, and offerings to leave, to join a movement that is too important to ignore. I looked around and saw activist strategies throughout—teach-ins, pamphlets, stickers, clandestine videos, groupuscules—the very means of self-organization that distinguish social art practices from the offerings uptown. I snapped some pictures and eventually headed to 75th and Madison, the next meeting on my afternoon agenda, which, in the end, would bring to the heart of the melee at Time Square before catching my bus home.
