The concepts of relational power (Hardt & Negri, 2000), rhizomatic networks (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), temporary autonomous zones (Hakim Bey, 1985), and tactical interventions into the everyday (de Certeau, 1984), underpin much socially engaged art practice, as well as the anti-capitalist movement. But rather than referencing the aesthetics of DIY or collaborative culture, Ressler lives it through his work: finding film-makers, writers and theorists to collaborate in rigorous investigation into the myriad of tactics with which people are finding ways to express their social connectivity and alternative economic culture around the world.

In the film What Would It Mean to Win? (Begg & Ressler, 2008) John Holloway talks about protest as asymmetrical to capitalism because it proposes a different way of organising and being. In the publication accompanying the exhibition AEAS, (Ressler, 2007) Gregory Sholette describes the asymmetrical networks of the artworld: one which is based on mutual aid and gift economy, and the other on a market economy of institutional representation supported by art dealers and collectors (p15-16). It is possible to map the characteristics of informal production and distribution methods in art and activism. However, it is an unstable map, where artists often keep (or desire) a relationship with the formal art economy, both to legitimise their work aesthetically as art, and to keep the art-world as a communication/distribution channel for financial as well as ideological reasons.

Horizontal artist and activist networks are in contrast to the pyramid of capitalism (George, 1992), and attempt to construct spaces for dialogue, consensus decision-making and action as a model for social change. But there are problems here – in many ways the activist message utilises mainstream communication tactics, where art adds complexity and often confusion.

As an artist and film-maker Ressler is both representing activism, and expressing his political interests through the work, but what are the conceptual and aesthetic concerns of this process?

From an activist perspective it may seem banal to consider how Ressler’s practice reconciles his role as an activist within artistic terms. But for artists the question of cultural expression and representation lies at the heart of political change. Whilst both the mainstream and activist media often depict the polarities of political positions, Ressler attempts a more reflexive view. Every film includes the cultural context and explores the role of creativity in political change. But certain aspects of his work deal with complexity and ambiguity in representation, more than others.

Ressler’s films acknowledge activism as a form of self-expression (creatively, as well as politically), but they are also conscious of their own role of representing particular subjectivities (Bromberg, 2006).

The film 5 Factories – Worker Control in Venezuela (Azzellini & Ressler, 2006) examines the contemporary experience of co-operatively run companies supported by the controversial public reforms of the Chavez government. But the film is not typical of much activist documentary where high emotional drama can leave the viewer informed but completely exhausted, guilty and disempowered. Neither is it a charitable request, or a government information film. Instead it is a considered presentation of a model for an alternative economy in progress. Ressler and Azzellini take care to include the voices of workers from all areas of the production and management process. The content of the film is narrated through the individual experiences of the workers, inter-cut with visually seductive film-shots of the scale and beauty of the industrial production process. These shots, combined with the workers narratives, clearly represent knowledge of the raw material, and pride of ownership of the production process.

Symmetry and Asymmetry
There is symmetry throughout Ressler’s work – firstly in the analogy between art and activism as exploring worlds that are both asymmetrical to capitalism. Secondly, the films often work as pairs, with documentary of protest in Europe screened alongside evidence of alternative economies in other continents. Watching the film What Would It Mean to Win? (Begg & Ressler, 2008) is made manifest through the example of 5 Factories (Azzellini & Ressler, 2006). They form a diptych reflecting ambition and meaning between the two continents and cultures, each forming a context for the other.

There is symmetry of responsibility in Ressler’s work. The audience is not simply given information, they are asked to think, to imagine and to enact. The challenge of the Imagine… texts speaks directly to the audience, taking John Lennon’s day-dreaming into a series of specific socio-political propositions. Here, the artist creates a vision, and takes others on a process of visioning the world in a different way. Whilst the films document a socio-political movement, the texts challenge audiences to apply these ideological struggles, to our own experience.

But lastly – I want to introduce a type of linguistic symmetry that has been less critiqued within Ressler’s practice.

Ressler’s most conceptual and ambiguous work has been realised through collaboration with David Thorne. They have created designs for a series of 3 BOOM! Banners (2004), which feature extremely long url’s. The banners are designed for public space, both physically – strung across the city square, and virtually as website domain names, exploring the complexity of protest in public space. The almost impossible websites (no-one has bought the domain names yet) use a different visual and linguistic strategy compared to the films and Imagine texts.

The banner slogan is written in one continuous line without spaces. One of the texts reads:

www.ifonlypeoplewouldopentheirheartstothevisionthatfreedomisonthemarchandbelievethattheyarebeingspiritedonthewingsofangelstoabright
andshiningfuturecalledglobalfreemarketdemocracythenthefactthatthisvisionthingonlybecomesclearaftertheireyesaregougedoutandtheycannot
seewheretheyaregoingatallandthattherearenoangelsleadingthewayonthislongforcedmarchcouldbebetterleftunsaid.com

Activism (and media) has a tendency to simplify the message, in a way that art can mimic, parody or interrogate. Ressler’s films are serious, even when depicting performance-art activism that uses humor as a tactic (Begg & Ressler, 2008), whereas the BOOM! banners embody both the utopianism and symbolic nature of action in virtual space, with irony and humor. Ressler and Thorne describe the intention of the work:

“to mix up the rhetoric of oppositional politics and to complicate the visual and verbal languages of protest.”

The text is symmetrical, which leads the reader to try and decipher meaning through this pattern. The words ‘vision’, ‘march’, and ‘angels’ are repeated. The nature of ‘vision’ shifts from the imaginary to blinding. ‘Angels’ emerge as saviours and then disappear. Perhaps the work is a metaphor for utopianism being swallowed up by the wheels of political structures.

This particular url merges several centuries of protest and political romanticism, from protest-march to forced-march, questioning it’s autonomy and efficacy. But rather than decoding the meaning of the message – we can only ask a series of questions; the meaning may not be in the message, but in the question you ask yourself.

This text was written in 2008. Dr Ele Carpenter is currently a Research Fellow at HUMLab, Umeå University, Sweden.

References

Azzellini, Dario, and Oliver Ressler (2006). 5 Factories: Worker Control in Venezuela. DVD, 81 min, PAL, Spanish with English subtitles.
Begg, Zanny, and Oliver Ressler (2008) What Would it Mean to Win? DVD 40min. English with German or French subtitles.
Bey, Hakim (1985/1991). T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zones. Autonomedia.
Bromberg, Ava (2006) Along the Path of Revolution: Worker Control in Venezuela, Agency in Art.
de Certeau, Michel (1984/2002) The practice of everyday life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press: California.
Deleuze, Gilles. Felix Guattari (1987 / 2004) “Introduction: Rhizome.” In: A Thousand Plateaus London, New York: Continuum. p3-28.
George, Susan (1992) The Debt Boomerang: How third world debt harms us all. Pluto Press / Trans National Institute: Netherlands.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachussetts/ London: Harvard University Press.
Ressler, Oliver (2007) Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies. Wyspa Institute of Art: Gdansk.
Wikipedia, (2008) Hugo Chavez, Wikipedia.

Oliver Ressler: The time between Chris Gilbert’s invitation to produce a new piece on Venezuela and the exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum was actually quite short. It was only slightly more than half a year. This is actually one of the shortest periods I’ve had to produce a new piece in the recent years. But this was also an exception, as the invitation came along with a quite generous production budget and the invitation for a solo show.

TP: How were the five factories selected? Did you visit a range of factories before you decided which five to work with?

OR: Dario and I were interested in focusing on those factories that had already introduced models of workers’ self-management or co-management (“cogestion”). So the film presents a selection of factories that had functioning structures of workers’ democracy at the time when we recorded the film [fall 2005]. One of the factories we already knew from our previous film Venezuela from Below; the paper factory Invepal, located in Morón, appears in both films.

Dario, who at this time had already been living for several months a year in Venezuela, found further interesting examples of forms of co- or self-management. When we arrived in Caracas for the production of 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela, we participated in a congress on occupied factories in Latin America where we made important contacts with workers in occupied factories in Venezuela and got some hints about specific factories in which interesting experiments were going on. So we chose “our” factories quite carefully in advance, as we had limitations in shooting time and budget. We filmed only six factories, and in the editing process we decided finally to use the material of five factories for the video installation.

TP: As a matter of curiosity, what materials or goods were produced at the sixth factory that was not included in the final production?

OR: It produced diapers. The factory had an owner, who was also the director, and it was run in a kind of co-management together with the workers. After carrying out the interviews, our impression was that the director had decided on a form of co-management because it gave him access to cheap public credit he wouldn’t have got otherwise. But the workers did not seem to be involved a lot in the major decision-making processes. The factory did not inspire us, and this is why, even when we were still traveling around in Venezuela, we decided not to include the factory in the final project.

TP: Has the piece been exhibited as an installation since it was shown at the Berkeley Art Museum?

OR: No, the six-channel video installation 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela has not been presented since its launch in Berkeley. But some months after the opening of the exhibition, Dario and I finished an eighty-one-minute, single-channel version and produced a DVD with three language versions (English, Spanish, and German). This film was shown a lot and is still being shown in art institutions, cinemas, film festivals, and local TV channels, as well as in hundreds of screenings organized by the Bolivarian circles all over the world. Several unions and workers’ organizations use the film for educational purposes, and through California Newsreel the film is now also widely distributed in the U.S. In the meantime Korean and Turkish versions of 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela have been issued. It is one of the most successful and well-known pieces I ever did.

TP: In his introductory remarks to the MATRIX booklet that accompanied your exhibition, curator Chris Gilbert wrote, “The Projects in the yearlong MATRIX cycle Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process will operate in solidarity with this process. They are not only or even primarily representations of or reflections on this process, but, as our title indicates, along the path itself.” How did the curatorial lens of the exhibition (the idea to create works in solidarity with a social process) affect your creation of it?

OR: Not at all. I assume Chris Gilbert chose Dario and me for the show because we already did one film in solidarity with the Bolivarian Process in 2004. Venezuela from Below focuses on different grassroots efforts in Venezuela that have in common support for the Bolivarian Process and defense of it against its enemies. This first film already thematizes (besides many other aspects) occupied factories, and in 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela we concentrate on this aspect and observe the changes, which developed two years later. When Chris Gilbert contacted us, Dario and I were already discussing a second collaborative film on Venezuela, and Chris’s invitation meant for us that this second project got developed and produced much faster than it would have otherwise.

The invitation to do the first exhibition of the MATRIX cycle Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process led in any case to the development of the format of the six-channel video installation, where all five factories were presented on individual projections with benches and headphones in front of them, and the management meeting of the aluminum plant Alcasa was presented on the sixth projection at the end of the installation.

TP: One of the facets of the work that struck me was how it drew on histories of democratic processes being introduced into media production, blending ideas of the “Cinema of the People” with pedagogical concepts drawn from the ideas of Paolo Freire. Can you speak about the models that you were drawing on in the creation of this piece?

OR: I had already done a couple of films focusing on protagonists of social movements. In the case of the self-managed factories it was very important for Dario and me to present the protagonists directly in their work environment. The speaking workers are in the center. As the workers manage to run the production on their own, they are being recorded directly in their workplace, which increasingly seems to be for them a place of self-determination and less a place of exploitation. It is important for the concept of the film not to interview only the press spokesmen or engineers in the factories but average workers who are usually not interviewed. Very often our audience overlooks the fact that most people we interviewed spoke for the first time in front of a camera. The workers are capable of speaking in such an eloquent manner about modes of organization because they are used to discussion with their colleagues in the workers’ assemblies. It would be almost impossible to carry out similar thoughtful interviews with average workers in the U.S. or Europe.

In comparison to many other films on Venezuela, we did not focus on Hugo Chávez but tried to highlight the interesting processes that became possible through the political changes, which in the dominating media discourse are usually hidden behind the charismatic president. In the film only workers speak and there are no commentaries. The idea is to develop arguments and provide information about the factories through the protagonists only, and not to talk about them.

TP: Can you describe the “preparation” for your filming in each of the factories? Did you meet with the workers as an assembly to outline the project, or were the interviews the first time that you engaged with them? Were the individual workers self-selected?

OR: With one exception we were in contact with one worker at each factory who knew that we would come filming. When we arrived we usually discussed with a small group of delegates, outlined our concept, and told them about the variety of different workers we wanted to film. We asked these people for advice about which of the workers had something interesting to say. We tried to make sure that employees from different departments would participate, that there was a kind of a gender balance, and that we represented people who have been working in the factory for many years and those who just started.

In the case of the ketchup factory we did not find a phone number. So we just drove to the city and convinced the janitor to allow us to get in touch with some workers. Half an hour later we were in their office talking to five or six delegates of the workers about the concept of our film, which they obviously seemed to like. They allowed us to talk to anyone we liked, to stay as long as we wanted, and they invited us for lunch in the factory canteen. They were very proud having a film team from Europe in their factory. By the way, self-management seems to make the procedure of getting in touch with workers and filming much less complicated than it would be in hierarchically structured factories.

TP: While we have focused our discussion on the project and the political ethics that you brought to its production, it is also significant that events around the exhibition project caused a storm of controversy within the art world, coinciding with the resignation of MATRIX curator Chris Gilbert during the exhibition. Can you comment upon those events and perhaps contextualize the place of your work within them?

OR: Chris Gilbert got the job as the MATRIX curator with his proposal to initiate a year of MATRIX exhibitions in 2006 dealing with the political situation in Venezuela. The first in this cycle of exhibitions titled Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process was our project. Chris’ concept was to produce the exhibitions “in solidarity with Venezuela,” and also to use this phrase. But the former director of the Berkeley Art Museum and some people from the staff and the Board of Trustees wanted a more neutral political positioning of this cycle, and tried to change Chris’s curatorial texts several times. When they saw our installation with revolutionary workers talking about how to take over businesses, I think they still had a hope that maybe the next exhibition would be a little less radical and less direct. This hope of the administration immediately vanished when they read his curatorial text for the second exhibition in the cycle, a wonderful commissioned piece from the alternative TV station Catia TVe in Caracas, which was presented in Berkeley while our exhibition was still on display in the museum. The conflict and mobbing became tougher, and as it is not very effective trying to work in a museum against the museum, Chris decided to resign. His success was that he produced two exhibitions how he wanted them to be, without any compromises. The prize for his thoroughgoingness was that he had to give up his job as MATRIX curator, which he had started only months before; unfortunately, his position within the museum was too weak for him to continue working on the remaining exhibitions of the cycle. His public resignation letter got a lot of attention in the art world internationally. It raised inspiring and controversial questions within progressive art circles about the meaning and potential of formulating a radical critique from the inside of art institutions, which are not politically radical at all.

TP: Now that there is distance of several years on the exhibition itself, I am most interested in understanding the internal political ethics of the work, and the way that work has continuously negotiated its “movement” within the globalized art world, rather than the immediate politics of its debut. You produced the film very much from a position of co-creation and solidarity with its “subjects.” As a final question, I am curious to know if there has been an opportunity to “return” this work to its original site of creation in Venezuela? Has there been any chance for the film’s protagonists, those whose voices it channels, to comment on its conclusion?

OR: Yes, there have been numerous presentations in Venezuela. Even though the two films had been produced primarily for a European or North American audience, there has also been a lot of interest in Venezuela in presenting the films. As Dario is living around half of the year in Caracas, he has also had the chance to organize several screenings. In summer 2006, a big screening was organized of 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela at the Teatro Teresa Carreño in Caracas, and the interviewees from all around Venezuela were invited. A great discussion with the workers took place after the film, which was transcribed in excerpts by Michael Fox for venezuelanalysis.com and can be read on my Web page, www.ressler.at. Usually the film is very well received by the workers. Some people even distribute bootleg DVDs of the films in the black market in Caracas, which obviously means there is a continued interest in watching them.

Ted Purves, Now-Time Venezuela, Part 1: Worker-Controlled Factories, in: Elizabeth Thomas (ed.), Matrix/Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art, 2009

Question: How do you select the works for the exhibition you are curating for the current Taipei Biennial? What can be the standard for your choices?

Oliver Ressler: All the invited artists focus in their exhibited works on the so-called counter-globalization movement. They don’t do their work from a neutral perspective, but they are active in the movement or identify with its main goals. In choosing existing videos, photographs, slides or installations from 12 international artists, I tried to cover some of the most important stations of this movement of the movements, which starts with the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, leads over to Prague, Genoa, Buenos Aires, Gleneagles in Scotland, St. Petersburg and then to Heiligendamm in Germany.

Q: Why do you call the counter-globalization movement, “the movement of the movements”?

O.R.: “Counter-globalization movement” is actually a quite strange term, even though most people currently use it. The movement is not against globalization in general; for example, it is for the globalization of human rights, labor rights, indigenous rights or high environmental standards. In addition, this movement appears at these international summits of the World Bank, IMF, WTO or G8. Therefore, this movement is active on a global level and tries to globalize its resistance. The only globalization it definitely counters is the globalization of capitalism, and there are many reasons for that. The term “movement of the movements” refers to a horizontally organized movement of loose groups and individuals with no leaders.

Q: Outside of street protest, what other methods enhance communal understanding?

O.R.: The movement consists of ten thousands of groups and individuals all over the world, and most are active on a local level; for example, in community centers, squats, exchange rings, schools and much more. However, of course, the highest visibility is gained in these international demonstrations, because they occur at events with thousands of journalists from all over the world.

Q: What do you think is a better solution to global issues if Leaders Summit Meetings such as G8 is not considered legitimate for determining global policy?

O.R.: That is a quite a difficult question without a simple answer. The globalized capitalist societies have such a deep political, economic and ecological crises that problems cannot be solved, for example, by simply enlarging the states that define the main shapes of this world from a group of 8 to let’s say 30 states. I think our societies have to be changed in a way that guarantees a much more direct involvement of people in decision-making processes in those aspects that influence their lives. And then, there must be various levels of international meetings, where democratically elected delegates (not representatives) from smaller communities work on shaping the principles of how international relations should be organized. I think the system of representative democracy completely failed; at least how it exists nowadays, which is corrupted through the interests of the economic and political elites.

Q: In your video work “What Would It Mean To Win?” you try to discuss the possibility of using the term “we” in a social movement. What is your attitude to those who have different ideas? Is there a possibility of democracy on a global scale?

O.R.: One exciting thing about participating in an art biennial is that many people from different backgrounds come together. I am very interested in presenting some viewpoints from the movement of the movements; for example, to an audience that is not familiar with these political ideas. In order to make such a movement more influential, it must become much bigger, so it is good to try different strategies to get allies in current and upcoming struggles. Still you have to define a precise border: people with nationalistic, sexist, racist or homophobic viewpoints have to be excluded from any progressive movement.
A real functioning democracy on a global scale would be an ideal thing, but I even doubt that those states usually called democracies are real functioning democracies. Therefore, it will be a long, long struggle until we reach democracy, be it on a national or on a global level.

Q: What is your wish for the New Year?

O.R.: I am not a big fan of wishes… If we want something, we have to fight for it, otherwise it will not happen. The progressive social movements urgently need to get much, much stronger in the next year. It hurts to see that while huge financial crises fundamentally challenge the continuation of business as usual, no strong movement exists to not only criticize or kindly ask governments, but also that would simply force them to reboot this whole corrupt system and to free the way for social movements seeking to create a new system from below. No movement is yet strong enough to hinder nation-states from socializing the financial losses of banks and insurance companies. Unfortunately, in the upcoming decades, all people will have to pay for private financial losses of gamblers.

Marko Stamenkovic: In his most recent project entitled ‘La Buena Vida’ (The Good Life), a New York-based artist Carlos Motta (born 1978 in Colombia) developed a set of interviews that he filmed in the last few years across Latin America. In an attempt to investigate and construct the public opinion on the idea of freedom across the continent of his own origin, Motta travelled to twelve cities all over Latin America during the three-year period (2005-2008): the result of such a nomadic approach is the variety of perceptions on democratic ways of government, as expressed by the citizens – being different by their various professional backgrounds and social statuses. All of them are united at least at one point of concern, that has been fundamental for Motta’s project: they are the subjects belonging to a common territory (of Latin America), whose experience of life has been shaped under the constant interventionist pressures by the United States. In that regard, and instead of giving any direct answer to your question, please let me draw your attention to a statement as formulated in one of the interviews in the project, so I quote it here in the following way: “For Democracy there must be Love”.
Once I heard this sentence, it brought me immediately back to Derrida’s way of thinking: in one of his seminal works about the concept of democracy (The Politics of Friendship), Jacques Derrida approaches the issue of friendship in its analogy with politics. Being aware of the difference between the (apparently marginal) status of friendship in the hierarchy of fundamental political concepts (such as government, sovereignty, or citizenship), Derrida draws back to Montaigne and Aristotle in order to introduce – in a proper way – the figure of the friend onto the contemporary intellectual stage: for him, friendship plays ‘an organising role in the definition of justice, of the political experience, of democracy even.’ This is why, in his addressing of political questions, the concept of friendship has been granted a privilege. And this is also why I want to believe that in the current constellation of powers, the social relations (being always dependent upon many different sources of influence, including the neoliberal economic logic, as you have properly noticed) need to maintain the power of resistance. And this power comes only as a result of hospitality, where the concept of solidarity and mutual accommodation of each others’ viewpoints, long-term trust and sharing of common beliefs and ideals, participate in the processes of silent, but never-ending (either physical or virtual) construction of powers.

Marco Baravalle: Setting a value to social relationships is one of the distinctive characteristics of current capitalism: to it we associate giving value to knowledge, languages, feelings and creativity. Contemporary art is based upon these elements, and one of its priorities could be that of reflecting on the theme of the greediness of capital towards social relationships. It is not a matter of democracy (a term that seems to be getting emptier and emptier in the current crisis panorama, and in need to be refilled with meaning), but it’s about the possibility for art to subvert its production relationships when – as I gather from your question – it shares its own instruments with what we generally address to as cognitive work. The interlocking between contemporary art and cognitive work seems to be not only a viable alternative, but a full of potential one.

Elvira Vannini: I recall two quotes from Godard’s films. The first from ‘Made in U.S.A.’, where Anna Karina says “I have no words to say how much I hate the police”, and the second one from ‘British Sound’, where “more strike, more strike” is often repeated. Is it possible to live in a world of non-parallelisms to gain freedom, despite knowing that democracy is based on parallelisms?

Marco Scotini: Our democracies are rather bizarre objects. Their most ordinary forms are the militarization of the police, the gated communities, the bulletproof cars, the autovelox placed at every second kilometer, the surveillance cameras every square meter, the more and more technologically improved biometric devices of control. As Hobsbawm recently stated, it is a world where the economy, instead of being a provider of mutual services, it is more and more a system of reciprocal inspections. Perhaps only a Martian could see this society as “democratic”.
Let me recall a recent example. Not by chance, it is an example taken from the art system. Hans Ulrich Obrist – for Frieze Art Fair – called upon a series of great artists and intellectuals for a two days Manifesto Marathon, and invited them to rethink the tradition of the modernist manifesto. I mean that tradition which includes even Marx and Engels in its founders. All of this opposite the Serpentine Gallery, under a glass and wooden temporary pavilion, open on all sides – as designed by Frank Gehry – and surrounded by large numbers of bodyguards. The event was far from being a picket of artists and theorists. Rather, it was just another example of security device, of the art’s rule, staged by the new alliance between culture and market!! I believe that only today we can carry on naming ‘democracy’ this progressive convergence of modern democracies and totalitarian states, not by chance, from the biopolitical grounds of contemporary sovereignty, and the fact that the capitalist production sphere has by now extended from the ‘working time’ to the ‘living time’: there is no imaginable outside, no possible exterior. Once Lazzarato affirmed that until 1968 the work was the form of exploitation and surveillance; communication and language assume the same form for today’s capitalism. Thus, the production and circulation of images play a big role in all of this. I would like to add that this role could eventually transform into a freeing function, producing subjectivity. We must agree on what this role can be, though.

Marko Stamenkovic: A Flemish friend of mine told me once (while we were discussing the very same subject somewhere in Antwerp earlier this year): “Don’t be so naïve – resistance is only a word, a phrase on a T-shirt”. I got mad, of course… although I must admit I understand his point of view. But still, let me answer to you: it IS possible to live in such a world – otherwise you could have never posed such a question, and I would have never been able to give you this answer, I guess. The powers I mentioned before are those that belong to the multiplicity of subjects involved in the common efforts (sometimes even without knowing each other, they are capable of recognizing each other); they are the powers taking place at the multiplicity of geopolitical points around the globe, simultaneously and with the same fervor NOT to accept the given, NOT to subscribe to the dominant order (without having a voice to put it explicitly into question), NOT to pretend and NOT to forget. And, of course, NOT to allow oneself to be easily appropriated, ‘adjusted’ and consumed. For me, it is the question of constant nomadism (here understood as a way of being critically engaged with the multiplicity of subjects, places and contexts around the world, as opposed to the ways of being a mere “cosmopolite” urban dweller and traveller, or even worse – a cultural tourist) and also the question of multiplicity (and multi-layered, polyvalent, hyper-engagement on a daily basis), that produce the possibilities for change, within our own fields of interest and our own ways of being – either secluded or extremely open, from time to time, but always persistently present (as even the absence of presence – the shadows, so to say -reveals the power of Potentiality, in Agamben’s terms, for example).

Elvira Vannini: As part of your artist’s practice you organise ‘theme-specific’ exhibitions, with interventions in the public space. You work across a variety of media (video, documentary, inquiries) criticizing capitalist systems and neo-liberal economies, while creating platforms for resistance and offering social alternatives, together with the anti-globalisation movements. If the cultural activities reflect the dominant economic system, is this the right time for an alternative? What’s your point of view on democracy, and how does your art practice intersect it?

Oliver Ressler: Nowadays it is not very special or radical anymore to say that the system of parliamentary democracy does not work in a way that it guarantees a fair involvement in democratic decision-making processes for the masses. It is rather working in favour of the political and economic elites and guarantees that the existing power-relationships and the unfair distribution of wealth are not being questioned. In my opinion, it is essential for progressive political movements not only to criticize the existing capitalist system, but to concentrate on visions for alternatives as well. Even when unfortunately in Europe the progressive social movements are far away from being strong enough to achieve a systemic change, I think at this point it is still very important to discuss different possibilities of how a non-capitalist economy and a more democratic society could be organized. In my project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies I try to create a kind of archive installation, in which a variety of interesting models and theories for a radical systemic change can be listened to. As the people in their struggles will at some point in the future have to decide through which institutions and structures they would like to replace the capitalist order, it is important for me to present a variety of different concepts and models in my non-hierarchical archive. In the exhibition people get the possibility to choose among several different concepts according to their interests, combine them and make something new on the basis of this new knowledge, and are not being lead to one particular concept, which I chose for them.

Elvira Vannini: The relationship between art practices, resistance movements and activism entails, at a radical level, the production of dissent as a new form of political representation. How can an artist (or a curator) play an active role in the society and in the cultural debate, how can he produce new forms of subjectivity, new leaderships, instances of resistance, and activism? Do you think the definition of a possible space for dissent, and for the initiative of those movements criticizing the economic globalisation, could be achievable? Which is the relationship between artistic practices and social transformation processes? Could you tell me, please, about your experiences?

Marco Scotini: I believe the ‘artist’ has its own radical responsibility. It is amusing to think of a cynical artist, who, for self-defence, follows the commercialization creed despite being aware of its ideological nature. I think this type of artist – a now widespread product of the Eighties – is fundamentally pathetic, as much as those who shield artists from the market, even knowing that the market’s capitalistic economy is extended to all fields, none excluded. It is manifest how both positions intend to protect an archaic version of the artist that no longer can be valid: it would be only a capitalistic mystification of character. I am convinced that nowadays we should no longer talk about the ‘artist’, but think of a collective ‘artistic function’, well familiar to those working on the boundary between art and contemporary activism. Refusing the role of expert, the artist becomes a sort of catalyst, not offering technical solutions, but pointing out the possible way to find them. This constant call to self-organisation, to individual activities, to auto-representation, should now be read in this sense. A sense meeting – in the Foucaultian acception – the production of subjectivities in an era of biopowers, as ours is. It is no longer a matter of creating alternative realities – as Adorno could have thought, when an ‘outside’ was still possible – but production processes alternative per se. A large number of these artists or activists aim to transform the spectators in producers, and to break the existing barrier between the expert creating culture and its passive consumer. At this point, we could observe that Agamben refers also to this, when talking about the ‘desecration of devices’. So, it is not entirely erroneous to think of the ordinary man – of the new subjectivity – as a ‘potential terrorist’ for sovereignty.

Marco Baravalle: There is a multitude of possible answers to this question. My experience is, especially now, strongly connected to the Venetian space S.a.l.e.-Docks: a space entirely dedicated to contemporary art, but started by a group of people with experience in community centres. An experience that we haven’t dismissed: S.a.l.e. is, in fact, part of a network of social spaces, extremely varied in their nature. This offers us a complexity degree still missing in all those spaces that, despite being extremely lively, concentrate their activities only in the artistic or cultural field. This allows to interlock – it is not by chance I am using this word again – our specificity of artistic space at work with the battles and discourses of subjects different from us, but propelled by the same need to create free and communal spaces within the metropolis.

Elvira Vannini: In 2001 you participated in a rally against the World Economic Forum in Salzburg. In the video “This is what democracy looks like!” (2002), you show how this demonstration was stopped by the police, the demonstrators cordoned off, held captive and how the whole event was being manipulated not only by the media, but also by the police and politicians. A critique to globalised capitalism and false democracies, a lucid insight into human right’s violations, collective action and participative phenomena, spontaneously grown out and self-arranged on an international level. A similar critique applies also to your last film, “What Would It Mean To Win?” (2008, with Zanny Begg) on the protests against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm (and earlier “Disobbedienti” with Dario Azzellini in 2002). Marco Scotini talks of a “grey area” between art and politics, moving within which means exposure and activism. In such cases, which are the relationships between art and activism in a perspective of political militancy? Are they interchangeable? How does an artist express himself, and how can he play an active role in the debate about society and in the critical discourse?

Oliver Ressler: I believe it makes a lot sense as an artist to focus on diverse activist practices, for the field of activism and for the field of art. Artist’s videos dealing with activist matters might add some interesting levels of reflection, could be used to address people who are not part of the inner circle of activism, and can inspire and mobilize people in other regions. Activists all over the world frequently present my videos for these or other reasons. The videos also make sense for the field of art, because they politicise it and expand it towards the borders of activisms. My hope is that the reason for the inclusion of political art works in major exhibitions has less to do with the continuous wish of the art system to absorb new things in order to renew itself and legitimize itself through this tendency, than that the majority of those curators who invite political art projects really see the potential to use the space of art as a space for a political debate and action. Therefore I am not so much interested in defining the distinctions between art and activism, but in making a small contribution to dissolve these borders.

Elvira Vannini: Deconstructing histories, politics, institutional historic and artistic narrations: which is the regime of visibility for a so-called ‘political’ exhibition, for example what does Disobedience tell us about how art shows itself nowadays?

Marco Scotini: I believe to think of an art exhibition today with such assumptions means to create platforms for a kaleidoscope of interventions, not recognisable even within the modern genealogy of art. While conjuring a multitude of possible formats, I am convinced contingency, and a precarious arrangement of an archive, could represent one of these platforms. From this point of view we can also understand the deconstruction of the neutrality of the exhibition space, and the narrations accompanying it, as well as the discursive spaces that founded it. Now we have to think of the image as ‘constituent image’, an heterogeneity of images slotting in the corporate media, cropping out from all the fields power penetrates into, beyond any juridical model of known sovereignty. There is a continuous and growing proliferation of this type of images that do not want to be counter-information, do not intend to deconstruct the mainstream imagery, but operate on a different level, intervening directly in the process of auto-production and auto-circulation of the images. The current exhibition should give voice to this pluralism of practices. ‘Disobedience’ is an attempt in this direction.

Elvira Vannini: In the discourse on production systems connected to post-fordist capitalism, Lazzarato locates the potentiality of some artistic practices for the deconstruction of the art system: the means of declaration and distribution of specific roles (the artist, the work, the curator, the viewer) and of the infrastructure of governance (museums, festivals, biennials) that reimpose the concept of property in art (borrowed from processes of capitalistic development). Which is the action field to undermine these power dynamics? In a perspective of political militancy, how can art and activism interweave?

Marco Baravalle: Maurizio Lazzarato highlights a peculiarity in the artistic field. In art, he states, the distribution of specific roles and the governance infrastructure (intended as the molar dimension, according to a definition he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari) are useful elements towards the capitalistic development processes of art itself. This molar dimension should oppose to the molecular one, or the capability of a piece of work, an artist, a critical discourse, to generate new subjectivity, to change the way the spectator looks at himself and at the world. A revolutionary power. You will note that, to clarify the concept of molecular dimension, I have decided to apply molar categories; this because – and here is the important intuition by Lazzarato – when talking about art, the molar dimension and the molecular one cannot be put in a dialectic relationship, as the first is not antithetic to the second, and viceversa. This means that the molecular level, despite remaining effective and maintaining, in the best cases, a truly revolutionary potential, could never mutate the production relationships in the artistic realm. Despite the readymade, the avant-garde, the conceptual, et cetera, art remains a field strongly linked to the concepts of propriety, collecting, luxury, status quo celebration. Which way out can we foresee on the basis of these considerations? It is hard to tell: certainly we are very far from roles disappearance and traditional devices. As I already mentioned before, I believe nowadays it is becoming more and more necessary to highlight similarities between the artist and the cognitive worker as a worker of the contemporary. In the past there has never been a parallel situation, with such a similarity in technologies and (social) instruments between the fields. The effort should be organising and producing political subjectivity out of this similarity. Without nostalgia or a return to the past.

Elvira Vannini: I would like to talk about the section “A World Where Many Worlds Fit” you curated for the Taipei Biennial 2008, which is dedicated to the movements against globalisation. The biennial curated by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu was centred on a thematic constellation in response to “the chaotic state of things in the age of globalisation”, examining the very concepts of resistance, neo-liberalism, frontiers and borders, divided countries, war situations, and so on. Thus, “A World Where Many Worlds Fit” is a political exhibition: in this case, what is the format of display? Could you talk about the project for Taipei?

Oliver Ressler: At the beginning of 2008 Vasif and Manray invited me to present some of my videos on the counter-globalization movement in the biennial exhibition, which give some insight into certain aspects of the movement. After a couple of Skype conversations Vasif and Manray expanded the original invitation and asked me to curate a section within the biennial, in which I could invite further artists dealing with the movement of the movements. I liked the idea from the very beginning on, developed a concept and finally chose twelve artists. As it is a global movement, which is in particular visible when the demonstrations or blockades at the summits of the G8, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or the WTO take place, I decided to focus on these events. The decisions made at these summits affect the lives of all people in the world, but still take place behind fences and thousands of police, that became a symbol for the undemocratic and illegitimate formation of global capitalism. The artists I invited focus on these events from an inner-perspective of the counter-globalization movement. The artists are usually activists themselves and consider themselves as part of the movement.
Through the art works the exhibition ‘A World Where Many Worlds Fit’ makes visible how the strategies of the global movement changed after 911 and the intense level of repression at the G8 summit in Genoa – both incidents took place in 2001 and affected a lot the appearance of the movement in the coming years. Till 2001 a quite masculine, militant concept of direct confrontation with the police seemed to predominate. The crowed tried to gain access into the red zones directly through the police lines. The tactics of resistance somehow became smarter and elaborated over the years. Pink blocks and clowns question these forms of male-dominated direct confrontation with the police, and as the activities against the G8 summits in Heiligendamm and (with less success) Gleneagles proofed, with elaborated, smart concepts such as the ‘five finger tactic’ it is still possible to achieve the same goal – namely to block a summit and create a symbol for the illegitimacy through it.

From: Around Photography 14, 2008

Plato would have twice despised such a creature. To begin with, he reviled artists, famously seeking to prohibit them from entering his ideal Republic for fear their skills of mimicry would lead to moral corruption and uncertainty about what is true.(1) Plato also had an ulterior motive for his embargo. He banished artists, the philosopher Jacques Rancière insists, because their practice makes transparent the aesthetics of politics, or what he calls the distribution of the sensible:

“The delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.”(2)

According to Rancière, Plato intended each laborer in the Republic to remain fixed in a specific place and thus far from engagement in the distraction of leisure or politics. Plato’s logic is simple. In order for laborers to participate in political discourse, or any other activity for that matter other than their occupation, they would need to be elsewhere, at least part of the time, away from the physical and temporal demands of work. And work will not wait. (3) This economy of time provides the greater community steady, reliable production “24/7”. Certainly, artists also do a type of labor, but as Plato contemptuously points out the artist worthlessly imitates the products of other workers. The artist needs to know nothing useful. The exact proportion of salt to flour is irrelevant for making a sketch of a loaf of bread, just as a painting of a house does not need to provide shelter from a storm. With the appearance of imitative art, a duplicitous mode of labor contaminates the economic minimalism of the Republic. Plato’s despair begins here. For if the artist can do two things at once, work and also imitate work, then some type of labor is not based on necessity. This also means the community’s well-being is not dependent on virtuous workers standing by their stations all day long, only to collapse exhausted by night. Instead, there must be time available for other pursuits, time to be somewhere else. The useless and ultimately fictional nature or artistic labor proves this and opens up a space of reflection in which one can fantasize, perhaps even imagine a permanent alternative to the grueling routines of work itself, such as the pursuit of art. Like the young Marx, Rancière envisions “a society of emancipated individuals that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the divide between those who know and those who do not know, between those who possess or who do not possess the property of intelligence.”(4) And yet, if art opens a potential “escape route” out of labor’s mute drudgery, where then does this leave the artist? Is the artist constrained by a “true calling” to serve as good shepherd, at least until the day of emancipation when all labor is artistic labor? A reciprocal question therefore is needed regarding the distribution of the sensible. If the artist’s duplicitous labor makes clear the aesthetics of politics, then what are the politics the govern the economy of artistic labor itself? It is this question that Oliver Ressler’s work raises first and foremost, not merely because he is an artist who speaks, but because he is an artist who speaks of things that are external to his given station. This is why he is doubly contemptible. Returning once more to Rancière’s parable then, we must now take it to a place where the French philosopher himself has refused to travel.(5)

THE ARTIST WHO SPEAKS

We read in Plato’s tenth and last book of the Republic that the imitative artist has one opportunity to be granted citizenship, but this comes with a stipulation. The spell that the artist’s mimicry casts over the citizens of the Republic must be publicly countermanded.

Let us assure our sweet friend (poetry) and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered state, we shall be delighted to receive her…. We are very conscious of her charms, but we may not on that account betray the truth…. Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but on this condition only, that she makes a defense of herself in lyrical or some other meter? And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf. Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit.

Plato’s speech act inaugurates two cultural institutions: arts administration, and art criticism. One will manage the artist-producer’s relationship to society; the other will interpret the value of art to society. But imagine now an artist who accepts Plato’s offer, and yet rather than choosing to defend his or her own art, raises questions instead about the social order, including why some are permitted to speak and others must remain silent, why some are visible and others hidden from view. Socrates, after all, only granted poets the right to defend themselves and their work, not the right to spout off about society in general. Yet endowed with both beguiling skill and a big mouth, the artist who speaks out beyond his or her station represents the ultimate threat.

Oliver Ressler is an artist who speaks. He also reads, writes, thinks, and questions. While in person he is quiet enough, as a visual artist Ressler is garrulous and loud. Yet what makes him and his work especially irritating to those who patrol the borders is how he uses his loquaciousness not to ruminate about art, but to question the political economy of 21st Century capitalism. Nor is the platform for this unlikely interrogation a lecture or essay. It is instead Ressler’s artwork, which he defines practically, avoiding the artist’s usual fixation on form and materials. Like other artists who seek to engage directly with the political sphere, Ressler approaches aesthetics practically, as a set of tools for getting the job done. To that end, his work may one day consist of posters and videos, another day involve architecturally contingent visual elements, and another day make use of organizational and pedagogical situations to open up public discussion and debate. He calls this pragmatic, aesthetic flexibility his strategies:

“The strategies I develop in my work differ from project to project, because each work normally provides a different strategy. I am interested in transferring issues from the real political space to the symbol-political space, and maybe back again.”(6)

Ressler’s claim of moving back and forth between different spaces combining fiction and non-fiction underscores the danger artists can represent to the order things. It also points to the ontological precariousness of the artist who chooses to speak about that order. At the same time, Ressler’s de-prioritizing of formal issues sits comfortably with the direction of much contemporary art today. The art market is flush. Canvas is hip. Painting, drawing and other saleable forms of merchandise are obligatory. Art is even returning to its default fixation on the individual auteur as romantic visionary.(7) If there is a message to be gleaned from this art market, it is: this is no time to be looking for alternatives! Or, to quote that connoisseur of capitalism, Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative.”

Needless to say, Ressler sees things differently. His project (AEAS) takes as its premise just how differently things might be. Ressler puts this mission succinctly when he describes his project as a 21st Century search for,

“Alternative concepts for economic and social development… after the loss of a counter-model for capitalism – which socialism, in its real, existing form had presented until its collapse.”(8)

But the question that haunts us is why an artist has anything to say about the state of the economy in the first place.

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS, ALTERNATIVE SOCIETIES

Ressler’s project AEAS is organized in a straightforward manner using an economy of forms, materials, and spaces. One gets the impression that the artist’s subject matter secretly shaped the work’s very syntax. As an installation, AEAS consists of just three interwoven elements, each in some way echoing the other. These include: 1) A series of bold, typographic logo-posters affixed to the gallery walls; 2) An expanding suite of videotapes on individual monitors that contain interviews with intellectuals and activists describing their vision of an alternative economy or society; and 3) A set of textual citations printed and mounted on the floor of the exhibition space, (this, by the way, is the most eccentric aspect of AEAS for otherwise, the project does little to call attention to itself as art preferring instead to serve as a medium of communication.) The first version of the project was produced for Galerija Skuc, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2003. Entering the space, one notices a weave of thin yellow bands forming a crisscrossed pattern across the floorboards.(9) Running the length of each band was a text. These were citations taken selectively from Ressler’s interviews. The videos are shot in a minimal style with long takes now and then interrupted by an edit or a line of scrolling text, its superimposed message mirroring Ressler’s graphic logo-posters. In this way, each of the three major installation elements reflect upon the other to form an economy of means in which conveying information to the viewer is paramount. Inevitably, this combination of formal economy and direct communication with one’s audience brings to mind the program of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s. I am especially reminded of El Lissitzky who stated,

“Communicated through conventional words, the idea should be given form through the letters… Economy of expression – optics instead of phonetics.”(10)

Meanwhile AEAS shares something with Lissitzky’s conceptual schema that he called the Proun: a series of sparse, geometric shapes the artist understood as much more that so many plastic forms. For Lissitzky, the Proun opened up the “economic construction” of space itself.

“The surface of the Proun ceases to be a picture and turns into a structure round which we must circle, looking at it from all sides, peering down from above, investigating from below… Circling round it, we screw ourselves into the space.”(11)

Such dynamic thinking later inspired Lissitzky’s unconventional approach to exhibition design in which moveable walls and malleable surfaces sought to generate a phenomenological interactivity between the space, the art works, and the viewers. By working both walls and floor and by incorporating time-based media as a tutorial device, Ressler’s AEAS project shares with the Proun Room a desire to surmount the white cube’s limitations. Yet, in so far as AEAS functions more as conceptual platform than a conventional work of “installation art,” its elements can be modified for the particular architectural, urban, and cultural setting of each exhibition venue without interfering with the project’s conceptual and pedagogical schema. And, there have been, as of this writing, twenty-one re-installations of the AEAS project including, among other locales, the post-communist nations of Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Serbia, but also Brazil, Peru, Spain, Turkey, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Ressler’s native Austria.(12)

Each re-incarnation of the project has also brought an expansion of the work’s public component. Ressler’s first production in Ljubljana included a large, logo poster in the gallery window. However, for a project in Amsterdam in 2004, the artist began making a set of related posters for city streets. In that same year, thanks to an invitation by Billboartgallery Europe, he was afforded access to giant public billboards in Bratislava. AEAS has also expanded in another way. Initially the project had five video pieces on five monitors. A sixth video was added for the second version of AEAS, and a seventh the time after that. However, after the third re-installation, Ressler’s initial grant from republicart, itself a project of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) aimed at supporting interventionist art and theory, was finally exhausted (13). From that point on, he has produced posters and videos only if an invitation came with the necessary production budget. Nevertheless, the most recent installation in Stroom, The Hague in The Netherlands is the most elaborate to date and consists of sixteen videos on sixteen monitors spread between two exhibition spaces. Regardless of how the work grows, however, Ressler’s economy of three elements – text, video, and posters – remains constant. At the same time, the wide geographical range AEAS has covered over the past four years suggests not only a continued interest in the way art and aesthetics interact, but also a desire to re-examine life under post-Cold War capitalism. Eighteen years after the fall of actually existing socialism and thirty years into the neo-liberal juggernaut of privatization and deregulation, the working classes are beginning to ask questions again about which social option remains available, and which may need to be invented. Academics and artists who speak politically, such as Ressler, are amongst these doubters, (but they are not necessarily out in front of them.)

THE MYSTERY OF (SOCIAL) CAPITAL

Translating his logo-posters into the appropriate local tongue of each venue, Ressler’s street graphics inquire of passersby: Imagine and create revolutionary processes which are not intended to take over state power but to dissolve power relations, or Imagine a society in which people have a say in decisions in proportion to the degree that they are affected. By taking to the streets, Ressler, the artist who speaks, has moved away from his assigned position inside the white cube to tackle the world outside.

“I think it is extremely important to realize the projects in a way that they can be read and understood not only by experts of contemporary art, but also by a broader public, to counter the isolationist tendencies of the art field. But it depends on the context: Whereas in one context, it might be important for me to emphasize the fact that my work is art, in another context, for example when working in public inner-city spaces, it might be necessary to realize work which also functions under the condition that people are not aware of the fact that what they see is art.”(14)

And yet, there is still a slight of hand here all the same. The disenchantment of art is only possible for someone who perceives a difference between art and life to begin with, and who understands the secret behind the conjuring trick that produces artistic value in the first place. Coming at this the other way around, the plebian, the worker, the man or women in the street may very much wish to produce art. This may be one way to temporarily escape the tedium of work. But the secret of being an artist escapes the amateur. And not because amateur creativity is necessarily less interesting than the work of many professionally trained artists, one need only step into an art gallery in Chelsea to realize this. The mystery of how contemporary art acquires its value has nothing to do with talent, any more than it does with expenditure of labor, or with the preciousness of materials used to make a particular object. What it requires is the ability to tactically leverage power within the micro-politics of the institutional art world.(15)

The art world is really two worlds or two asymmetrical networks of activity. The largest of these networks is the invisible multitude of individuals who make artistic production possible including parents, wives, husbands, but mostly other artists and technicians whose support comes primarily in the form of tangible and intangible gifts. These gifts may include hard cash, but more likely consist of time, or ideas, or sustenance. Think of all the ways art production is dependent on such things as freely given childcare, or the gift of a meal, or an inexpensive place to work, or even the loan of a car. Historian Alan Moore puts it succinctly. When it comes to making art,

“Mutual aid is as important as competition. The process of production is continuously or intermittently collective as artists come together in teaching situations and workshops, sharing ideas, techniques and processes.”(16)

These hidden networks of artistic production are however, materializing before our eyes at a rapidly increasing pace. So much so that one well-known French art critic even claims to have “discovered” them! (17) What has really been discovered, of course, is a larger process of disclosure brought about by: 1) the de-industrialization of the developed world’s economy and the return to precarious forms of labor, and 2) the observable growth of gift economies such as peer-to-peer information production made possible by new digital technologies. In addition, the shadow network where artistic production takes place is large and extends in multiple directions. But there is also a second hidden network that contrasts with the first where aesthetic valorization takes place. This other economy is small and tightly wound and includes visible institutions such as major international museums, critical journals, auction houses, biennials, art fairs, and so forth. Nevertheless, what most artists never or seldom ever see is what really counts: an intra-network that devolves to a small number of leading art dealers and collectors who circulate information and judgments regarding artists and their work. Not to say supply and demand play no role, especially at the uppermost end of the market, but it is a given artist’s capacity to attract symbolic, social capital to their product and brand that determines value here and now. (This is why, one day, an artist whose work is barely distinguishable from that of his or her peers, or even in some cases the work of non-professionals, can become a star by the next day.) Such value-added production is unique to the contemporary art world and contrasts with the not-so-distant past when craft skills and quality of materials still played a determining role in an object’s worth.(18) At the same time, nothing prevents this arbitrary and asymmetrical arrangement of power from being radically inverted. For instance, what would happen if artists developed their own form of peer-to-peer production aimed at creating a cooperative market structure where benefits would flow to all producers, rather than just the fortunate few? Where is the inviolable law of aesthetics inscribed and who says it cannot be opposed or re-thought so as to de-segregate artists from each other? And why stop at only artists? What about those workers who dream of taking part in an “emancipated society of artists”?

Ressler’s complex meditation on alternative economies proves that the laws consigning each to his or her proper place are not impermeable, not within the art world, and not beyond it. And not surprisingly, these same themes of intervention, autonomy, and free exchange also appear in Ressler’s AEAS project, especially in the series of video interviews with economists, political scientists, historians, and assorted radicals that make up the heart of the installation. The interviewees offer an assortment of modified or alternative economic models that go by the names: Inclusive Democracy; Participatory Economy; Free Cooperation; Anarchist Consensual Democracy; Libertarian Municipalism; Caring Labor; The Socialism of the 21st Century. The range of terminology is particularly revealing as much for what is stated as for what is not. For nowhere do we find any hint of the vanguard model associated with socialism or communism in the last century. Instead there is a strong mutual suspicion of centralized party politics and a marked disinterest in annexing state power, either through political or extra-parliamentary means. Some of these alternative economies seek to sweep away capitalism altogether, others aim to minimize exploitation while maximizing the spread of social benefits. All in all, the video portion of AEAS functions like a thick dossier filled with case studies and theoretical models, some focused on local reform, others global in nature, and still others historical experiments whose failure has not diminished their evocative power. French historian Alain Dalotel for example stands outside the Père Lachaise cemetery wall where numerous communards were executed and fleshes-out the short, tragic history of the Paris Commune of 1871. Trade unionist Salomé Moltó speaks about workers’ collectives of the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1938 in which horizontal committee structures allowed for collective decision-making, and where, much like the Wobblies (IWW) in the United States a decade earlier, almost everyone had equal representation and received a similar salary regardless of the type of work they did, skilled or unskilled. Workers’ self-management in the former, socialist Yugoslavia is the subject of another tape. Sociologist Todor Kuljic points out that in the1960s and 1970s, “The working class and the poor people had a type of sovereign right, which they do not have today.” Kuljic also raises the negative aspects of this history, including the hierarchical cadre that ultimately governed the worker’s committees from above. But what sort of alternative do these men and women envision today? “In my opinion” Kuljic explains, “there can never be wild [unregulated] capitalism. One must always have a mixture of various forms of property, and mainly, the peaceful coexistence of nationally and socially diverse societies.” And what about Moltó? “How would we structure a new society, an anarchist society? … Politically speaking, there would be federations, regions that would be united … without violence, thus demonstrating that with good organization and with moral and ethical values and solidarity it is possible to achieve the same or even more than with weapons.” And finally Dalotel? “If the Commune is able to teach us anything, it would be that we must get together, discuss, debate and when possible, unite … Because resistance can’t exist without utopia.”

Ressler continues the historical lessons straight into the present day with his recordings of masked Zapatistas at the meetings for the Sixth Declaration in Chiapas, Mexico. Here we see both men and women speaking, some candidly relaying the challenges they face overcoming gender discrimination in a traditionally patriarchal culture. The autonomous, democratic networks the Zapatistas are held up as an exemplary model of an alternative society in a number of the other tapes, and yet I can not avoid thinking about the difficulty that transposing the Zapatista’s cooperative structures which are rooted in rural, under-developed Chiapas to the post-industrial North would present, especially countries dependent on inexpensive labor from the South. AEAS also presents interviews with economic theorists, such as Takis Fotopoulos, who explains to viewers his voucher system for the democratic distribution of profit. By contrast, the Massachusetts-based feminist economist, Nancy Folbre, focuses not on exchange, but on the quality of labor itself by discussing types of work motivated by altruism and gift giving rather than the accumulation of personal wealth. Folbre describes caregiving as labor intrinsically opposed to the commercial market. She expressed fear that neo-liberal privatization will undermine the quality of such services as childcare and elderly hospice care, and she admits to another concern found within the ranks of progressive thinkers. “I spend lots of time trying to persuade leftist economists and utopian visionaries to pay more attention to the ordinary work that women do and to learn from it.” As if picking up on Folbre’s concerns from across the Atlantic, the Bremen-based theorist Christoph Spehr insists that a post-modern, cooperative society must, “Bring utopia back to the kitchen. It has to work there and the rules of the kitchen have to be the rules of bigger cooperation – not the other way round.” Meanwhile, anarchist Ralf Burnicki recalls how the hierarchical pecking order he encountered as a young apprentice locksmith initiated his “first confrontation with dominance and power.” The son of working class, German communists, Burnicki decided to read books which made him wonder if a “just” society” is possible. He answered this question in the form of a three hundred-page study on Anarchist Consensual Democracy in which he envisions “self-organization from below in the form of self-administered projects,” that would lead to “re-thinking for us as individuals, as subjects.” The nature of subjectivity also concerns Massachusetts-based Chaia Heller, a former student of the late eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin. Like Burnicki, Heller’s libertarian socialism celebrates grass-roots democracy but does so not by organizing human production, but by encouraging communication. She rejects “man, the producer,” preferring instead Aristotle’s vision of thinking man, the “political animal.”

The contrast between these two self-described anarchists raises one of the fundamental issues regarding any alternative politics today: what do we mean by agency in the post-industrial society? For if the industrial workforce was the revolutionary actor of the 19th and 20th Century, in the so-called information age can we still think of labor as the collective agent of social transformation? Many individuals associated with feminist, ecological, and anarchist political traditions insist that labor’s privileged position as historical emancipator ended with the social upheavals of the 1960s, if not earlier. With control over social production no longer centered on the factory model, resistance to oppression has devolved to other actors, many rooted in previously marginalized social identities. Such subcultural resistance is inherently decentralized and operates across both the public and private zones of life. At the same time, other theorists point out that the rise of immaterial labor neither eliminates exploitation from the work process, nor displaces labor as the structural negation of capitalism. Since we still live under its economic system, the goal of liberating social production has not changed, only its tactics have. AEAS reflects all these differences. Yet Ressler avoids singling out one or another model as correct, or as more likely to succeed or to fail. Still, there is one video that comes close to summarizing the project as a whole. When the tape labeled bolo’bolo begins, we see a series of mysterious signs appear in rapid succession, white graphic markings on a black background. Next the screen fills with a mesmerizing display of animated abstract shapes as a husky voiceover starts to narrate. The voice belongs to a Swiss secondary school instructor and underground literature author whom Ressler identifies only by the initials P.M. He describes for us bolo’bolo, a project that aims at nothing less than reinvigorating the worn out terminology of the Left by substituting new words for old ones. Thus communism becomes bolo’bolo. Looked at as a work of “video art” this tape probably comes the closest to expressing Ressler’s Constructivist roots. But viewed as a commentary about alternative economics and alternative societies, it returns us to the nagging question of the artist who speaks about politics and what this artist’s place is or should be in the order of things. And it does this by way of history, not using another case study, but by addressing what Marx described as the dead weight of the past upon the present.

MATTER OUT OF PLACE

When all is said and done the republic of high culture has taught itself how to live with the artist who speaks, the artist who makes trouble, and who is insufferable (19). It is unlikely that this ever happens in the short run, right at the moment of rupture, but over the long haul, through a process of historicizing, political art’s capacity for resistance is gradually reduced or disarmed. The institutionalization of these all too brief skips of the historical heart are therefore infuriating, as well as gratifying. Gratifying because speaking honestly as a partisan, we do want historians to recognize that there were moments when artists refused to stay in their place; that the most celebrated avant-garde was often explicit in its politics; that artists have shown an ability to organize, educate, write, and philosophize. And that under certain circumstances, artists can even be revolutionaries seeking, along with others, to wipe the slate of history clean and lift its weight from our collective shoulders. This is why political artists such as Oliver Ressler do not make “political art,” but instead, as Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard of the Dziga Vertov Group advocated in the 1970s, they make art politically. And to the art world elite, and to some defenders of aesthetics even on the Left, the political artist is abject, or, to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Mary Douglas, a type of “matter out of place.”(20) What can be said then regarding the worker who dreams, the artist who speaks and thinks, and the collective that organizes political resistance is that they thrust hidden matter out of place, from darkness into light, and in doing so make briefly visible alternative economies of pleasure and exchange, humor and play, that are the ultimate threat to the social order. The lesson of Ressler’s AEAS are obvious. As Subcomandante Marcos exclaims in one of the videos, “Laugh compañeros! It is good to laugh. It is necessary to laugh, because what we are doing is utterly serious.”

• (1) Calling upon classic Western philosophers to illuminate political or cultural issues in the present day is a risky venture at best, and especially so for a non-specialist like myself. For that reason I ask the reader to view my rendezvous with Plato’s Republic for what it is: a critical engagement with the writings of philosopher Jacques Rancière whose writings about Plato, art, and politics continue to have a considerable impact on the contemporary art world.
• (2) The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Rancière, (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2004) p 13.
• (3) Rancière puts it this way (his italics), “Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait.” (Ibid) p 12.
• (4) Quoted from Rancière’s Le maître ignorant (1987) by Brian Holmes in his essay “Hieroglyphs of the Future: Jacques Rancière, and the Aesthetics of Equality” available at http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/Hieroglyphs.php, also available in the book of the same title by Brian Holmes published in Zagreb, 2002/3, p 99.
• (5) Having opened up new ways to think about art and politics, Rancière appears to be retreating of late. In an interview with Jennifer Roche, the British critic Claire Bishop defends conventional notions of artistic quality and individual artistic vision from the corrosive practices of politicized collectives by citing Rancière’s recent and guarded writings on art and politics. See: http://radical.temp.si/node/70
• (6) From an interview of Ressler by Anna Liv Ahlstrand
• (7) This return to painting happened in the early 1980s and dovetailed with the art market boom during the same time frame so it is no wonder in what even Forbes Magazine calls the “superheated” contemporary art market that painting once again is the commodity of first choice. See: http://www.forbes.com/collecting/2005/07/05/cx_0705conn_ls.html
• (8) Ressler’s own description of Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies on his website
• (9) I am writing this description in New York City using extensive documentation the artist provided me.
• (10) El Lissitzky, “The Book,” (1923) in El Lissitzky: Life-Letters-Texts, Herbert Read and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), p 359.
• (11) “Proun: Not world visions, but – world reality” (1920) in El Lissitzky: Life-Letters-Texts, Herbert Read and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), p 347
• (12) for a full list please see the artist’s website
• (13) http://www.republicart.net
• (14) From an interview of Ressler by Anna Liv Ahlstrand
• (15) Following Pierre Bourdieu, such leveraging requires a reserve of symbolic capital that can even permit the cultural player to cross borders between social rank.
• (16) “Political Economy as Subject and Form in Contemporary Art,” by Alan W. Moore in the Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 36, No. 4, 471-486 (2004).
• (17) Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud (Paris: Les presse du reel, 1998).
• (18) This has a long history but nothing compared to the “de-skilling” of the last forty or fifty years when this is most pronounced See Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.)
• (19) For more on this topic see, “Liar’s Poker” by Brian Holmes at: http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/holmestext.html
• (20) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, by Mary Douglas: (London: Routledge Press, 1991, first published in 1966).

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and a founding member of two artists’ collectives: Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980-1988) and REPOhistory (1989-2000). Along with Blake Stimson he co-edited the book Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (University of Minnesota, 2007), and together with Nato Thompson co-edited The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006). He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art and Art History at Queens College, and is currently working on a book about the political economy of the art world and his concept of creative “dark matter” for Pluto Press, UK.

from: Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies, Wyspa Institute of Art (ed.), 2007

What would it mean to win? is the title-giving question of the film by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler about Heiligendamm and the most current aspects of a social movement. Other questions resonate behind it: Is it actually possible to win? And before that: Against whom? And still more abstractly: Does anyone actually want to ‘win’? It is a basic statement of the film that ‘winning’ in the form of a united, revolutionary subject and the taking over of state power has no great future. Rather the ‘We’ that asks itself the question as to what it means to win, has to accept the form of a question, the form of an undefined movement, stumbling and stuttering, like the music in the cartoon fragments in Begg’s and Ressler’s film that complement the pictures of actions and theoretical commentaries with playful reflections.

Just as this fragmented, multitudinous ‘We’ evades every definition and every organic representation, it also makes sense that Begg and Ressler – instead of dwelling on the spectacular riots in Rostock at the beginning of the summit or on the media-effective Greenpeace actions along the coast of Heiligendamm – immediately plunge into the depths of the micro-political fabric in the fields and camps around the G8 summit. The pictures and original sound that the two artists have captured of the actions and social forms of organisation around Heiligendamm are impressive, not only in content but also in the careful and exact way in which they are presented on film. Particularly convincing are the picturesque images of the blockades and the attempts to break through the police lines in the far hinterland of Heiligendamm; above all, the pictures of the effectiveness of the ‘five finger tactic’, the strategy of the repeated division of larger groups upon contact with the police lines until their gaps finally lead to breakthrough – a strategy of the active scattering of non-conforming masses in the wide meadow landscapes on the East Sea.

These dispersions, unfoldings and duplications also correspond to the claim of the film borrowed from Zapatism that life does not have to mean the same film every day but on the contrary every day a new one. Instead of affirming the one world of global capitalism, but also without claiming that only one other world is possible, it is a matter of inventing many worlds. This implies for one thing the creation of other worlds but also the concrete actualisation in the here and now of every day a new film, an infinite film programme, an infinite programme of the invention of worlds.

Emma Dowling, one of the six protagonists of the film refuses accordingly to answer the subjunctive question as to the meaning of winning, by interpreting the movement currently in the making in Heiligendamm as winning: Her comment ‘We are winning!’ refers to the extended present of coming together, exchange, discussions in the camps, the delegitimisation of an illegal power such as that of the G8, but also to the proliferation of this current development in the daily routine beyond Heiligendamm, into the everyday struggles dictated by racism and sexism, into situated knowledge and local discussion.

The very actions of Heiligendamm, their aesthetics and form could be interpreted as citations from the time around 1968: this could be partly unconscious or partly ironic, for example when a block of the ‘naked power’ – some twenty naked men and women almost rubbing shoulders with the shields and truncheons of the robocops’ lines – chant the slogan ‘Anyone who touches us is a pervert’. What is being commented on here and treated with irony – more or less affectionately – is both the media construction and the uncompromising reality of machistic Black Blocks, such as hit the headlines a few days previously in Rostock, and also the Woodstock tradition of staging quasi-innocent nudity.

The more recent forms of action like samba bands, anti-G8 cheerleaders and clowns armies coincide with aesthetic-political records of practices in the 1960s. Begg and Ressler take up the aesthetics of these actions and transport them right into the formal aspects of their film. The film begins with Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind, interpreted by a mouth-organ activist and ends with the scene of two tambourine women in the camp (the gender-technical adaptation of Hey, Mr Tambourine Man!), creating a double Zeitgeist (1968-2007) whose dissociated and at the same time empathetic innuendo fortunately is not lost. In contrast to the Social Forum it is not Gilberto Gil standing here, or more appropriately perhaps Joan Baez on a large stage; the film on the contrary offers a stage for micro-political practices, and aesthetic-political ways of existence. It is here that the strength of Begg and Ressler’s film lies in comparison to other examples of visual representation of the anti-globalisation movement: not to denounce but rather to enhance aspects of counter-information and counter-propaganda, at the same time building in several levels of reflection which avoid hammering home an all too simple solution.

Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theorist who lives in Vienna, Austria.

from: Artlink – Contemporary Art Quarterly, vol. 28, #4, 2008

Grotesk und unausstehlich ist er: Oliver Ressler. Dies zumindest schreibt der Künstler Gregory Sholette in der Einleitung zu Resslers Buch «Alternative Ökonomien, alternative Gesellschaften». Denn: «Was nicht geduldet wird, sind solche KünstlerInnen, die über Dinge sprechen, die nicht ihrer Position entsprechen, wie beispielsweise Politik oder Ökonomie.» Und, so Sholette weiter, «diese Art von Künstler ist mehr als unausstehlich, sie ist grotesk.»

Der 1970 geborene und in Wien lebende Österreicher Oliver Ressler beschäftigt sich in seiner Kunst seit den neunziger Jahren konsequent mit gesellschaftspolitischen Fragen: «In der Ausstellung ‹The global 500›, die ich 1999 realisierte, setzte ich mich mit transnationalen Konzernen auseinander. Die Arbeit war eine Analyse und eine Kritik an den bestehenden ökonomischen Verhältnissen.» Anschliessend konzentrierte er sich auf die Formen des Widerstands gegen den Kapitalismus und produzierte drei Videos zur Antiglobalisierungsbewegung. «Die logische Folge war, dass ich mich mit Ideen und Konzepten auseinandersetzte, wie Gesellschaft anders organisiert werden könnte.» Diese Ideen und Konzepte sind nun auf Deutsch und in Ungarisch in einem Buch erschienen.

Zwischen Utopie …

Das Buch «Alternative Ökonomien, alternative Gesellschaften» basiert auf dem gleichnamigen Ausstellungsprojekt, an dem Ressler seit 2003 arbeitet, und das er kontinuierlich erweitert. Er hat Interviews mit sechzehn GesellschaftstheoretikerInnen, ÖkonomInnen und HistorikerInnen geführt und daraus Videos produziert. Die Transkriptionen dieser Videos sind nun im Buch zu lesen. «Das Gemeinsame der Konzepte ist, dass ihnen anarchistische und sozialistische Wurzeln zugrunde liegen», sagt Ressler.

«Alternative Ökonomien, alternative Gesellschaften» ist ein Sammelsurium von Ideen, Utopien und konkreten Konzepten, wie eine Gesellschaft jenseits des Kapitalismus aussehen könnte. Eine Gesellschaft etwa, in der nicht ein paar wenige auf Kosten vieler reich werden, in der die Demokratisierung auf allen Ebenen stattfindet – auch in der Ökonomie – und in der soziale Gerechtigkeit herrscht.

Unter den sechzehn InterviewpartnerInnen Resslers findet sich die US-amerikanische Science-Fiction-Autorin Marge Piercy, die über ihre utopischen feministischen Visionen spricht. Oder der Zürcher P.M., der seine «bolo’bolo»-Utopie vorstellt. Vertreten ist auch der Wirtschaftstheoretiker Michael Albert mit seiner Vision von einer partizipativen Ökonomie, die auf Gleichheit, Solidarität, Vielfalt und Selbstverwaltung basiert.

… und gelebter Praxis

Dass alternative Gesellschaftsformen nicht Utopien bleiben müssen, wird an anderen Beispielen sichtbar. So basiert ein Kapitel auf Interviews mit Mitgliedern einer «Junta de buen gobierno», einer «Versammlung der Guten Regierung» der Zapatisten. Die Mitglieder in diesen regionalen Regierungen rotieren, damit kein Berufspolitikertum und keine Hierarchien entstehen.

Ein anderes konkretes System ist das der jugoslawischen ArbeiterInnenselbstverwaltung, das Todor Kuljic als eine Mischung von Plansozialismus und reiner Marktökonomie vorstellt: Auf der einen Seite die relativ strenge Kaderverwaltung der Partei, auf der andern die unmittelbare Demokratie in den Betrieben. So konnte zum Beispiel ein Arbeiter seine Stelle nicht verlieren, ohne dass der Arbeitsrat eingeschaltet wurde.

Natürlich haben die meisten vorgestellten Konzepte und Utopien Mängel und Schwachstellen. Resslers InterviewpartnerInnen erwähnen diese jeweils gleich selber und diskutieren sie auch.

Kunst politisch machen

Durch die Finanzkrise sei das Interesse der Leute, sich mit alternativen Gesellschaftsmodellen auseinanderzusetzen, grösser geworden, meint Ressler. Aber er glaubt nicht, dass in unmittelbarer Zeit eine der Alternativen umgesetzt wird: «Die Modelle und Theorien im Buch funktionieren alle so, dass es eine starke soziale Bewegung braucht, die die Veränderung bringt. Doch im Moment ist keine solch starke Bewegung wahrnehmbar.»

Nebst den Texten zeigt das Buch farbige Fotos von Ausstellungen in Wien, Genf, Istanbul, Taipei, Lima und anderen Orten, in denen die Videos zu sehen waren. So klingt der künstlerische Raum, den Ressler mit den Videos geschaffen hat, auch im Buch an. Als Installation bestand «Alternative Ökonomien, alternative Gesellschaften» aus drei Elementen: Plakate mit dem Logo der Ausstellung zierten die Galeriewände. Die Interviews liefen auf sechzehn Monitoren verteilt. Zitate aus den einzelnen Videos führten die BesucherInnen zum zugehörigen Monitor.

«Es ist für mich wichtig, dass das Projekt innerhalb eines künstlerischen Kontextes stattfindet,» sagt Ressler. «So kann ich auch viele Leute, die sich ausserhalb aktivistisch-politischer Kontexte befinden, direkt ansprechen.» Sich selber sieht er nicht primär als politischen Aktivist, sondern als Künstler, der einen Teil seiner Arbeit in Verbindung zum Aktivismus stellt.

Was als Kunst bezeichnet wird, ist für Ressler ohnehin einfach eine gesellschaftliche Vereinbarung – ein Diskurs, der sich in den letzten Jahren allerdings verschoben hat: «In den neunziger Jahren wurde an meinen Ausstellungen häufig darüber diskutiert, ob das, was ich mache, nun Kunst sei oder nicht.» Heute stelle sich diese Frage weniger, da politische Kunst besser akzeptiert sei. Auch wenn Ressler eigentlich gar keine politische Kunst macht, wie Gregory Sholette abschliessend feststellt: Er macht Kunst politisch.

Oliver Ressler (Hg.): «Alternative Ökonomien, alternative Gesellschaften. Alternatív Gazdaságok, alternatív Társadalmak». Promedia Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft. 2008. 228 Seiten.

aus: WOZ – Die Wochenzeitung, Nr. 48., 2008

Alex. Cistelecan: “State-less direct democracy”, “self-management”, “libertarian municipalism”, “anarchist consensual democracy”, etc.: it is difficult to imagine what exactly lies behind these fundamental expressions that we find in the ten leaflets of your project. The one example that you mention – Ancient Greece – doesn’t make things easier; let’s not forget that the Greek model of participative democracy was just the sunny side of a more unethical political system based, in the main, on slavery. Could you give us some other possible examples of such direct democracy, either from the past, from the present or – why not? – from a not so distant future?

Oliver Ressler: It is clear that the Ancient Greek model only functioned as a democratic model with direct involvement in decision-making processes for the privileged white man – I also refer to this aspect in the project description of Fly Democracy. It is interesting to learn about its structure, but of course it cannot be used as a blueprint for the creation of a modern democratic society. Indeed, I think there are some examples of direct democracy in history, ranging from the Paris Commune in 1871 to the workers’ collectives during the Spanish Civil War. Unfortunately these models existed for a very short time, could only be developed to a certain extent due to a lot of pressure from political enemies, and were militarily defeated very quickly. If we think of direct democracy today, I think the juntas of the good government, the direct-democratic self-governing networks of the Zapatistas in Mexico, have to be mentioned. And the consejos comunales in Venezuela, the communal councils, which are neighborhood networks currently formed to give people greater control over the running of their communities, are the most recent development which will hopefully succeed in involving the population of Venezuela more in democratic participation processes. I think that none of these models is perfect, all of them have their problems, but they all present interesting examples for direct democracy which have to be taken into consideration.

AC: Let’s try to shift the problem a little bit with a dichotomy. On the one hand, you mentioned the Paris Commune and the worker’s collective during the Spanish Civil War. But you also agree that these movements were only short ones, quickly crushed by their enemies. Don’t you think that this is a structural problem of such revolutionary movements – namely that their revolutionary engagement is a finite one, that they are not capable of holding power and, to put it bluntly, that they are, as such, very specific for the left, something that the French call “le romantisme de la Chose perdue”? On the other hand – and this could already be the answer to the question above – you mentioned the Zapatistas and the communal councils in Venezuela; here, it is true, the revolutionary moment proved to be a lasting one, but only if it was supported by a strong and charismatic leader. Do you think this is a compromise to be made by the revolutionary movement or is it its only chance? Or, to put the question in terms of politics of representation and representation of politics: how can one put his faith in such forms of direct democracy, and relate at the same time to the messages that the media diffuses, namely that the Zapatistas organization didn’t bring any economic progress and that Hugo Chávez is becoming more and more the usual dictatorial leader of the Communist countries?

OR: It is clear that nowadays all approaches towards direct democracy can only take place against the powerful resistance of neo-liberal capitalism. That means there are many limitations and obstacles. I assume it wouldn’t be a big problem for the Mexican army to smash the structures and institutions of the Zapatistas within a couple of weeks through military means, but the price of doing so would be a very big one, as the Zapatistas are very present in the media and are supported by many people on a national and international level. A military defeat of the Zapatistas would severely damage the modern image the Mexican government wants to be associated with, the image of a functioning (formal) democracy with certain freedoms for their citizens, and it would provoke a wave of revolt in the whole country. But I am sure the Zapatista uprising would continue even if Subcomandante Marcos would resign or die. The title “Subcomandante” from the outset questions typical hierarchical structures of the army or society in general, because, as also clearly pointed out in their public announcements, the people in Zapatista communities give the orders and the Good Government Junta and the military sector listen. Delegates of peasants work in the Good Government Junta as rotating volunteers to try to solve problems between individuals and communities. Subcomandante Marcos is the very visible person who communicates with the media, but he has no accumulated power comparable to that of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela where we have a completely different situation. Chávez’ accumulation of power is, of course, an indissoluble contradiction in the effort to install a system that involves people in direct-democratic decision-making processes. But without his strong leadership, the political experiment there would have ended a long time ago. It is interesting to observe that the successful transformations in Venezuela and Bolivia are based on years of struggles and strikes by the majority of the impoverished people, and I think especially the fact that these movements finally gained power through winning elections within the existing system of representational democracy contributes very much to the visibility and attention enjoyed by a single charismatic person. The reductionist discourse of big media then somehow claims that these leaders mislead and seduce the masses, because they are populists and their voters are gullible. It is a strange distortion of the facts…

AC: In pursuing further the politics of representation / representation of politics and the role of the media, one could say that there is a small paradox in what you’ve just said: on the one hand, the Zapatista movement is somehow protected by its image; if they didn’t have all their notoriety in the media, the Zapatistas would be easily smashed by the Mexican government. On the other hand, in the case of Venezuela, the media plays the opposite role and, through its deliberate distortion of facts, endangers the political experiment led by Chávez. Is this paradox a structural one for the media in general? Is this the inevitable dual nature of media, to be at the same time a medium for the politics of emancipation and the immediate weapon of repression? Can one overcome this contradiction and bet on the existence of the independent media – or would this present the risk of losing too much visibility and sinking into pure localism?

OR: Well, there are different kinds of media. I read a couple of texts in liberal media by writers who seemed to be fascinated by the Zapatistas, who are often described as the first postmodern guerillas because they exchanged weapons through the weapon of the spoken word. You don’t have to be a radical leftist to acknowledge that the rebellion of the Mexico’s indigenous people is justified, because they live under terrible conditions of extreme poverty and their rights have been ignored by all Mexican governments. The superior beauty and poetry of their declarations and of their distinct appearance in the pasamontaña, the ski mask, which hides the individuals while making the Zapatistas as a collective power better visible, fascinates many people, and obviously journalists as well. Chávez is in a completely different situation that seems to make him less attractive for Western media. The fact that he has won all elections since 1998 is often ignored and he is depicted as an anti-democratic, populist dictator. His military background and his involvement in an attempted coup d’état in the early 1990′s make him an easy target for the conservative media who reject his politics. The privately owned right-wing media in Venezuela are the strongest part of the opposition against the Bolivarian Process, and they were directly involved in the coup d’état against Chávez in April 2002. The completely erroneous and one-sided statements of these media are very frequently repeated by Western media unverified. Through its oil wealth, Venezuela has a lot of power in Latin America and Chávez uses this power on many levels: among other things, he founded the South American counter-CNN media network Telesur and the Banco del Sur, the Bank of the South, which reduces the dependence of Latin American states on the World Bank and IMF. With the Bolivarian Process a role model has been established for other states seeking alternative development possibilities, like Bolivia and Ecuador. Venezuela represents a real threat to the neo-liberal model, at least in Latin America, and stands in contradiction to the interests of private media, which consider Venezuela an enemy. The situation is more complex for sure, but these are some relevant aspects.

Attila Tordai-S.: It is quit obvious that the political and economical elite recognize the power of mass media as a tool for propaganda, so much attention has been given to its control. In Romania, the mass media are extremely powerful; the political changes in 1989 officially began with the protection given by the international media to a Timisoara-based reformed pastor, and continued as a “televised revolution”. Perhaps this is why Romanian society remains such a highly TV-addicted nation. But compared to the importance of mass media, the practice of contemporary art is considered simply a luxury with absolutely no impact on society. What role do you think contemporary art can play in this context defined by strong institutional structures, by the hegemony of the free market, and by the neo-liberal neutralisation of the political?

OR: Well, my hope is that from time to time art still has the capacity to intervene directly in political debates. I think sometimes it is possible… I usually position myself on one side of conflicting parties, and don’t take in the convenient position of the neutral observer. My role shifts a little from project to project, because I am interested in trying out different strategies within my artistic practice. So, for example, a kind of staged scenario has been created for Fly Democracy that can be seen as wishful thinking about potential future possibilities for political action, by presenting the staged release of leaflets about direct democracy in the US. There is some irony in this allusion to the drop of leaflets from US military aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of these recent wars, which contained propaganda for representational democracy. Fly Democracy combines very direct and straightforward textual material from different discourses on direct and participatory democracy, quotes by leftist political analysts, with video material and a very esthetical sound produced for the piece, which – in comparison to other projects I have done – can be more easily received by people on an emotional level.

AT: No doubt, hundreds of leaflets calling for direct democracy raining down on US soil has a strong effect and, at very least, reveals the global military and political reality in which such an action is unthinkable. I mean, the idea that American citizens might be encouraged by an unknown entity to free themselves. So Fly Democracy is in this way intervening in a political issue. On the other hand, the territory usually occupied by a work of art in real life is so narrow that I sometimes wonder what the possible outcomes of such a political work can be. Now I am speaking against myself, as I don’t consider myself a neutral observer either. When I went to the printing house to collect the invitation cards for your exhibition at Protokoll Studio, they were not yet ready so I had to wait there for a while. I was looking around and noticed that in the same room, besides the 350 invitations for your project, there were thousands – in fact, 30,000 – posters and promotional items announcing the upcoming European Parliamentary elections. The paradox of the situation was well-captured by a worker who said, pointing to these huge piles of promotional prints, “Look, this is where our money comes from.” Don’t you think that this unique situation is, in fact, the normal paradigm for contemporary art? And doesn’t it neutralize the political potential of so called critical and subversive art? Or is there another possible strategy for art, one that could avoid this paradox?

OR: Sure, it is very difficult to work against the overwhelming financial and ideological power of the dominant political system. If you present your work in art institutions it is very often only seen within a narrow frame. This is one reason why I realize a lot of my work outside of art institutions. On the one hand, I produce posters, billboards, billboard-objects, or magazines that intervene directly in public inner-city spaces and address political issues through different methods. For example recently I realized a poster as part of a campaign against the G8-summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, in which 50,000 posters were printed and distributed to mobilize the demonstrations and blockades. It was absolutely amazing to see how the posters and their ideas were used by the activists and appeared in so many of their own publications, which were all produced for particular publicity events. On the other hand, I also work a lot on films, which are presented not only in the field of art, but are also presented in cinemas, festivals, and community centers, in screenings organized by leftist political organizations, and the films are also sometimes presented on TV. For example the film Venezuela from Below, which I did with the political analyst Dario Azzellini in 2004, was broadcast on Telesur and the Venezuelan television stations Vive TV and VTV. Though the film originally came from the art world with its limited production resources, it had the capacity to reach a very broad audience. But at the same time, I am also interested to show my work in exhibition spaces, as I consider them as valuable spaces in which forms of dissent can be articulated in an experimental way. Art doesn’t always get neutralized through the exhibition format, as can be seen in the example of the exhibition cycle Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2006, for which Dario and I realized the 6-channel video installation 5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela. After a lot of pressure on the exhibition curator Chris Gilbert by the museum, the continuation of the cycle was canceled because of its political intention, and because it was impossible to continue working: Chris resigned and is now living in Caracas. I will continue working in all these different fields – I am interested in shifting from one presentation space to another, from one field of reception to another.

From: IDEA, arts + society, #28, 2007

Many of Ressler’s works are realized as collaborations. Among these are European Corrections Corporation (2003-2004) with Martin Krenn and Boom! (2001-2006) with David Thorne. Together with the political analyst Dario Azzellini he produced the films Venezuela from Below (2004) and 5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela (2006), a 6-channel video installation that was presented at the Berkeley Art Museum, USA. Ressler’s films are presented in cinemas, art exhibitions and film festivals. In 2002 his video This is what democracy looks like! (2002) won the first prize of the International Media Art Award of the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. His project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies is soon to be published in book form by the Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Poland.

In 2007 Ressler was a participant in the International Art Project HOLY DAMN IT: 50,000 posters against G8. This affinity group assembled ten artists and artist groups who produced posters to be distributed for free among groups mobilizing against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany (June 6-8, 2007), and for lead-up demonstrations in Hamburg and Rostock. Proceeds from the sale of a limited number of copies were reserved for legal aid to arrested demonstrators. On this same occasion, artists committed to the de-escalation of antagonism between protesters and police participated in a group exhibition titled Art Goes Heiligendamm, Art Goes Public, a curatorial project organized by Adrienne Goehler for the city of Rostock (May 24-June 9, 2007). In the context of increased police intimidation and defamation campaigns against global resistance movements in Germany, HOLY DAMN IT refused to participate in this exhibition and publicly criticized its legitimization of G8 politics. I interviewed Oliver Ressler about his collaboration with HOLY DAMN IT in June of 2007.

Marc James Léger: How did the artists and artist groups come together for this collaboration? Did you form in response to Art Goes Heiligendamm?

Oliver Ressler: The initial idea for HOLY DAMN IT came from Petra Gerschner and Michael Backmund. They proposed the production of a series of posters as an artistic intervention to be used in the course of the mobilization against the G8. The first meeting took place in September 2006 in Graz, Austria, on the occasion of an exhibition in the Forum Stadtpark. Five of the ten artists/groups who would eventually produce one poster each participated in this meeting. From that point on we were all of us invested in making the project possible. We proposed other participants, raised some money, created the webpage and tried to build a network of exhibition and presentation sites in order to distribute the posters as widely as possible with our limited budget.

When we started organizing HOLY DAMN IT there was no information available about Art Goes Heiligendamm – neither on my part nor from any other person involved. We had a dispute after dissatisfying email conversations with the organizers of Art Goes Heiligendamm, who offered to present the ten posters. When we realized that they were not interested in discussing the problematic political aims of their project with us, we decided to make our contrasting political agendas public.

ML: Art Goes Heiligendamm‘s proposed “third way,” not to mention its stated motifs of “intercultural communication” and “cultural translation” seem like laudable goals. At the same time, these themes, which are very academically respectable, seemed to almost naively return to a moralistic argument that the two sides do not represent good and evil, black and white, thus setting up a simple dichotomy to “deconstruct” as one wishes. But the problem is not so simple considering that the conditions in which the questions themselves can be posed are so heavily weighted by the discourse of neoliberal global capitalism. Tell me more about your collective response to the premises of Art Goes Heiligendamm.

OR: The project description on the Art Goes Heiligendamm webpage and the interviews with the curator Adrienne Goehler make it obvious that they seek to functionalize art in order to mediate between the conflicting parties gathered around the G8 summit. The instrumentalization of art is nothing particular new, but what really disturbed me was the number of interesting politicized artists who accepted the invitation to participate in such a project. While in Rostock and Heiligendamm, I spent my time at the blockades and demonstrations against the G8, which are a great example of collective intelligence. My experiences were so intense and rich during the week I was there that I did not want to spend my time visiting a show like Art Goes Heiligendamm.

While my knowledge about the exhibition mainly comes from the webpage, I assumed that there was no real need to see a show whose subtitle, “Art interventions on the occasion of the G8 summit 2007,” already brings the failure of the curatorial concept to the point. How can you talk about an intervention when your show is located in an old shipyard building, which is 30 or 40 kilometers away from the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, and while at the same time more than 10,000 activists managed to delegitimize the official summit directly with three days of blockades in the banned “red zone”?

Sometimes I think it is necessary to express precisely what side you are on. Concerning the struggle between the movement and the G8 and their neoliberal politics of exclusion, I think that the majority of cultural workers are on the side of the movement and don’t have to look for “third ways.” I think that in certain cases polarization is necessary in order to make visible different political viewpoints and ideals. Those people who don’t want to express “yes” or “no” – to the G8 in particular or the hegemonic system of power in general – de facto contribute to the continuation of the present conditions.

ML: I want to get back to some of these points, but first I would like to know more about your critique of Art Goes Heiligendamm. It was proposed that participants in HOLY DAMN IT would give presentations at various institutions that “operate in between art and politics.” Aside from the poster project, which you could not show in the context of an exhibition dedicated to “de-escalating” oppositionality, it seems that this was the way that you decided to respond to the contradictions that became apparent between these two art-based initiatives. What points did you discuss concerning the motifs of artistic intervention? What kinds of response did you get?

OR: You really over-estimate the role of Art Goes Heiligendamm in the unfolding of HOLY DAMN IT. The parameters of our project were already defined before we got their invitation. The 50,000 HOLY DAMN IT posters were presented and distributed for free in a variety of different places like museums, non-profit art spaces, cultural centers, youth centers, universities, bookshops, bars and at political events in several European cities. Where it was possible someone from the team gave a presentation, and when it was not possible the posters were simply presented with an invitation to the audience to take them away for free. In many cases we contacted these places in order to present the posters, but as soon as the project was better known we also received invitations to present the project in specific cities. The format of the poster made it possible to reach many different people; all ten posters also indicated the webpage www.holy-damn-it.org, which is linked to the most important web pages mobilizing against the G8. Of course a project such as HOLY DAMN IT has interventionist aspects. For example, Marina Grzinic used one of the central slogans of “Block G8” for her poster: Move. Block. Remain. Such a piece of art directly supports the blockades, which is of course a completely different approach from the de-escalation concept of Art Goes Heiligendamm.

ML: Among other things, the HOLY DAMN IT website mentions that “the project deals with the power of global image (re-)production within capitalism.” What were your specific concerns here?

OR: I didn’t write this sentence, but I assume it means that some artists relate their posters to existing images, which are being used with a very particular intention by corporate media. For example Petra Gerschner’s poster is based on a well-known image from a burning police car from the G8 protests in Genoa, a category of images that are typically used by mainstream media as evidence for the violence of the protestors and therefore of the illegitimacy of the protests in general. Petra frames this photographic image in a very interesting way, first with a golden picture frame, which presents the image like a valuable painting, and second through the presentation of the framed image on the wall of a run-down living room. At the bottom of the poster the sentence “history is a work in process” can be read. Petra not only transfers the existing image into another presentation context, freeing it from the reactionary media discourse of violence it is usually related to, but also suggests a critical reading of the events in Genoa 2001 as a possible step towards a new society – and not evidence of violence.

ML: Tell me about the poster distribution campaign itself. Were you in close contact with other affinity groups?

OR: Individuals and groups had the possibility to order the posters for free form our webpage. Petra Gerschner and Michael Backmund were in very close contact with a variety of different organizations and affinity groups. They participated in several coordinating meetings for the mobilization and political conferences against the G8 summit, and also used these opportunities to spread information about our project and to make the posters available to thousands of people. I think that HOLY DAMN IT can really be seen as a kind of embedded art project, a part of the mobilization, and not as a project that simply deals with the issues. The widespread awareness of our project within the movement also led to the use of our poster images in many of the left magazines and leaflets mobilizing against the G8. They used the HOLY DAMN IT posters as images to be printed along with texts. Many activists and groups ordered posters from our webpage and distributed them. Through these different strategies, we reached a circulation of more than 100,000. In addition there were numerous publications of our posters in left or liberal daily, weekly and monthly magazines, for example, PUBLIK, the largest union newspaper of the German union ver.di.

ML: You previously mentioned that you think that the majority of cultural workers are on the side of the movement. I think that is maybe true. I would say that the field is highly hegemonized, with all of the ambivalence and over-determinations that that entails – you know, the Althusserian view that the division of labor is structured like a language. Many cultural workers, especially those who have been reared on postmodern discourse, identity politics and poststructuralism, consider themselves to be “beyond left and right,” beyond notions of political unity. It seems to me that many art world people do support the goals of the movement, and just as many react to the kinds of identification that are associated with protest activity. In many cases, intellectuals are more concerned with sign value and symbolic exchange. It’s like the idea that Courbet sides with the worker by working as a painter; the “creative intellectual class” sides with the movement, but by doing their cultural work.

Also, the kind of oppositionality that you are talking about is clearly anti-capitalist. While many are against militarization, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, the attack on civil liberties, the excesses of the consumerist economy, they may remain liberal democrats or something as seemingly innocuous as that. Sometimes they do so because the institutions they work for enforce capitalist ideology: art that sells, production for the sake of the GNP, corporation grants, students as consumers, etc. For more theoretically educated workers and for people who experience kinds of oppression that are based on race, gender or sexuality, the worry is that something like the Marxist critique of political economy or the labor theory of value will surreptitiously come to supplant all other modes of critique. Of course what we’re dealing with here is the distribution of knowledge, perceptions and fantasies among participants and onlookers.

OR: That is for sure a more precise description of the relation between cultural workers and protest movements than the one I gave. I totally agree. The majority of the highly-educated cultural workers are aware of all the major global problems and know that some kind of change is necessary, but would probably not sympathize with a real systemic change. They would rather advocate and support minor reforms within the capitalist system and take the classical reformist approach to change some parameters – for example, the improvement of working conditions or the reduced emission of greenhouse gases – but not question the system as a whole. But still, I think that under certain circumstances these liberal people can be considered allies. The field of art provides many possibilities for expressing viewpoints with no direct censorship and therefore can play an important role in our society as a space for debate and dissent.

ML: I would like to ask you more about the conjuncture of art and activism and how this relates to what we could hesitantly call contemporary avant-garde practice. To my mind, what makes HOLY DAMN IT and your work avant-garde is its interventionist character. Many years ago, Krzysztof Wodiczko identified some 60s and 70s interventionist work as “Situationist Cultural Avant-Garde” and 80s artists like Barbara Kruger, Alfredo Jaar and Dennis Adams as “Critical Public Art.” He further defined this type of work as “critical-affirmative action on everyday life and its institutions … critical collaboration with institutions of mass and public media, design and education in order to raise consciousness … to win time and space in information, advertising, billboards, lightboards, subways, public monuments and buildings, television cable and public channels, etc.”(1)

In many ways the work that you do is similar to some of these artists and we could also find some precursors among the historical avant-gardes, in particular the agitational work of the Russian constructivists. But the situation has changed dramatically. In the eighties it was possible to imagine reversing the effects of the first wave of neoconservatism, but now, after 30 years of neoconservative policy changes and neoliberal globalization, the situation within capitalist democratic countries has been exacerbated. Yet the discourse on public art sometimes seems to have become increasingly relativistic, with the emphasis being placed on community art in a way that is compatible with corporate interests, or at least non-threatening to them. In contrast, when you make interventionist work, you are categorically oppositional and you assume the responsibility of dealing with and presenting confrontational work and ideas. How do you see your work, or the kind of work that is represented by HOLY DAMN IT, in relation to critical art practice in general?

OR: Of course my artistic practice is influenced by the kind of political art you describe. There are several different artists I am interested in, at least with regard to certain aspects of their work. Often it happens that I appreciate the formal presentation of a project but don’t agree with the way it addresses its message – or the other way around. I see my work as operating differently from certain types of work that are usually labelled “political.” For instance, I think that the pathos of Alfredo Jaar’s work is absolutely unbearable, in particular his aestheticized presentation of suffering in works related to the genocide in Rwanda. The form of Barbara Kruger’s work interested me a great deal when I was still a student. I liked the way she combined short messages in huge fonts with images, but most of her projects since the late 1980s, at least the ones that I have seen, seem to repeat and alter the visual language she is already famous for. Besides that, her critical potential does not seem to go beyond a critique of mass culture. I think that Barbara Kruger is probably already too much involved in the commercial art market since she does not even reject doing an advertising campaign for a company like Selfridges Department Stores.

So “critical public art” can even lead towards “incorporated advertisement art.” Martha Rosler has made the distinction between a general criticism, around which the art world and the criticized institutions have learned to collude over the years, and a concrete criticism that is more difficult to absorb. The majority of political artists seem to prefer the concept of a general criticism; the artist gets bestowed the prestigious attribute of being an art world rebel, while at the same time the way s/he expresses criticism does not hurt the art market, private collectors and major museums. So the show can go on.

The early works of Hans Haacke have some importance for me. Haacke always tried to keep a distance from his subject, which is significant for the classical approach of criticism. In comparison, several of my projects are not carried out from the position of a neutral observer, but by someone who is personally involved in the struggles or clearly positions himself on one side. In my artistic practice in the last few years I have tried to avoid focusing too much on criticism and have focused more on alternative economic models and modes of organization. Maybe this also fits in with what you call “categorically oppositional” in my work. At least it has to be clear that I don’t work in order to be oppositional, but to highlight some of the important ideas and experiences that take place in our world. For example, I realized two films in collaboration with Dario Azzellini on the political changes in Venezuela. One of them, 5 Factories – Worker Control in Venezuela, was also presented as part of the film program at the recent G8 counter-summit. The largest project I have been working on so far is the ongoing exhibition project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies. At this stage, it now consists of 16 video interviews with political analysts, economists and historians, and deals with proposals for the organization of alternative societies.

The poster I made for HOLY DAMN IT could also be seen in this way – using art to address and support political struggles that represent alternative ways of organizing that could one day lead to the existence of alternative societies on a larger level. The poster not only points to the possibility and capacity of the multitude to block a summit, to show the media and those in power that they are ready to fight against militarized neoliberalism, it also addresses positive things that are worth fighting for. The text proposes “a democratization of society, social welfare, dismantling [of] capitalism and the creation of free space.” The poster uses direct language that can easily be read. For a piece of art it is pretty anti-elitist since the content is not hidden somewhere behind aesthetically designed surfaces. The extremely successful blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm will also be the starting point for a new video on the movement of the movements, which I am currently working on in collaboration with the Australian artist Zanny Begg. We hope to publish this new video in about half a year.

ML: I’m interested in this anti-elitist aspect of what you are talking about. Victor Burgin mentions in his book In/Different Spaces the fact that the term elite relates to the idea of elections and democracy.(2) In this way, elite cannot be opposed to popular or populist in a simple way. This relates too to the idea of oppositionality, which can imply leadership as well as solidarity. Precisely on this issue, Georg Schöllhammer has suggested that your work does not require theoretical introduction and that its didactic means are self-explanatory. Gerald Raunig and others, and you yourself seem to agree with this, the idea that the issues speak for themselves, almost as though too much focus on culture could come to obviate from the task at hand.(3)

It’s interesting that you mention Haacke since his approach to critical autonomy has always made use of the most minimal of “classical criticism,” as you call it. Other approaches, let’s call them anti-aesthetic, are more mistrustful of the way that the aesthetic frame might neutralize the political effectiveness of a communication. How do you negotiate this older question of form and content, or is this displaced when one begins to address issues in terms of communications and activism?

OR: I don’t know in what context Victor Burgin wrote about this notion of an elite, but as far as I understand it through your description it does not convince me. I think too that elections and the system of representative democracy are dominated by people who are part of the elite, understood in terms of power and wealth. Perhaps a better term would be “oligarchy.” What I wanted to express was simply the fact that much of what is labelled “art” uses visual concepts that are not understood by the majority of people. Of course I wouldn’t say that I reject using complex visual strategies and some of my projects are also based on forms that probably exclude many people from the possibility of understanding these projects. What I wanted to point to in the case of the poster for HOLY DAMN IT is that I chose the form of straight talk in order to make the poster as accessible as possible to a large range of different people. The poster does not require many explanations, which is probably nothing unusual for a poster by an activist, but to some people related with the art scene it may appear strange when they hear that it is a poster by an artist.

When I start with a new project it is important for me to think precisely about the framework in which the project will be presented and then to choose the kind of content I would like to address, define the position of the speakers and choose a visual strategy that supports the concept. I don’t have a predetermined form or strategy; all of these aspects of the work go hand in hand. I’m interested in trying out different strategies. In the last few years I’ve had the chance to try out different ways of working in public space, in art institutions, and in the format of video.

ML: In a recent article about your work, Yates McKee mentions that the protest banner that you and David Thorne designed for Boom! was made to “disturb the unproblematic functionality of protest art … the immediacy of its claims, the identifications it elicits, the responses it activates.”(4) But he also criticizes the work at the same time for its relative unintelligibility on the part of those for whom it was intended. We find this strategy used in the posters for This is what democracy looks like (Liberalitas Bavariae) (2002) as well. Would you agree with this description? Do you see this aesthetic “resistance to signification” as Jacques Rancière puts it as part of how you deal with protest art?

OR: I think the banners that we carried out under the title Boom! can be seen as a trial run in the production of atypical banners that are based on complicated text and that are to be used in counter-globalization demonstrations. Having made two videos on the counter-globalization movement that are mainly based on what activists have to say about their political activities and that are visually dominated by the material that can be found in a demonstration context, I was interested in thinking about ways to complicate the visual and verbal languages of protest.

As you know, in a demonstration you can really see many different languages of protest, some of them being really great and very inspiring, and others that really suck, like “One Solution – Revolution.” This slogan can be heard in almost every demonstration in the world and completely contradicts my understanding of revolution, which is influenced by the sociologist John Holloway, who argues that revolution should not be seen as a predefined singular event, but should be based in day-to-day refusals of capitalist power. And you can find even worse slogans, some of them working with anti-Semitic stereotypes. So David and I decided to create very long texts in the format of dysfunctional web addresses in order to say something about global capitalism.

The series of posters I produced for the project This is what democracy looks like (Liberalitas Bavariae) took place in a different context. The posters were not presented in a demonstration context but as a city-light series that related to the banned demonstrations against the NATO security conference in Munich in 2002. In this series of posters the idea was to use an already existing visual reference – the posters of the election campaign of the governing social democrats in Munich – and to alter the text so that it says something about the reduction of democratic rights and police violence that thousands of demonstrators experienced some weeks before the local elections. The social democrats, who supported the police repression of the demonstrators, were re-elected. So this piece was a critical intervention into the existing order of signs designed to make visible the repressive politics of a ruling party regarded to be liberal by the majority of people. It led people to think that the social democrats were proudly advertising some of the major political decisions the party was recently responsible for: bans on demonstrations and political events, police encirclements, mass arrests, and the restriction of democratic rights.

I think that in particular situations it can be more effective to hack an existing graphic design in order to attack a party or another institution, intervening in the order of the predominating discourse and causing some confusion. This can sometimes be more productive than using a clear message that will come across as moralizing rather than critical.

ML: How do you see yourself opposing neoliberalism in its cultural aspects? In other words, how do you take the modes and relations of production/consumption into account in a way that does not leave people comfortable with the idea of art on one side and politics on the other? Can politics become the general category that subsumes the specific artistic aspect of a work and do you think this be done from within the art world?

OR: Even when they are presented in major shows, as we have seen in recent years, political artistic practices are still marginalized to some extent. If you visit the major art fairs, political art is almost invisible. This may not be the worst obstacle, but it can become a problem when it comes to funding the production of new work. Funding in Europe very often comes from the state, region or from foundations, and is usually only available for a few artists. I think that funding is the aspect that most directly influences a political art project. To supply only certain artists with production funds functions as a form of invisible censorship within neoliberal capitalism.

Ignoring this problematic dependency for a moment, I really think that art has the potential to intervene in the political sphere. I am really interested in dissolving this artificial barrier between art and politics and I think that art can be used as a tool to intervene in political debates. It is clear that such a practice cannot be undertaken only within the usual sites for the presentation of art, but also has to consider other means such as performance, art in inner-city spaces, posters, video activism or magazine editing.

ML: Allan Sekula’s photographs in 5 Days That Shook the World were important images for me at the time that this book came out.(5) Who are the artists that you see yourself in dialogue with in terms of counter-globalization?

OR: Allan for sure is one of the really important artists working on these issues. I only met him twice in person, but got to know his work through several exhibitions that had a considerable impact on my work. There are a few artists dealing with counter-globalization with whom I am in touch: the Bernadette Corporation, a collective that produced a fantastic film called Get Rid Of Yourself (2002) – my favorite film about Genoa; the Russian artist Dmitry Vilensky, who produced a fantastic short film about the repression of demonstrators at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg called Protest Match – Kirov Stadium (2006); and Marcelo Expósito, whose very thoughtful and critical film First of May (the city-factory) (2004) deals with post-Fordist working conditions and May Day actions. And finally there is my new collaborator Zanny Begg, a writer, curator, artist and activist based in Sydney, who made a great effort to bring the movement of the movements to Australia. I know all of these artists personally and also presented their work in different contexts.

ML: I’m interested in the fact that you make and show your work in contexts other than art world contexts. For example, you showed 5 Factories – Worker Control in Venezuela at the G8 counter-summit. Hardt and Negri have talked about the concept of “immaterial labor” in contemporary cultural production, the manipulation of symbols and information. They also mention as part of this the “affective labor” of human contact and interaction. Protest organizing and protest space itself – with the usual police confrontations – is an important site in your work. On these occasions, people who are normally involved in very different kinds of activity get to see each other in larger numbers, with signs and costumes, listen to speeches, affect public space. What do you think of protest space as a space of representation?

OR: The medium of the film really makes it easy to present work in different contexts. In the case of my two films on Venezuela and the two films on the counter-globalization movement [Disobbedienti (2002) and This is what democracy looks like! (2002)], I assume that probably 50 per cent of all requests to present the films come from organizations and groups that are not connected to the field of art. I think this is one of the main reasons why the medium of film is so interesting to me. I am of course interested in the classical art audience, but increasingly have the wish to address a broader audience and develop different strategies in order to do so.

Being at the demonstrations and blockades around Heiligendamm was really amazing because of the variety of individual and collective singularities that had come together: video activists, clown army, individual clowns, pink block, naked block, black block, Marxists, Trotskyists, members of ATTAC, etc. Many activists even switch among these identities. I saw a whole pink block become a naked block at one of the blockades close to the fence around Heiligendamm. All of these singularities have their own images, banners, different public appearance and slogans, which not only represent something, but contribute to the creation of effective blockades and to the creation of a space, which is a space of representation, but even more a space for action that will hopefully spread to different areas of our society.

ML: It seems that we have regained momentum after the dramatic setback that came after 9/11. But militarization is still high on the agenda, with the U.S. now planning the “liberation” of other countries, such as Syria and Iran. Within an increasingly militarized situation, it’s more difficult for us to focus on policy alternatives with regard to trade, environment, and public services. What do you think of black block tactics? How do you feel about strategic actions that automatically produce police repression? Obviously a major success of the recent protest was the blocking of access routes to Heiligendamm.

OR: It’s interesting to see how the media and the police try to construct a violent militant identity that they label “black block” and that they seem to regard as an organization. I rather believe in the existence of several activists around the world who like to wear black clothes and prefer the tactic of a direct confrontation with the police. I can understand it on a personal level that people are interested in a direct confrontation with the police, but I think the results of these actions after all seem to have more advantages for the police than for the 99 per cent of all other people in demonstrations who perform actions based on different strategies and become directly or indirectly endangered through “black block” actions. The actions by the people who are summed up as “black block” become a good excuse for the police to transfer the level of confrontation to the military level, where they can of course predominate.

After the violent demonstration in Rostock on Saturday, June 2, before the G8 meeting, the corporate media and also the local residents were – as expected – extremely hostile towards the whole movement of the movements. This changed to some extent when the blockades happened. Many journalists writing for the corporate media could not deny that the blockades were very effective; they had to recognize the excellent organization of the blockades. These activities even produced a new category of images: thousands of activists walking from all directions through the fields to the fence around Heiligendamm – which did not exist before. For one or two days the media were so fascinated by this that they almost forgot to be in opposition to these people. The peaceful activists stood on the streets for more that 48 hours. Many residents supported the blockades by supplying the activists with food and water. These were unexpected events that really surprised and delighted me.

ML: Thank you for this interview.

• NOTES
• (1) Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?,” in Hal Foster, ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture #1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 44-45.
• (2) Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), 17-18.
• (3) Georg Schöllhammer’s “Art in the Era of Globalization” (1999) and Gerald Raunig’s “Double Service: Border Crossing as Political Action and Art Practice” (2001) are available at www.ressler.at. Consulted June 21, 2007.
• (4) Yates McKee, “Reactivating Productivism” The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 1:2 (August 2003); also at www.ressler.at. Consulted June 15, 2007.
• (5) Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair and Allan Sekula, 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (London: Verso, 2000). See also Allan Sekula, “TITANIC’s wake,” Art Journal 60, no. 2 (summer 2001): 26-37.

From: Art Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2008

Bald zehn Jahre nach den Protesten in Seattle und deren Slogan „Wir werden gewinnen“ ist die Überzeugung des Gewinnens brüchiger geworden, rückt in den Hintergrund, um anderen Fragen Platz zu machen: „Was würde es tatsächlich bedeuten zu gewinnen?“(2) Mit dieser Frage verbunden ist die Frage nach dem Subjekt, besser den Subjektivitäten, die gewinnen oder zumindest davon überzeugt sind, zu gewinnen: Doch wer ist dieses Wir, das darüber nachdenkt, was es bedeuten könnte, zu gewinnen? Die Clowns, der Nackte Block, TheoretikerInnen, Frauen oder Männer? Dass dieses Wir nicht leicht zu kategorisieren und zu benennen ist, Frage von Verhandlungen bleibt, welche sich wiederum ständig im Fluss und in Veränderung befinden, wird an den Antworten der InterviewpartnerInnen Zanny Beggs und Oliver Resslers ersichtlich.

„What would it mean to win?“ führt direkt zu Fragen der Macht. Es kann beim „Gewinn“ nicht um den tatsächlichen Besitz, im Sinne einer Macht über etwas (Power over/John Holloway) gehen, sondern um die Umwandlung der kapitalistischen Logik und Denkstrukturen (Power to/John Holloway). Genau an diesem Punkt wird, wie John Holloway treffend sagt, klar, was die anti-kapitalistische Bewegung ausmacht und welche Möglichkeiten sich ihr tatsächlich eröffnen: „Gewinnen“ spielt auf Prozesshaftigkeit an, welche sich durch das zusammen arbeiten/blockieren/tanzen/lieben etc. multipliziert und ausbreitet. Es geht somit nicht nur um Widerstandsrhetorik im Sinne von „Wir gegen sie“, also der reinen Demonstration nach außen, sondern vor allem um die Prozesse, die innerhalb des Wir entstehen und angekurbelt werden. Das Wir, wieder in alle Winde zerstreut, wird zu einer Menge an MultiplikatorInnen (Tadzio Mueller), die ihre Erfahrungen hinaus tragen und mit ihrer Umgebung teilen. Auch so wird das Wir zu einem größeren Ganzen.

Wo Emma Dowling davon spricht, dass in Heiligendamm gewonnen wurde, weil gestört wurde und sie diese Störung verbunden mit den Interaktionen der verschiedensten AktivistInnen als eigentlichen Sieg erkennt, verbindet sich Dowlings Aussage mit der von Sarah T. und ihrer Erklärung der Fünf-Finger-Taktik, die sie mit den Worten abschließt: „Wenn genug Menschen da sind, lässt sich einiges machen!“

Dafür, dass die „Wir haben gewonnen“-Euphorie nicht überhand nimmt, sorgt wohl eine der letzten Sequenzen, in der Tadzio Mueller den fehlenden Antagonismus zwischen G8 und Anti-Globalisierungsbewegung kritisiert und somit in Frage stellt, ob tatsächlich von einem Sieg gesprochen werden kann.

Es ist ein schwieriges Terrain, auf das sich Zanny Begg und Oliver Ressler begeben haben, leicht hätte der Film in platte „Widerstandsromantik“ abgleiten können. Dass er dies nicht tut, liegt an den spannenden Positionen, die dank Dokumentations- und Interviewsequenzen sichtbar werden. Vervollständigt werden diese durch die Animationen Zanny Beggs. Ausgehend von John Holloways Eingangsstatement zu Subcomandante Marcos Vorstellung der perfekten Welt, erforschen diese in drei Teilen das Verhältnis von Subjekt, Politik und Widerstand und hinterlassen Spuren witziger Details, Hinweise und Zitate.

Zurückkommend auf die gewählten InterviewpartnerInnen, stellt sich mir die Frage, ob es nicht auch spannend gewesen wäre, mit AktivistInnen zu sprechen, die weniger theoretisch beziehungsweise an weniger prominenten Stellen arbeiten und somit vielleicht einen Einblick in die Bewegung von unten hätten geben können. Natürlich kann auch dieser immer nur fragmentarisch und bruchstückhaft sein, doch erschiene mir diese Herangehensweise sinnvoll, um Hierarchien zu brechen und nicht das Gefühl zu hinterlassen, dass die jetzt Interviewten FürsprecherInnen der anderen sind. Besonders aufschlussreich wäre hier die Frage gewesen, was nach den Protesten passiert, in welcher Form sich diese tatsächlich auf das alltägliche Leben auswirken.

„What would it mean to win?“ lässt die ZuseherInnen mit mehr Fragen zurück, als der Film beantworten kann und möchte. Mein persönlicher Gewinn liegt in der Zeit, die ich damit verbracht habe, mit FreundInnen über den Film und die Ereignisse von Heiligendamm zu diskutieren.

• (1) What would it mean to win? (2008), 40 Min. Ein Film von Zanny Begg und Oliver Ressler. Der Film wird demnächst auf der Diagonale und in der Ausstellung Have the cake and eat it too. Institutionskritik als instituierende Praxis in der Kunsthalle Exnergasse gezeigt.
• (2) Das Turbulence Kollektiv, das mit Tadzio Mueller und Michal Osterweil im Film vertreten ist, produzierte eine Zeitschrift, die während des G8 Gipfels verteilt wurde. Vierzehn Artikel beschäftigen sich mit der Frage „What would it mean to win?“.

Belinda Kazeem ist Schwarze Aktivistin und freie Autorin.

Aus: Kulturrisse 1/2008