Making Art Out of Doors: A Conversation with Gregory Sholette, by Nicolas Lampert.

Lampert: Much of the political-activist art coming out of three specific regions, the US, Canada and Western Europe is engaging, but as you mentioned in your essay for the MASS MoCA group art show The Interventionists catalog, it is by-and-large symbolic. The artwork is often more of a critique on social problems, lacking any transformative powers for action that would truly help any group or class significantly. While we must still applaud the socially engaged artist, your critique runs much deeper than simply the shortcoming of the activist artist. I would argue that the majority of activists engage in symbolic protests from anti-globalization protests to the global February 15th protests before the start of the Iraq War. Arundhati Roy commented about this fact in an interview with David Barsamian. Roy stated, “Fifteen million people marched against the war in Iraq on February 15, 2003, in perhaps the biggest display of public morality ever seen. It was fantastic. But it was symbolic. Governments of today have learned to deal with that. They know to wait out a demonstration or a march. They know the day after tomorrow, opinions can change, or be manipulated into changing. Unless civil disobedience becomes real, not symbolic, there is very little hope for change.” Would you agree with Roy’s assertions?

Sholette: Yes, I agree in large part with this, but rush to add that it is the linkagebetween symbolic and direct forms of intervention that need to be re-thought and re-deployed in a far more strategic framework. Therefore, a better formulation is that under present circumstances social change demands thatdirect mobilization and civil disobedience be coordinated in tandem with sophisticated instances of symbolic intervention, dissemination, organization and analysis. For example, if a mass rally is called for, its organizers should develop ways of creating and circulating their own informational and visual representation of the action in order to counter the way mass media frames and neutralizes images of resistance. This began to evolve with IndyMediaduring the Seattle protest in 1999, but its development appears to have lost momentum. Artists could help to revitalize this alternate informational network by developing mobile broadcasting stations for public spaces. The Spanish organization Las Agencias did something like this with their Show Bus, a festively decorated touring coach converted into a muti-purpose media and communications relay center. The bus projected images from demonstrations onto its windows while its roof became a stage for performances. Of course, it was also a rather large target. It was set on fire one night, most likely by police or their agents. Smaller mobile media relays are perhaps preferable such as the Fire Fly: a remote video projector pulled by a bicycle developed by the Center for Applied Autonomy. One could even imagine modified headwear capable of relaying and screening alternative forms of representation beyond the control of the global news citadel.

All of this is actually pretty easy to envision technically. The real difficulty is at the organizational level. The first challenge is developing the capability to record, rapidly edit, and broadcast in a manner that is coordinated with street action. Again, models exist for this dating as far back as the Soviet agit-trains of the 1920s that steamed across the country shooting, developing and screening films and producing various forms of information and propaganda along the way. The principal difficulty is bringing political activists and cultural workers (for lack of a better term) together so they operate on the same page, thinking strategically, rather than in the fragmented way they often do at present. For many activists – cultural or ecological or anti-militarist— or what have you – such strategic thinking beyond the immediate group or activist cell raises fears about stifled dissent, collective discipline, hierarchical lines of authority, even the formation of an actual political party. Not all of these fears are unreasonable of course, but then who ever said resistance was going to be squeaky-clean or fun? I recall incredible frustration as a member ofPAD/D (Political Art Documentation and Distribution) in the 1980s when we attempted to collaborate with non-art, activist groups. Typically they were glad to have us “artistes”fulfill their graphic design needs by making flyers and posters. But more complex projects thatwe proposed were greeted with confusion or skepticism. Thankfully, I think that problem has greatly diminished, at least within the counter-globalization movement where it is clear art activists have been on the front lines of political struggle. Building flexibly networked coalitions with definite, long-range strategies that combine symbolic resistance with direct action is the ultimate challenge. This is something the Right has managed to do with all too obvious success. Think for instance how much more powerful the recent, and brilliant BBC intervention made by the Yes Men would have been had simultaneous mass demonstrations taken place outside various Dow Chemical headquarters in synchrony with that broadcast?

One of The Yes Men impersonating a Dow Chemical executive on the BBC, 12.3.04.

Speaking specifically in terms of artistic practice, the Dziga Vertov Collective (filmmakers Jean Pierre Gorin and Jean Luc Goddard) neatly answered the predicament you raise in the late 60s by re-stating a concept proposed by Walter Benjamin in “The Author as Producer.” “The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically.” The gap between symbolic protest and direct action means understanding the difference between political art that represents opposition, and activist art that produces instances of opposition, either fleetingly or in a more sustained fashion. The latter requires interrogating the means one uses to communicate the message through by discovering the shifting politics of form.

To make this more concrete consider Picasso’s painting Guernica as an example of political art in so far as it depicts outrage against fascismand militarismin the form of a powerful image that nevertheless remains a singular object of aesthetic contemplation. By contrast, the anti-fascist photomontage work of John Heartfield during same time period also began as a fixed, visual image, yet once reproduced on the covers of the German Communist Party’s illustrated newspaper AIZ they were disseminated amongst opponents of the Nazi regime spreading a visual and political analysis of fascist ideology.

Heartfield Preparing a photo-montage of Pro-Nazi Police Commissioner Zorgiebel in 1929 for AIZ: Arbeiter-Illustriect-Zerlung, (Worker's Illustrated Newspaper).

Activist art also describes the approach taken by many “community based” artists, both in the US and in the UK over the past thirty or more years. Here is how the artist Jan Cohen-Cruz argues this point:

“Community art can be distinguished from so-called political art, which usually refers to an aesthetic object whose subject matter either directly responds to a controversial public action or is intended to challenge public perception about the status quo… In contrast, community-based art is as much about the process of involving people in the making of the work as the finished object itself. Context is also central; this art is situated in more public, accessible and resonant places, geared to a specific audience and a specific time.”

An Introduction to Community Art and Activism on the Community Arts Network site at: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archive/intro-activism.php

Of course these neat distinctions are often more clear-cut in theory than in practice. When Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was cancelled in 1971, did not his essentially museum-bound art work suddenly shift from being political art to an activist practice that mobilized opposition to the conservative mindset of the museum? Arguably the incident even produced a temporary, oppositionalcommunitydrawn from the otherwise patchy set of individual interests that make up the New York art world as demonstrators performed conga-lines on the spiraling galleries of the museum in protest. (Organized by the Art Workers Coalition) Even Guernica momentarily shifted from aesthetic object to activist intervention when the US chose to conceal it behind blue drapes during Colin Powell’s infamous UN speech leading up to the war in Iraq. I spotted Picasso’s iconic imagery carried aloft by a flock of art students during anti-war demonstrations here in New York soon afterwards. They had collectively recreated the painting as a set of jigsaw-like picket signs having graspedGuernica’s momentarily “re-vitalized” activist energy.

Art students with Picasso’s Guernica as anti-war placards NYC, February 2003.

And of course this process alsoworks in reverse. For example whenGran Fury’s AIDS activist posters appear in a museum exhibition about graphic design, or when community-based artists are hired by municipalities to work with people in economically deprived neighborhoods, and inadvertently assist real estate developers seeking to transform an old waterfront or dilapidated downtown into an appealing site for upscale stores andhomesteaders. I would say that to ignore the potential for mutation from symbolism to activism is every bit as misguided as forgetting the power of reification and cooptation is naïve.

Lampert: It could be also be said that artists obviously re-evaluate their tactics and evolve in their work. Betty Beaumont comes to mind as an artist who began as a political artist and evolved to an activist artist. Beaumont first documented environmental devastation with her photographic series in 1969 of the Santa Barbara, California oil spill. Her work a decade later took a significant change, whereas instead of exposing these problems of nature and industry colliding, she offered a solution. In her work that merged art and environmental science, Ocean Landmark Installation completed in 1980, Beaumont built a small barrier reef with fly ash blocks off the coast off Fire Island National Seashore that stabilized a portion of a threatened ecosystem. I find this work remarkable but in the same context both her installation in the ocean and the documentation of the project at the Hudson River Museum were relatively hidden from large-scale public attention. One is nearly invisible in the setting of the gallery (a place where only a small segment of the community visits), and the other beneath the ocean. Beaumont demonstrates to the public who attended the show or who read about the project that this technology can in fact be successful, but by-and-large it was a symbolic action not unlike Mel Chin’s Revival Field in St. Paul that exhibited in a public art/laboratory exhibit how plants could pull toxics out of the soil. My point is that both of the artists succeeded in showing how human ingenuity can start to address environmental problems if the political will existed. The trouble of course is first reaching a large audience to inform people and second to inspire citizens to take action against an often all too reluctant government and corporate society. The ability to do so though often depends on what techniques are utilized to reach a mass audience. This brings us to problem of who has access to media. We are witnessing the growth of a global independent media network that is vital, but the corporate media that reaches billions of people is all that more pervasive and deceptive.

Sholette: Beaumont also played a key role in “Choice Histories,” an installation about the history of women’s struggle for control of human reproduction that REPOhistory created in 1992, and another example of submerged dissident art work that few people know about.Still, your right about what we are calling art: it is a very minor player in a cultural landscape dominated by sports, movie stars, television news, fashion, popular music and advertising. At the same time we should recognize that culture is a type of industrial production and it is increasingly accessible to non-specialists.

According to Michael Denning in his shrewdly argued book Culture in the Age of Three Worlds [verso, 2004] the industrial world made a decisive “cultural turn,” sometime around the start of the Cold War in the late 40s, early 50s. Because the Cold War was in large part an ideological confrontation, demonstrating one’s superiority by producing better cars, stronger athletes, and even greater artists (as the New York Abstract Expressionists were championed and propagated through international exhibitions) provided as significant of a victory as winning on the battlefield. As Denning puts it, everyone suddenly realized that culture had a weight all its own. Business and government realized that instead of being left to develop any which way, culture could be created and marketed like other forms of merchandise. The logical outcome of this was a, “Ford assembly line” of cultural production.

Broadly speaking, two types of cultural resistance can be described as significant here. The first of these are those artists who do not turn their back on the media, but selectively attempt to retool what Guy Debord termed The Society of the Spectacle, “the autonomous movement of the non-living,” for anti-consumerist, political ends. This type of resistance includes the Situationist’s detournmont of publications and cinema in the 40s, 50s, and 60s; the New Left media of the Dziga Vertov Collective; the guerrilla style film and video making of Paper Tiger and Deep Dish TV; the anti-colonialist media of Black Audio Film Collective, and the Sankofa Film/Video Collective; the AIDS activist media of DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists); and most recently the tactical media produced by Ricardo Dominguez, RTmark, the Yes Men, Whisper Media among others. In each case artists adapted the available means of cultural production, turned it around, and pointed its barrel back at capitalism, patriarchy, and/or colonialist hegemony knowing this “stick-up” was only a momentary intervention or pause.

The other resistant approach is linked to what the late Edward Said described as the recovery of colonized spaces through collective resistance and imagination, or what Hakim Bey in his surreal, near-orgiastic way describes as a Temporary Autonomous Zones, or what Denning terms the opposition found in the “intellectual shanty-towns” of globalization. These border areas are filled with cultural refugees who generate their own shadow economies, sometimes with full-blown counter-institutional forms and networks. Just as often however, they boil like a stew in which the fragmented histories of squats and community gardens, company sabotage and spontaneously organized strikes never really add up to a whole. They belong to what E.P. Thompson called social history “from below,” or what I have elsewhere termed “creative dark matter.” These displacements are not entirely outside the dominant culture however because points of resistance also occur even in the heart of the system where they momentarily produce a temporary gap or drop-out effect. When compared to a conventional union or political party these dark areas are far more difficult if not impossible for mainstream ideology to re-interpret or reframe since they do not conform to any well-mapped lexicon. However, unlike the first form of active resistance, this de-colonized space is not necessarily always progressive. Lingering anger about the failure of radical change, or what Denning describes as the uncompleted revolution, can transform itself into what Neitzsche termed ressentiment. Under certain historical conditions such bitterness can fuel authoritarianism and Fascism instead of greater democracy, racial justice and economic liberation. There is also the possibility of what Derrida termed a tromp l’oel effect in which old institutional forms are virtually replicated within a seemingly emptied-out, new space. Rather than overly-romanticize this second form of resistance look at it as a space of potential and radical displacement, rather than as the embodiment of actual political autonomy.

Thanks to the near global hegemony of capitalism and the spread of what Hardt and Negri call immaterial labor, the hinge/contrast between symbolic and direct action, or between political art and activist art, is simultaneously being exacerbated as Roy argues, yet it is paradoxically reaching a point of possible disintegration. How can that be? Because the same near-totality global capital has accomplished inevitably permits greater access to the means of ideological production, and not only for professionally trained artists, but increasingly for much of the population. Add to this the fact that capitalism now depends upon a high degree of worker mobility and lateral thinking or what has been mystically termed “thinking outside the box,” and what you get is a world population of producers and consumers that are forced to become creative, computer literate, and motivationally flexible. All the while digital technology makes disseminating alternative information and ideas that much easier. Case in point is the Yes Men’s Bhopal intervention. How did the BBC come to believe this artful imposter was a corporate spokesman? Because they relied on a website that the Yes Men created, which mimicked the symbolic authority of Dow Chemical itself.

Now, please understand I am not fetishizing new technology or suggesting it is the means activists should take seriously. For one thing, with technologies ubiquitous presence comes new, subtle forms of social control and manipulation. Nor am I dismissing the political importance of traditional forms of human labor under globalization, much of which is still going on in Southern Hemisphere nations. The emergence of immaterial labor does not minimize “embodied” resistance against colonialism, racism and sexism, nor does it disregard the fact that most people still work in factories or farms using their own muscle power (supplemented of course by animals and technology). My point is simply to recognize the fact that the entire world market, which labor power in all its forms reproduces, is now integrated and transformed by information technology. That is unprecedented. Opposition must start by first considering this fact, and what it offers. Theorist Brian Holmes for one frames the situation positively arguing that:

“The communicational infrastructure has been partially externalized into personal computers, and a “knowledge capital” has shifted from the schools and universities of the welfare state into the bodies and minds of immaterial laborers: these assets can be appropriated by all those willing to use what is already ours, and to take the risks of political autonomy and democratic dissent.”

In other words, gathering, interpreting, and distributing data and producing cultural goods – the work of creative and intellectual, immaterial labor – has emerged as capitalism’s circulatory system. Cut this circuit and it hemorrhages, a fact that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center demonstrated when we say the economy crash after 911. In other words, if in the past, ball-bearing factories and shipyards were primary targets for crippling an opponent’s economy, then today the target will also include, or perhaps primarily consist of, intellectual workers and their expertise. Granted, this is a negative example but it clearly underscores these changes in labor we are discussing.

The key question therefore is this: could these ubiquitous capillaries of knowledge and creativity be redirected towards a different set of coordinates, grated onto another type of tissue, pressed into producing an alternative future? In order to answer this challenge it will require going beyond the cultural politics of the past and breaching the divide between symbolic and direct action, even if that means dissolving “art” as we know it into a more generalized, non-specialized, creative production. It will also require some degree of political coordination and analysis, something the informally instituted interventionist artists are strongly resistant to it seems.

Lampert: Historian Howard Zinn offers us this critique of the built in levels of control in capitalism, particularly in the US. Zinn states, “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority… These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system fails.”

Could it be safely stated that the majority of artists are part of this buffer zone? That many artists in the US are too comfortable? If not, do you see an undercurrent that does not act as buffer zone?

From the New York Times Magazine circa 1999.

Sholette: If we are talking about art and artists practicing in the European tradition I think it is fair to say that artists have almost always operated from within the buffer zone that separates the powerful from the disadvantaged. Granted, we both know art historians have typically overlooked, or at best understated the recurring involvement by artists in the politics of their day. Correcting that record is the aim of your work, mine, as well as more and more younger scholars. As a division of specialized laborers, specific acts of class delinquency by artists – of straying out from the buffer zone that Zinn speaks of for anything more than a glimpse into how the “other half lives” – is now, as in the past, the exception, not the rule.

Such exceptions include times of severe crisis when society undergoes revolution, war, or political and economic meltdown. In such moments some artists will pick up the lead of activists seeking change: think of Beethoven siding with the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy at the time of the French Revolution or the Russian Avant-Garde inspired by the collective politics of the workers councils.

But perhaps another way to get at this question is to ask if artists, as a group or class of highly trained workers, are in a better position – technically, financially, and/or politically speaking – than other professionals to bring about social change? Lets say we could somehow measure this by comparing the net effectiveness of politically committed artists with that of doctors, or lawyers who practice amongst the poor and disadvantaged? My guess is that artists would not fair better. They may in fact fair worse. The only factor that might tip the balance slightly is that after receiving their training most artists, those at least who continue practicing art which is half or less, will not rise nearly as far in material terms as other professionals. (This positioning is different from how one perceives one’s class position). Typically out of economic necessity artists wind up living along side of poor and working class people and some inevitably come to identify with their status. Still, only a small number will carry that identification over into their art, and only a handful of these will turn their perceptions into a sustained critique of social inequality.

When Courbet took part directly in the Paris insurrection of 1870–71, even becoming a council member for the Communards, he abruptly abandoned the neutral role of “artist” as observer and maker of specialized images as assigned to him by bourgeois culture. By helping to topple the Vendôme column, a monument to French imperialism, Courbet was catapulted from artist, to artist as producer of political intervention to tweak Walter Benjamin’s celebrated phrase. He also paid for this partisanship dearly. After the Commune was destroyed Courbet was sent to prison, blacklisted by the artistic establishment, and banished from France to die in exile a few years later in Switzerland.

This then is the dominant lesson that history teaches us: cultural worker, know thy place. For it is one thing to represent the oppressed sympathetically or even to satirize the powerful and elite. It is altogether another thing if one dissolves the symbolic representation of dissent in order to directly act upon the world by transforming the means of cultural production and distribution, or by placing oneself at the disposal of those who struggle against injustice. That amounts to something like class suicide in so far as the privileged position of artist, normally shielded by the rights of free expression, are breached. Something similar happened recently to artist Steven Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble when the FBI investigated him for bioterrorism over his group’s Do It Yourself approach to genetic technology. Of course knowing one’s place and on which side of the invisible line to stand may also explain why we find thousands of compassionate paintings of saints and martyrs, but has one artist ever been canonized or, like St. Francis, actually chosen a life of poverty rather than have poverty forced upon them?

Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D) event flyers, circa 1982-85

Lampert: Considering the decline in Unions and the assault on working class people, how do artists fit into this equation? Radical artists such as the Berlin Dada Movement, albeit from a different society and time period, felt it crucial not only to address working class people with their work, but to join factory workers and Unions. We do not see that occurring as much today. Do specific artists come to mind that indeed speak to working class concerns and should our efforts be in building back Unions and working class political power?

Sholette: Well in the precise terms you put this there are, as you point out, very few artists working closely in collaboration with unions. Those I am aware of include Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Fred Lonidier, Mike Alewitz, Alan Sekula, Marty Pottenger and Carol Conde and Karl Beveridge. All of these people have developed a substantial body of art by working closely or actually collaborating with organized labor. However, many Labor Unions, at least in the US, have become so institutionalized and have come to resemble the hegemony of the corporate business model to such a degree that they resemble little more than political lobbyists out to get their members the allots slice of pork. Another thing I have been trying to suggest throughout our conversation Nicolas is that the very notion of labor, of work, has changed. It is no longer exclusively manual, even if it remains so in many parts of the developing world (and that includes some parts of the United States as well in Appalachia and the Deep South). Artists, as well as activists, must reformulate their approach to accommodate this change. This means recognizing the role that the new, so-called creative class plays in reproducing the system itself. At the same time, the connection between the interventionist art we are discussing, together with elements of organized labor points to an intriguing zone of potential resistance. In other words, any revolution “from below,” from the rank and file, the racially oppressed, or the poor or “lumpen,” will need to include the computer slave who puts in 14-hour days, 6 or 7 days a week as well as the single-moms who empty the office trashcans and sweep the floor. (I paid my early college expenses working late nights as a non-unionized janitor in an industrial computer plant in Pennsylvania and from that vantage point certain aspects of the system become clear, never to leave one’s outlook.)

Lampert: Audience is key concern for art carrying a social message. Many of the artists in The Interventionist show place their work in the public where the public might unexpectedly stumble upon it. Perhaps it may be a sighting of Wodiczko’s homeless vehicle, a paraSITE temporary shelter or a glimpse of the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s spray painting robot. While all of this work is ingenious, it is very different than say a large mural in the city that becomes part of the permanent landscape. In today’s desire for artists to be cutting edge, have murals lost their glamour and could one argue that one method is more effective than the other?

Sholette: The story behind the demise of the radical mural movement is yet to be written. In Chicago, New York, San Francisco and numerous cities (speaking now only of the US), murals were the preeminent form of socially engaged public art from the 1920’s to just about the present day. Today, murals are typically part of municipal programs to enhance run-down shopping zones, or they are decorations for schools and community buildings. The big challenge facing any re-activation of progressive, mural artis that the types of urban spaces – typically abandoned buildings or the walls of publicly owned property – have mostly vanished as private, economic interests have swept into the cities renovating lofts and raising the cash value of every square foot of space. It is no coincidence that as murals have disappeared of late, enormous, mural-sized advertising banners have taken their place on city streets.

When I first moved to Chicago Jon Pounds of the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) took me on a personal tour of the hidden, guerilla or otherwise forgotten murals of the city. All of these seemed to be at least ten years old and most were fading including some wonderful murals by CPAG co-director Olivia Gude. Here in New York the dramatic mural that used to adorn the Pathfinder building downtown was destroyed. Another mural on the Lower East Side that was produced by John Pittman Weber was saved from a similar fate by the public intervention of artists and activists. But who knows for how long? The death of muralist Eva Cockcroft about eight years ago was also a real loss to the once thriving movement. Perhaps, given what you suggest about the lack of allure murals possess, this is an excellent form to consider re-inventing?

A giant advertising mural adorns the A.J. Muste “Peace Building,” in Lower Manhattan (in 2004) where the offices of PAD/D and REPOhistory were previously located and where Paper Tiger, NY is still remains today.

Lampert: Geoge Lakoff, the UC Berkeley linguistics professor and founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute has garnered a lot of attention recently. He argues that the key to political success is “framing” the issue, especially in moral terms, to convince the public of your position. As a staunch supporter of the Democrats, Lakoff argues that the Republicans excel at framing issues to their advantage and Democrats largely fail at it. At a recent, design conference in Berkeley, he urged politically engaged artists to use framing techniques in their visual work to their advantage. At times, I really respond to his ideas, other times, it gives me the uneasy sense of embracing methods of propaganda. What are your thoughts’ on this matter? Should we embrace left wing propaganda as a method to reach a larger audience?

Sholette: Gran Fury made excellent use of mainstream visual framing techniques in their “kissing doesn’t kill” bus-poster series. This approach can of course be traced back to Heartfield and other photomontagists of the early 20th Century, as well as to the Détournement technique of the Situationists in the 50’s and 60’s. These artists took full advantage of the most technologically advanced forms of representation and reproduction available in their day. And yes, in the case of Heartfield, this very sophisticated graphic work disseminated a specific party line. Still, it is worth reading Adorno’s knotty but important essay On Commitment in which he raises trepidations about the way committed artists – Sartre and Brecht are his primary examples – tend to reduce the complexity of political reality in order to make their message more accessible to a mass audience, that is, in order to make it politically useful. It’s a complex critique even if it is shot-through with a searing pessimism about the liberatory potential of any working class movement, as well as filled with disdain for anything smelling of popular culture. In the end, Adorno correctly recognized the degradation and inertia mass media can bring about, but failed to grasp its potential for expression, education and pleasure might, at times, outweigh its deficiency. I think it is essential to distinguish therefore between propaganda as the embellishment of dogmas or half-truths, even if this is done for presumably noble ends, and the practice of creative play, of documenting reality, or re-framing information, news and historical representations in order to reveal their prejudices, or to express the point of view of the oppressed, the forgotten, the overlooked or simply to revel in the joy of refusing the enclosures that we increasingly are expected to silently live within.

Lampert: I am struck by the fact that much of the resistance to global capitalism in the world is occurring outside of the US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe – outside the centers of the hyper-wealthy societies. The Southern Hemisphere is revolting against the ideas of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador have all had major uprisings in recent times although the news media in the US blinds us to this and the voices of people on the streets. Although this is simplifying a very complex issue, I get the sense that rebellion in these countries is a matter of life and death. When Bechtel privatized the water supply in Bolvia, people of all walks of life rose up in massive resistance.

Could one conclude, that resistance in a substantially wealthy country such as the US, will continue to be marginal until economic poverty becomes a reality for a large segment of the population and that the actions of a far right-wing government become so egregious to an otherwise apathetic populace that they can not be ignored?

Sholette: You are of course making a point that many radicals (as opposed to liberals), have made over the years. History apparentlybears out the logic of this formula with this curious and perhaps crucial exception, that the New Left emerged in the United States at a time when the distribution of economic wealth was, for whites at least, incredibly evenly dispersed and the social safety net was fully deployed. Now certainly the counter-culture was stirred to life largely by the anti-war and civil rights movements. However, one might argue that the optimism of the 1960s resulted from a combination of fiscal stability and access to low-cost, higher education for the post-depression generation. In other words, it was a time of rising expectations in contrast to the falling expectations of today. Along with a yearning for more consumables came a hunger for greater social freedom and economic equality. Meanwhile, the economic safety net of the welfare state made taking risks with ones future seem less frightening. All of this radically changed in the 1980s during the Regan and Thatcher years. Since that time forward working people have certainly accumulated more commodities than ever before, more cars and electronic equipment, but they also have steep mortgages and deep credit card debt, they work longer hours, have less job security, pay more for health insurance (if they have it at all), and they are constantly in need of technical retraining simply to stay competitive in the job market. Therefore we might say that an intuitive grasp of this deeper material impoverishment has stimulated today’s conservative politics, including the support for an otherwise senseless war over oil resources. Of course such speculation rings hollow if we fail to acknowledging the collapse of socialism merely as an ideal that despite its actual shortcomings inspired varying degrees of utopianism, while simultaneously acting as a counter-weight to capitalist expansion. That “big other” is now gone. Nor do I doubt for a second that if Bush called for a draft tomorrow it would not lead to the end of the war and his administration. However, it may not be resistance from the Left or liberals driving such opposition to a general conscription, but instead traditional, isolationist tendencies within the right itself.

Lampert: What practical strategies do you see for confronting global capitalism in the post-911 context?

Sholette: It seems a new strategy is possible wherever the interests of immaterial labor and those of the more traditional working classes and the poor, especially in the developing world intersect, or wherever these can be made to intersect. In practical terms, if the counter-globalization movement is to move forward following 911 it must link the real needs of people in Maquiladora sweatshops in Mexico for example or in rural Venezuela with the day-to-day lives of working people in small town Ohio, upstate New York, the Bronx, Berlin or Paris. Finding ways to diminish the divide between activists who have similar objectives, yet who are divided by race, also continues to be paramount. Most importantly however, progressives must begin to move beyond the hit and run tactics and culture jamming of the recent past and into a broader, more sustainable collaboration with the movement of low or unskilled workers, the truly poor, and other disenfranchised people. For artists, this means finding ways of refusing and redirecting creative labor to resist a system that only turns it around against us. Perhaps the biggest unknown today however, is what to make of the United States under George Bush Junior. We seem to have entered a state of irrationality where theology, nationalism, free-market ideology and bare-knuckle imperialism are attempting to fuse. I am not sure that this will be sustainable in the long-run, but in the mean time the Bush administration appears to be calling a halt to the interdisciplinary, “outside the box” entrepreneurialism of the recent past. The new, homeland security state apparatus is already having a major impact on academic and scientific exchange, and as we have seen it is increasingly impinging on freedom of speech, especially political dissent. The federal case against the Critical Art Ensemble is only the most prominent of many instances of repression taking place since 911 and the institution of the USA Patriot Act. Where all this leads is the question of the moment. But in the absence of a strong political Left alternative to a possible governmental crisis that Bush’s policies are making increasingly likely, we could see a movement not towards progressive change, but from extreme conservativism to outright authoritarianism. Therefore, it seems that what the democratic Left needs now is a new vision or even a self-acknowledged myth or fetish-image to build upon. In other words, a fetishismthat recognizes the constructed nature of its own desire, but is not fearful of acting to bring about change, or as Marx would say, to realize the potential of collective, human action. As Blake Stimson and I argue in our book Collectivism After Modernism, this means acting directly within the new, disseminated forces of production, and not merely creating more cultural politics:

“This then is our fetish now: that the dream of collectivism realize itself as neither the strategic vision of some future ideal, of a revised modernism, nor as the mobile, culture-jamming, more-mediated-than-thou counter-hegemony of collectivism after modernism, but instead as Marx’s self-realization of human nature constituted by taking charge of social being here and now. This means neither picturing social form, nor doing battle in the realm of representation but instead engaging with social life as production, engaging with social life itself as the medium of expression.”

Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist, co-founder of REPOhistory and PAD/D and a writer whose critical essays on activist art have appeared in the journals Third Text, Art Journal, Afterimage, Mute, republicart.organd the InterActivistInfoExchange. He is co-editor of The Interventionists: A Users Manuel for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life(MIT), and currently working on the book Collectivism After Modernism(U. Minnesota Press) about the little known history of post-war collective art. More of his work can be seen online at www.gregorysholette.com.

Nicolas Lampert is a Milwaukee, WI based interdisciplinary artist. He is the co-founder of Drawing Resistance-a Traveling Political Art Show, an activist art show that has traveled collectively to 33 cities in the US and Canada from 2001-2005. He is the co-editor of Peace Signs: the Anti-War Movement Illustrated (2004). His visual art can be viewed at: www.machineanimalcollages.com. He is currently working on A People’s Art History of the United States, a radical art survey of American art and history.

Interview was conducted via email during the Spring, 2005