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[Alan Gilbert reminded me that there was a special issue of the online e-zine Pores devoted to questions concerning art practice and politics after 9/11. I've never been able to compose statements of this nature without sounding like a chest-thumping progenitor of humanist and/or Situationist clichés but nonetheless, trying to keep it simple and sticking to the questions, I did manage to commit a few things to words that would have been indifferent mental fluff (or neglected pineal furniture) otherwise. So with all humility it is here... I would recommend returning to the Pores site and looking at Alan's statement, among a few others. I am not sure if I agree with most of what I write below anymore, especially regarding street theater -- I had a naive belief, perhaps influenced by the apparent tension of the incidents described below in NYC, that people were paying attention. I've been disabused.]
What is your understanding of the cultural and political moment you find yourself in?
My sense is that we're kind of hanging in-between, waiting for that world “to be born” that, from this vantage, doesn't look very good though I have this feeling that, once it's here, we'll all know what to do.
I think there was some momentum created with the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and Genoa, and some of the radicalism that had been diluted by a too-theorized position-making in the 90s has been slowly leaking back into our notions of the arts in the world.
All of this seems to have been curtailed by 9/11.
Now:
* shucking off the worn ironies of an age of relative “prosperity” and experimenting with new artistic rhetorics and range of affects
* recovering from the aesthetic hangover after the optimism spawned by the innocuous successes of digital technologies (think The Matrix) and putting these technologies to work on a grassroots level (think Dogma 95)
* punching out of the total media-control that an indifferent mainstream (myself included) has permitted to occur
* preparing for a period in which the media will be questioned by everyone (not just by those trained to write about it or disaffected enough to not care) hopefully to the degree to make conversation about alternative responses to the world situation more possible, even imperative — for timid folks, like myself, but also among the politicians and other public speakers.
Also, waiting for the Bush administration to make its next ugly, decisive move. I'm surprised, given the media coverage of the range of war plans that have been appearing daily in the New York Times for the past several weeks (8/7/02), that there hasn't been more anti-war activism in the US, as if none of us can believe that they are planning on mobilizing a quarter-million troops against Iraq sometime within the next year. And asking Europe not to look.
I think a whole page of the Times should be dedicated each day to the exploits of the oil industry — I wanted to start a scrapbook myself, but realized that their stories on the oil industry's impact around the world only appeared very infrequently.
I don't know what to make of all of this in terms of aesthetics but I do get a sense that we are in a transition period. New languages will have to be used eventually that will be totally dissimilar to what we have now, and we will grow increasingly impatient with anything resembling academic hand-wringing.
(These statements seem to me very fragmentary, jumping all over the place, but perhaps the very static between the paragraphs is what I'm feeling.)
What necessities have emerged for you as a writer/artist/scholar after "September 11" and the events that have followed? How have these affected, if at all, your commitment as a practitioner?
No particular necessities – I don't think my life has changed all that much.
The only large difference might involve my turn away from internet art and an attempt to move more into performance/theater and, most recently, photography, possibly because I think these skills will be more useful in a period of civil unrest (such as I anticipate, in a way), but also because they have something to do with witness and spectacle which the web never really dealt with adequately or interestingly. Maybe as a form of cyborg navel-gazing, but not much more.
I'm probably just exaggerating (for you) but I do have this sense that I want to get out of my room (where I am chained to Flash and such things when working on the web) and into the daylight.
I feel some need to get back “in touch” with the world on a basic epistemological level, since it was that world in which I was dumped when the planes struck on 9/11. Process-oriented stuff has become less interesting to me since, though it leads to effects one could never have accessed in linear, improvisatory modes of writing, these effects are still bracketed by the procedure, by the idea of an algorithm, and exist in that culture which appreciates the elegant solution to aesthetic problems (a 'pataphysical culture, one which I still respect and respond to) regardless of more humanistic concerns.
I'm still very much an artist. In fact, I would never advise a writer to take up “topical” material if it threatened a certain integrity and excitement in the work – the example of poetic integrity is a political act in itself, and a poem that draws your attention out of the fabricated whole to the unanticipated completeness of piece of language achieves a sort of magic, a sort of clarity, that is its own form of activism.
Being boring melts the glaciers.
What forms of politics concern you? In what directions do they take you in terms of a need for actions or resources? How do they affect the practices available to you?
I don't think I'm a very effective “political thinker” if I am any brand of this at all, so anything I write about it will be pretty provisional and useless to anyone not myself.
But I will say that I have a sense for the need of some sort of public theater – some spectacle, with a touch of the bizarre, the gala, violence, community, song & dance, etc. – that can somehow get a handle on the media indifference to opinions that run up against the status quo, and form, if only temporarily, provisional communities against the ones constructed for us on television.
I think, in the handful of demonstrations that I have attended since 9/11, that there has been few bold, creative opportunities taken of the fact that a huge representation of the world's media is present – i.e. there are cameras everywhere, even on occasion important public figures (I saw Mike Bloomberg at a stand-off in Manhattan once) – but no one could create a gesture that would make the moment stick.
Something funny, but beautiful, etc. – the puppets are good, but I think we need bodies out there.
Not that I prize symbolism all that much – America is drenched with bad symbols, and when we run out we call in u2 – but I'd like a few symbols to be created spontaneously, from the passions of the people not being paid to create them.
My sense is that effective street theater of the sort I'm imagining would be the most immediate, far-ranging way to dispel the indifference that so many feel right now – I don't think any particular “point” will be put across, but it will turn our heads away from what is being seen on TV and in the paper and get us imagining what can be done now, in a group and as a culture, on the streets we live.
Spontaneous creativity, Situationist-style.
Obviously, this is not much of a political idea, if one is looking for an agenda, but it's something I've been thinking about. It's a more exciting idea than e-mail petitions, small press anthologies or even radical web-sites, though of course all of these things are important phenomena.
Posted by Brian Stefans at February 3, 2003 11:38 AM