"I wouldn't want to ruin the integrity of political art by bringing it into the walls of the museum". Do you agree with this? Do you not? I took this quote from a to-be-unnamed bonifide conservative curator. It is a strange quote. After considering it, I realized that it reminded me of the same type of double-speak that Karl Rove has used for Bush. The use of sympathy belies its dark aggression and it is this type of conservative strategy that haunts me every time I hear folks more sympathetic to my heart discussing how 'sold out' it would be to show at a museum. When the radical left finds itself in cahoots with most lazy of conservative art people, something is amiss.
Let it be understood, that at times, I feel like the question of what is and isn't sold out is at the root of some the most intelligent and self serving discussions happening in America today. I appreciate that this question, if thought about carefully, can uproot the deep seeded culture capitalist in all of us. For it's not only be avoiding the spaces of being sold-out that we preserve our integrity, we can also preserve our social capital. And it is this weezly game of social capital production that teases all of us as we make radical propositions on the end of this type of art, the end of that theory, the treachery of showing here, and the brazen boldness of not showing at all. For the game of social capital is not as obvious as this or that institution and many people cunningly strike the avant-garde pose as a method to ultimately win, the capitalist genre game.
What is this game? Well, it is the game often heralded by most art historians on the avant-garde where geniuses like Tristan Tzara or Andre Breton or Guy Debord viciously cut down the 'posers' to produce the truly legit movement (of ten people); these movements where, as opposed to producing revolutionary movements, the self-declared leaders self-consciously accumulate social capital in heaps. While retaining a rhetorically radical anti-capitalist pose, these intellectuals and leaders of the avant-garde were able to increase their mafia-like social power.
In the age of the saturated culture industry, social capital has almost become a way of life. Being able to pin point it requires comprehending the saviness at which our tastes and personalities adjust to market pressure and ultimately feelings of self worth. We nurture our own identities as potential products, not to be sold just on the open market, but more dangerously, sold in our own personal niche markets. We inherently understand that there are more markets than just one big one and we realize that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can openly defame the big public market while nonetheless cultivating our strength in our private markets. This is the classic paradigm I see operating in political art and well, it's strange.
Allow me to switch gears and address The Interventionist: Art in the Social Sphere exhibition in particular. This was an exhibition I curated in 2002 at MASS MoCA consisting of 29 artists and collectives dealing with contemporary radical political art in a rough genre described as interventionism. I have never had much of an affinity for the term "intervention" as it can easily be used by the right wing as well. The tactics of intervention are simply guerrilla forms of meaning production that often trespass a contested discursive field. Right-to-life movements, the Michigan militia and neo-Nazi groups all use these same techniques in their battle for meaning as well. I set out on this project quite aware of the dangers of commodification and scared of somehow doing a disservice to the work by giving it the bourgeois seal of approval. Most of the interventionists projects exist in the public sphere and ultimately translate a bit awkwardly into a gallery setting. But I felt the work was important and that, ultimately, its social value would translate to our 110,000 visitors. In addition to displaying work in the gallery, we produced numerous public projects that would go into the public sphere as part of the exhibition including those of artist William Pope.L, Haha, subRosa and e-Xplo.
I realize that it is a mixed bag to provide this type of institutional platform for political art. On one hand, the museum was able to offer some legitimation to a certain form of cultural practice. This legitimation (particularly assisted by a widely distributed catalogue) allows many of those artists who have to support themselves as art professors in po-dunk college towns, able to go back and show the rest of their conservative faculty that what they do is valid. This is no small thing. It is astonishing how many talks I give at small colleges and there is always some sad young art professor who is desperate to have their social practice legitimated in their department. In legitimating a form of practice, this faculty member is able to produce classes on the subject and hand this knowledge over to young fledgling artists/activists.
I realize that this might sound pretty ridiculous on its surface. As though, the good part of showing political art at an institution is to secure jobs for the artists in it. But ya know what? Getting a job is a real thing. Helping radicals who want to continue their practice is a good thing. Another great aspect of showing this work at the museum was, of course, introducing it to such a wide audience. I hope political artists and curators watch what happens in a museum. Cultural producers of all stripes should grab a seat and watch those families enter a museum and set off into the galleries a little nervous about what they are going to find. I find it truly gratifying. As shocking as it seems, these projects actually get a reaction from people. The interventionist projects (while obviously positioned a bit awkwardly in a gallery) can have a critical pedagogic function. In the Interventionists there were numerous projects that asked visitors to rethink their role within civic culture. The works also possessed enough charm and elegance to get the visitors to pay attention. For example, the Yes Men video where the team of Andy Bichlebaur and Mike Bonano are giving a lecture at a textile conference in Tampere, Finland posing as the WTO. I can’t tell you how many times I saw entire families gathered around this video and laughing. A whole family laughing at the WTO! That is truly remarkable.
Of course, there is a down side as well. Placing these works in an institutional format can never adequately translate the real-time public experience. These projects inevitably are shadows of their former self and can dangerously lead the false impression that this presentation was their ultimate goal. With the interventionist's intention to operate outside the bounds of art (and its debilitating discursive formation), it is obviously misleading to re-present it in an art institution. The goal is to liberate these practices into a social sphere removed from the stultifying lens of beauty and abstraction. Guy Debord, of course, would have a heart attack if you brought this work into the museum. But alas, it's hard to impress Mr. Debord.
Another detrimental effect is to shut down the excitement of its counter culture underpinnings by validating this work. I realize that showing a select amount of artists and collectives produces a group who is in the show and a group that is not. The selection process obviously leaves more out than in, and this type of exclusionary practice can have counterproductive effects in terms of art activist moral. It’s a bit of a quandary that applies equally to books and magazines as it does to exhibitions. These tensions have a ton to do with the role of social capital in the production of radical practice and I suppose we need to all keep ourselves in check.
Finally, I would like to add that in the Interventionist exhibition I tried to include artist/activists whose personal lives actually participated in radical culture. That is, I didn't want to show artists whose works 'raised political issues' but ultimately were using this aesthetic as a veneer for more personal gains. Now, I will admit that some of the artists in the exhibition are more like that than others and that this criteria is difficult to gauge. But in general, I feel comfortable with the level of on-the-ground activists that were highlighted. I say this, because many of the benefits that the exhibition produced increases dramatically when it supports those actively participating in communities of resistance. This small caveat also allows me to look a little askance at some other political art exhibitions I see floating around the globe where I am quite convinced that those participating have little interest in any radical culture outside the global radical art exhibition circuit. If I may be quite frank, this is a problem more endemic to cities like New York or London where the culture of radical aesthetic participation is often divorced from on-the-ground activism.
Ultimately, I am a fan of small outside the museum projects. I am a fan of multi-use centers that provide formats for artists/activists/citizens/gardeners/freaks to participate in a wide array of formats from those most civically pragmatic to those most ambiguous. But this essay is geared towards whether or not the museum is a good place for radical practice. I am amenable to critiques of political art in museums, but I must admit, I am often leery of critique's intentions. If I smell the rank odor of those using the veneer of critique for the sole purpose of building their own social capital, I get nauseous. If I smell the familiar fragrance of those building social capital and committed to a radical practice, I am quite sympathetic. In my experience with the Interventionist exhibition at MASS MoCA, I would say the project produced a set of truly amazing positive results. If the project can inform a public about radical practice and provide support for a radical community of resistance, then I say yes.
@Nato Thompson, 2006
Nato Thompson is a Curator at MASS MoCA and curator for the exhibition "The Interventionists." With Gregory Sholette, he is co-editor of The Interventionists: A Users Manual to the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, published by MIT press.