A human project

”When it comes to urban planning, we are building suburbs that in 20 years will be ghettos of ill health,” said Margaret Beavis, a Melbourne doctor who appeared before the inquiry.

“I’m not interested in colonizing brains,” he replied. “I see the truck as a potentially healing gesture, not that it has to be. I don’t have delusions that it will perform the hard work of healing traumas. I do believe there can be an aesthetic of good intentions, but I’m leery of saying what those are. No, I’m not going to tell anyone it’s art.”

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And handled poorly, a Rakowitz work could easily come off as jokey, disingenuous or worse — obvious. The food truck, for instance, is spun off an “Enemy Kitchen” project he began in New York soon after9/11. At first, he invited children at a Manhattan after-school program to cook with him; he encouraged discussion on the war, terrorism, etc. He hoped for a microcosm of opinions about the war: crackpot, patriotic, dissenting. He got that. But the project received so much media attention that he was invited to stage an “Enemy Kitchen” in other cities, and though he often agreed, the participants were too like-minded in their politics, too agreeable, too conscious of “Enemy Kitchen” as an art project. “So there was no friction. And I am not making art for the art world.”

Kristof’s kind of awareness-raising is a vacuous (and vapid) tautology that motivates no social change but rather exists to serve itself, an endlessly churning machine to project the ultimate liberal humanitarian fantasy: a clean, orderly, decent world without having to change anything. His glosses become social facts that are difficult to displace.

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Desire has changed, and it can change again. This will likely occur by mining the gap between the official discourse and its underbelly, and using that contradiction—and the trauma that speaking it causes—to shatter the agreed-upon common sense. This would entail not simply screaming the truth from the rafters—and as a result perhaps creating reactionary rejection (a more aggressive and obdurate shutting of the eyes)—but rather using that act of speech to rejigger values and ways of seeing, such that closing one’s eyes is still possible but no longer desired. This article is hence not meant as an exposé of some Truth about Kristof, but rather an attempt to make it slightly neat or even cool to no longer objectify the poor or ignore our arbitrarily privileged position within a brutal global political economy.

Occupy Wall Street may (perhaps inadvertently) provide us with a particularly sophisticated example of how to “speak” the open secret: By not speaking—by resisting attempts that would coerce it into making legible claims—OWS performs demands on others to think and act politically. To wit, when mainstream Kristof-types attempt to capture OWS by reducing it to a set of policy prescriptions, OWS remains silent. When cynics insist that “we don’t know what you want,” OWS, as Doug Rushkoff suggests, says, “I don’t believe you.” In refusing to provide a solution that nests comfortably inside the existing system of power relations, OWS both effectively denies the cynic’s acceptance of the open secret (where we must pretend that the system is containable through regulation; that it won’t produce as a matter of course stratification, exploitation, and crisis; that capitalism can be made to work for the middle class), as it also makes a fairly radical demand on everyone to begin thinking what the system might look like instead.

Asked if Voina had exceeded the boundaries of performance art with its politically-motivated actions, Plutser-Sarno responded, “If an artist follows rules, canons, norms, he is dead. An artist should be walking on the razor’s edge between art and non-art, between death and life.” That territory is certainly where Voina is headed, given their multiple daring escapes from arrest and imprisonment (it is worth noting that Plutser-Sarno is currently in hiding abroad).

According to Voina, the difference between performance art and political activism is art’s public nature and the importance of laying claim to your work. “If an activist secretly burns a cop truck at night, it won’t be art. It will be the revenge of an activist,” Plutser-Sarno wrote. “But to burn it openly and proclaim to the entire country: ‘I am an artist. I burned down your prison, symbol of totalitarianism. This autodafe is our art action,’ then it becomes a piece of art. We made people discuss it as an artistic action.”

Commissioned as part of an IASKA residency program pairing artists with remote Western Australian communities, Leber and Chesworth’s latest work, The Way You Move Me, traces the subtleties, complexities and rhythms implicit in the mass-movement of cattle and sheep across the vast farming properties skirting the area.

The 2012 New Museum Triennial will feature thirty-four artists, artist groups, and temporary collectives—totaling over fifty participants—born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, many of whom have never before exhibited in the US. The exhibition title, “The Ungovernables,” takes its inspiration from the concept of “ungovernability” and its transformation from a pejorative term used to describe unruly “natives” to a strategy of civil disobedience and self-determination. “The Ungovernables” is meant to suggest both anarchic and organized resistance and a dark humor about the limitations and potentials of this generation. “The Ungovernables” is an exhibition about the urgencies of a generation who came of age after the independence and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Through both materials and form, works included in “The Ungovernables” explore impermanence and an engagement with the present and future. Many of the works are provisional, site-specific, and performative reflecting an attitude of possibility and resourcefulness.

‘Informality’ focuses specifically on the concept of the informal economy. The informal economy is that part of commercial and the service sector that operates outside of the circuit of formal financial transactions – and thus is hidden from the sight of the Revenue Service and other governmental institutions that control business and economic affairs, and the banks themselves. In the West the informal economy makes up a about 11% of the total economy. On other continents, such as Africa and Latin America, but also in former East Bloc countries, the informal economy often makes up the largest part of the total economy. ‘Informality’ examines the phenomenon from the perspective of art, involving certain informal aspects of the art world itself in doing so, including the precarious position of the artist in society.