Note: This blog posting is LONG overdue. My desire to keep a daily blog report during the Janaury 9-11th Art and Activism retreat was more than a little overly ambitious. Not only was the retreat incredibly intense and full, but it took me a good couple of weeks just to let all of what happened sift through in my brain...so here is a condensed version of the report back.
A telling moment: the last morning of the We Want More retreat one of the members of the Just Seeds Radical Print Collective announced to the group, “We keep talking about how to open this group to others, but I have no idea how to invite people to join us when we can’t even define what this is.” And really, what was this? A gathering of 80 plus artist-activists interconnected by one or two-degrees of separation? A retreat to reflect on the ways in which our shared and divergent practices are or are not making a difference in the social movements with which we align ourselves? An opportunity to connect around our commonalities, support one another’s efforts, and strategize for how to get more from ourselves?
Yes, We Want More. But exactly who are we, and what is the more that we claim to want? After three days of on-site investigation and two weeks of post-retreat reflection, these questions continue to bounce around my brain, delightfully unanswerable.
Filled with a burning urgency to figure something out, a small subset of the group spent the final hours of the retreat attempting to lay out some possible guiding principles.
We believe in:
- Arts* as open-ended experiments in imaginary, libratory, future possibilities of being;
- The orientation of arts’ work within social movements;
- Arts as forms of visual and performative languages in opposition to commodity form;
- Aesthetic cultural work against ALL hegemonies;
- Arts against oppression;
- Art that articulates possibilities for an unwritten future.
* The group presented these principles with the caveat that the words “art” or “arts” were both equally problematic. Ditto “value”. (Words are so hard!)
We agree to uphold these principles in our creative practice and acknowledge that, in many cases, IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING!
While the seven people in our small group enjoyed the mental and linguistic experiment, after presenting to the larger group, we chose to abandon any further efforts to carry these principles beyond the walls of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Whether the result of our discomfort around setting out definitions for the larger group or our resistance to speaking for those who did not choose or could not attend. Poof! (Thus I am recording them here as a reminder of our hard work, despite the utterly inconclusive outcome).
There were plenty of other undeterminables and moments of organizational meltdown – much of which focused around the question of who we were and who we were not. How to address the lack of diversity in the group became one of the hot spots of the retreat—looking around the room, the we represented was overwhelmingly white artists in their mid 20s to late 40s (it was curious that the brown people in the room didn’t seem to quite meet the group’s desire for diversity, as if somehow we were equating diversity with the presence of black people) The 80 one minute presentations reflected overlapping interests in performance, installation, occupation, food, street spectacle, mapping and creative discourse. Tune an ear to the conversation and the language floating to the top was that of university-educated, middle to upper class, anti-capitalist rhetoric.
It wasn’t until after the retreat that we (by which I mean the Providence representation of me, Andrew Oesch, Jori Ketten, and Micah Salking) asked our selves the question, “What if these elusive others that kept being evoked chose not to attend because they were just NOT interested in having this kind of conversation, participating in this academic, activist discourse?” It is important to remember that the same language that inspired many of us to respond to the initial invitation may have been a detraction to others who may be joined in similar struggles. I don't want to say that the language we use is good, or bad, but simply to point out that the ways we communicate matter to how our events/projects/etc. are perceived by others.
Beyond the fascinating meta-experience of trying to identify “what happened”, there were also direct take-aways that, yes, are even MORE questions. Here are a few that I sent to Steve Lambert (see earlier blog posting) the day after I returned to Providence.
- We talked a lot about imperfect models of slow burn strategies that offer resilience for groups that are in it (ie social change, mutual aid) for the long haul. People really responded to the model of the church (or temple, or mosque … lots of discomfort there too from a largely areligious crowd) as a model for building support systems that are intergenerational, ritualistic, with multiple points of entry.
- Conversely, what are other ways of talking about spectacle that do not carry the same, potentially vacuous, connotations? Celebrations? Radical sites of participation? I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I am wondering how to reframe spectacle versus the concept of slow-burn tactics that came out of the conference.
- People talked a lot about art being embedded in activist movements, which reminded me of your [Steve and Steve] How To Win presentation in which you talked about thinking of art as only one part of a larger strategy. My question then is whether artists are ready to step out of their leadership roles to both show up and in effect “be of service” to larger social movements. At the same time, I don’t like the uni-directional relationship implicit in “service”. Basically, can artists be humble?
- I keep coming back to the question that was raised at the How to Win talk about whether there are subversive art practices that do not need to employ the masters tools. Smaller, less sensational acts - what role do they play? Especially given that when you look at the ways in which social change is often a process of small incremental shifts in patterns and habits based on relationship building with these larger flash point moments. So the small is important, as is the intimate, but in what ways?
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I am still waiting to hear back from Steve on his response. But in the meanwhile, the We Want More group has continued to move its thinking beyond the retreat and towards two upcoming events. The first is the radical urbanism The City from Below conference to be held in Baltimore March 27th-29th. Its organizers position the conference as follows:
"In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below."
The other flashpoint will be the US Social Forum in the summer of 2010. A number of people at the conference were excited about building solidarity between the arts and cultural producers and the amazing groups activating for this national event. And so, onward with all the desire and ambiguity that can be conjured.
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