Curatorship | Literary Review “Art out of Joint: Artists’ Activism Before and After the Cultural Turn” By Greogory Sholette

Literary Review

Gregory Sholette, “Art out of Joint: Artists’ Activism Before and After the Cultural Turn,” in The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, edited by Andrew Ross(OR Books, 2015), pp. 64–85.

This essay, all 23 pages of it, investigates a terrain of art practice exemplified by its latter-day incarnation- the GULF project. This essay is quietly situated in the publication G.U.L.F by Scholette that focuses on artistic practices that “favour more direct political action” during the post-war “cultural turn” between 1965 and 1989. “Art out of joint” could be considered a chapter that contextualises the various forms of “direct actions” that preceded the GLC and the GULF coalition of artists and their collaborators.

Historical Lineage of Artists Activism

Through various examples of artists’ activism and their actions, Scholette unquestionably puts forth a historical lineage of post-war artists-led organised coalitions like Critical Art Ensemble, The Art Workers Coalition (AWC) and Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG), that were active in the art world in the 1960s and 1970s. The essay sketches artists and artists collectives who respond to external events like the Vietnam War (outside of art) with their noncompliance with “research and art norms” during supposed moments of crisis. His thesis is very much about how artists as cultural producers become politically engaged, engage in social criticism outside of the formal vocabulary of art and attempted “activistic” activities to voice out against global issues throughout the periods of increased visibility and importance of art museums as cultural institutions.

In the view of Scholette, “as art and politics collude and collide with each other, panicked tradition-bound cultural institutions and artworld patrons pushed back against ..dangerous blurring of categories”. The blurring of categories between the institution and the role of the artists was highlighted in Sholette’s numerous historical examples in the essay, systematically archived in his writing from its earliest incarnation to the current day example of G.U.L.F that has come to support his argument. From the 1966 manifesto from the anarchist collective Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers to the Situationist International (from 1968) and their affiliation with university students, these coalitions signal a shift in how the array of ideas, organisational platforms, and “direct” political action became co-opted into practices of contemporary art.

The 1980s as a breed of tactical public interventions

Examples of boycotts by artists in protest of military and corporation involvement in Biennials by AWC or other similar coalition groups (e.g. Guerilla Art Action Group) continued into the 1970s and 1980s. In his essay, he charts how the 1980s brought together artists, writers, curators, gallerist, commercial dealers, architects and infiltrated alternative spaces in pushing forth these artists activisms beyond mere protest. The organisational competencies of these more tactical public interventions emerged, during a period of greater pragmatism, where artists and their collaborators became less “ideologically romantic”. This self-reflexivity enabled the protests campaigns to be more politically confrontational and noticed by various political and cultural leaders and the general public as well. Amplified by the mass media and “acting as public intellectuals, cultural producers demanded that national leaders, as well as museum directors, live up to democratic ideals”, Scholette in his essay lays out that through his various examples, acts of solidarity between cultural producers and human-rights groups possibly resulted in greater solidarity between populations and amplified the artists call for change.

He concludes his essay by summing up that the more contemporary examples of GLC, Liberate Tate and Occupy Museums were a clear continuum of direct actions started by the earlier waves in the 1960s and 1980s. An important difference between these 20th-century forms of protests is the “absence today of an ideological counter-narrative to capitalism, and…belief that cultural producers bring something extraordinary to the underprivileged masses via the elevated benefits of serious art”. With this premise, he has set out that contemporary art has come a long way in wielding greater power in opposition to the might of politics, institutions and the state. What is somehow lacking in his argument is primarily the effect (and affect) created by these public interventions. How much of these acts of “art out of joint” had created greater awareness of global populations which in his view are caught in the cruel cycle of precarity?

The questions that resonated

As a result of the literary review of this essay, some pertinent questions came to the fore.

Can art and the ethics surround its creation transcend geographical boundaries in creating greater awareness of global populations caught in the cruel cycle of precarity?
Could and Should art be politicised?
If so, what is the aesthetic core of this activism, if it exists?

Some extended reading includes:

Say, Jeffery and Yu Jin, Seng. (2016). Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art. Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Art, LASALLE.
Bishop, Claire. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books.
Decter, Joshua. (2013). Art is a Problem. Austria: JRP | Ringier.
Stimson, B. and Sholette, G. (eds.) (2007). Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Sholette, G., & Lippard, L. (2017).Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (Charnley K., Ed.). London: Pluto Press.
http://www.gregorysholette.com/ and his other essays and videos:
1. http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Encountering_The_Counter_Institution_Sholette_2016.pdf
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8KAopK0M-o
3. http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/A_User_is_Haunting_the_Art_World_a_book.pdf

Protected: A Selection of Performance Art Relics (from The Artists Village, 1988 – 2008)

Research Critique | Ant Farm’s Media Burn, 1975

Ant Farm
(An Interview with Chip Lord, from the NMC Media Lounge at the College Art Association conference, February 23, 2018).)

In approaching and researching into the artistic oeuvre of Ant Farm (1968 – 1978), one stumbles upon numerous documents and retrospective shows about/from the visionary collective. The body of works all stack up as being ‘sublimely relevant more than three decades later’ as quoted by Constance M. Lewallaen in her essay Still Subversive After All These Years, a testament to how Chip Lord, Doug Michel later joined by Curtis Schreier have left behind a body of not just artworks but research that is not just relevant but still considered radical and groundbreaking. As described in Michael Sorkin’s essay Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Cars, Dolphins, and Architecture:

Looking back at the amazingly fertile oeuvre of the Ants—produced in a ten-year sprint that would have left lesser artists burned out for life— one is overwhelmed by their vision and their generosity, their interventions in the range of practices and issues that set the contemporary agenda for architecture. Performance, video, public sculpture, architecture, and polemic were all wielded with huge skill and massive aplomb.

Ant Farm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of 1968 San Francisco by architects who dealt with the intersection of architecture (the built form), design and media arts (the projected form) and produced works in numerous formats ranging from agitprop events to videos, live-action performances, and installations. Referencing Michael Sorkin’s essay again, he continues that:

The times, after all, were not purely about rupture but also about rupture, about submitting the cultural and physical landscape to the revaluing of altered vision. That vision was diverse.’

Ant Farm was an art collective like no other as they produced a diverse body of artworks that cuts across visual arts, architecture, graphic design, new media art and socially engaged art. Such a diverse vision was achieved by Ant Farm as they existed as an ‘autonomous reality community’, a term by respected scholar and theorist of media arts and politics, Gene Youngblood (and referenced by Randall Packer as an ideal description of Ant Farm, in a recent interview with Chip Lord from the NMC Media Lounge at the College Art Association conference, February 23, 2018).

Autonomous, in how they developed their practice outside of the privileged institutional context of universities and were able to produce art that is still relevant today in debates about the impact of mass media on our lives, discussions on sustainable architecture and issues surrounding building technologies, public art and essentially questioning the ‘realities’ of architecture. The group crafted artworks that were altered visions like “Media Burn” that was always somewhat utopian, but also ironic and tongue-in-cheek in the appropriation of elements from popular culture. As a collaborative entity, their work was a result of the creative energies swilling around at the conceptual activities of the late sixties and seventies, a seminal period of creative gestation for art.

In “Media Burn”, it is a multimedia artwork on many levels. As a live event, the artists have created an opening ‘mockumentary’ where the artists have appropriated documentary-style staging to create a simulacrum of an actual event. Doug Hall plays John F. Kennedy, appropriating the iconic president whose live television shooting shocked a generation of Americans and their experience of mass media, as an artist-president. This tongue-in-cheek gesture by Ant Farm is exacerbated by the speech that he delivers where the artist-president regally pronounces “Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?”

With this radical gesture, the reconstructed Cadillac that has been crudely modified (as Ant Farm were greatly influenced by the Do-It-Yourself culture at that time) to resemble an idealised/dream vehicular object, plows into a wall of televisions. The video brings forth a performative gesture that sets up an explosive collision between two of North America’s biggest and most potent cultural symbols of the 1970s: the vehicle (a car that has come to symbolise the ability to traverse land, a dream of many Americans) and the television (a mass media device that has shaped the way people in America live and perceive one another and how they have come to envision the outside world). The invited media representatives that formed the spectators made the spectacle into a ‘media circus’ and footage of the event, which were shot from the video camera mounted inside the car, were further juxtaposed with news coverage from television stations. Such was the complexity of the work that in surveying the work, we categorise it as a media event, a series of site structures (installation), performance (also in real-time) and video-art (closed-circuit cameras and pre-edited ‘mockumentary’.

The event itself manages to merge all these into an artwork that is humorous with cultural and political critique, where they critiqued North American’s ideals of technological superiority and questioned the role of mass media and consumerism on the North American culture. The invited guests who were members of the national media, a gesture that up to this day is very much spoken about. Ant Farm had:

engaged the most powerful aspect of the joke: the possibility of splicing things that in conventional atmospheres would be considered impossible to join.

Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975-2003.  San Francisco. Videotape. 16 mins. Color.

With “Media Burn”, Ant Farm has produced one of the most exquisite artworks of the 20^th century that is still relevant and spoken about up until today. In fact, the work has definitely become more ‘sublimely relevant more than three decades later’ due to the increased intertwining of mass media and one’s social and physical reality. The altered vision set up by Ant Farm still resonate, as our experience of the every day becomes blurred by imagery displayed on the television, internet and social media.