“A certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm is encoded into the DNA of OWS.” Yates McKee
Time Magazine’s “person of the year” is just my ploy to draw attention to two much more worthy reports on the Occupy Movement, specifically as they intersect with the arts. Yates McKee’s thorough overview of occupy and the arts in the Nation is a passionate catalogue and valuable archive by a sharp art historian. He considers the OWS Arts and Culture group, visual strategies to expand the movement, and longheld suspicions about the arts and activism. Domenick Ammirati discusses the events of Dec. 16-18 (storefront for art and architecture, various publications, International Migrants Day, etc.) in Artforum with a tone that I think was supposed to be objective, as in distanced, but it comes off as a touch Gen-X apathetic, exactly what we don’t need. Nonetheless, it’s great to see the coverage and good to get some details from the ground.
From the beginning creative strategies have been key to the Occupy movement, which was sparked by the Canadian magazine Adbuster’s call “to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street on September 17” and its visually arresting poster (above). Of course, the movement’s initiation was actually the work of many activists and community organizers on the ground in New York, preparing for America’s resistance movement since at least the Arab Spring (but actually well before, e.g. Keystone pipeline, Wisconsin, Seattle…activism is an unstoppable continuum of resistance since…um…the beginning of humanity).
My dissertation, whose writing has occupied my time, is an attempt to draw out some particular historical lineages to artistic activism along the side of reform rather than revolution through the sociological art movement in the 1970s in France. I am hoping that this historical and intellectual work will some day contribute to understanding and supporting the Occupy movement, even if the timeline is years in the making. For now, I want to just keep up with the goings on and support worthy creative endeavors (two recently supported on Kickstarter include Sam Mayfield’s film Wisconsin Rising and Beautiful Trouble, a toolbox for the revolution). As my favorite bumper sticker from my teens read: If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.
