Category Archives: performance

OWS Spring Training

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After spending a somewhat dreary week in academic salons, being told that there was no song and dance at Occupy or that there was no point to the General Strike, I chose to skip another round of conferences and head downtown for OWS Spring Training. These weekly Friday sessions have been happening since March but, for one reason or another, this was the first one I could attend.

Photo credit: Eva Destruction

It was an energizing relief after all the talk to be doing something. I was at once impressed with how much things have moved along in the street organizing. Following the influence of the excellent +Brigades, there’s a good deal of co-ordination, tactics and wit back in the actions. Extra energy came from last night’s successful Sleep to Protest, in which about a hundred people managed to sleep overnight on Wall St itself, despite the sudden desire of the city to clean sections of the street for hours on end. There were also lots of “new people,” by which I mean faces I didn’t recognize, and a noticeably wider age range.

After some tactical training by the +Brigades, we set off for a set of Bank of America branches where supporters were planning to close their accounts. Along the way, despite my academic colleagues, a nice range of old and new songs and chants kept the mood light. Protestors have identified the short-tempered white-shirt police officer assigned to OWS marches and when he appears, they set up a drawn-out mocking chant of his name. He didn’t seem to like it. OWS organizers were making sure that the marchers took up no more than half the sidewalk to deny police the pretext for arrests. The obvious good humor of the event and the interest of many downtown passers-by mitigated the chance for mass arrests.

When we arrived at the banks, those who closed their accounts were hoisted shoulder-high and spoke via people’s mic about how hard BoA made it to do so. After properly denouncing the vampire squid, they then ceremonially cut their debit cards in half to loud cheers. One closer was a Democratic official of some kind.

Then we dispersed in order to make our own way to the Stock Exchange. Just as well, because the police had placed a checkpoint at the Broadway entrance to Wall Street, permitting only those with workplace IDs to enter. Luckily downtown has many byways and it was a simple matter for those who wanted to do so to congregate on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial. At a signal, we congregated into a large cluster and sounded the People’s Gong, closing the Stock Exchange for violations against the people. Proceedings were closed with an exuberant chant of A-Anti-AntiCapitalista, with a new twist: after a couple of choruses, we went quieter and quieter, lower and lower, jumping up at the end in full voice.

All quite silly in some ways but it prevented Mr White Shirt from the mass arrest he was clearly itching to orchestrate by catching a lot of public attention and not being demonstrably an offense, as no signs were displayed. There were just a lot of people there at the same time doing the same things. Needless to say, perhaps half-a-dozen were arrested for no apparent reason.This exercise has been going on for a few weeks now. It’s creating new energy, new songs, new ways of being in space. So much for academia.

 

On Duration

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Does duration matter? How long is a protest? How long is a movement? When is it “over”? In beginning this project, I had in mind durational performances, like those of Tehching Hsieh, while realizing that there is a very considerable difference between durational writing and embodied durational performance.

Hsieh "Outside Piece (1981-2)

Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950) arrived undocumented in New York in 1974 from Taiwan via a job in merchant shipping. Four years later he began making astonishing year-long performances, beginning with Cage Piece (1978-79) in which he spent an entire year in a cage. He followed this with Time Clock Piece (1980-81)  in which he endeavored to punch a time clock every hour over the course of a year, missing only 134 hours over the course of the year.

His next project, Outdoor Piece (1981-82), has a striking resonance today.  “I shall stay OUTDOORS for one year, never go inside. / I shall not go in to a building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, tent. / I shall have a sleeping bag.” Hsieh occupied New York. He did not go near Wall Street, though.

In the film documentation embedded below you can get a feel for the project from Hsieh’s preparations, his sleeping, eating and grooming arrangements over the course of the piece and how he passed his time.

In the last few minutes of the film, the crisis of the project arises, when the NYPD arrest Hsieh for being involved in a fight. From what his lawyer says later it seems that Hsieh was attacked and defended himself, but the police take him inside a police station, causing him obvious distress. In one of many distinctions between present-day New York and the time of the project, Hsieh is permitted by the judge in his case not to come inside to his hearing because he is a “serious artist.”

You notice many other little details: the availability of pay phones, food vendors that sell out of the window to the sidewalk and street markets allows Hsieh to sustain his project and make use of a range of commodities, all of which would be much harder now. He makes a call next to a cop but is not harassed as present-day street people and Occupiers alike tend to be.

In the other hand, it’s often pointed out that it was the proximity of a McDonalds and a Starbucks to Zuccotti Park that allowed the occupiers access to bathrooms that enable the park to remain sanitary. Hsieh did not have that option, as the film shows. He has to make do as best he can, washing from fire hydrants and urinating in the open.

In other ways, Hsieh did not stand out as much as the occupiers did. As one can see in the film, there were numerous indeterminate “zones” in the city, such as the river bank on the West side and even Washington Square Park, where flexible living arrangements were tolerated. Indeed, the homeless population in both New York and the US in general began to expand dramatically in 1981, leading to the foundation of the Coalition for the Homeless in that year. It was not until 1983 that the New York Times began to refer to homeless people as opposed to vagrants.

What can we learn from Hsieh’s experience of duration? He has said that he did not find the performances difficult but that he was “depressed” afterwards. There is a relation of time, work and narrative here. Time is measured in his projects, whether by the punching of the clock or by the full duration of the project, but it is not a relation to alienated labor. It makes us realize how much our sense of time is dictated by work, from the so-called 9-5, to the weekend, the “holidays” and so on. We do not experience time as a measure of life or of understanding but more as a burden–as in the “thank god that’s over” response.

Hsieh’s work makes us understand that the Hollywood version of narrative  is always already about moving through a predictable “arc” to the predetermined ending. Investment, going to market, followed by profit has been laid over the classical exordium, agon, catharsis. There is no catharsis in the market relation. It is a narrative without reward other than the shadow of supposedly increased value.

Instead, Hsieh stayed in the moment–for a year. From Buddhist philosophy to revolutionary praxis, the task is precisely to stay in the moment, not to move on but stay there where always were but differently: as ourselves, between ourselves, not in predetermined market relations. Don’t go back.

Occupy Godot

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The signs posted to evict Occupy Pittsburgh were simple white board with black lettering. They reminded me of something and it bugged me all day. Then I remembered:

"Waiting for Godot" in New Orleans

It’s the stage directions for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as staged by Paul Chan in New Orleans after Katrina. His 2007 production was prompted by Chan’s own sense that the devastated city reminded him of something. When he remembered the scenario for Godot, the New Orleans streets now seemed to him to call for a production of the play. Audiences flocked to see it and the endless waiting of the “tramps” made sense to people in post-Katrina New Orleans because of their own interminable delays with FEMA and other governmental authority.

The Lower Ninth Ward

The play was performed first in the Lower Ninth Ward and then in Gentilly. The board above is now placed in the street by what are known as “the Brad Pitt houses,” a series of modern, flood-resistant buildings that constitute a permanent architectural exhibition by the banks of the Industrial Canal that flooded so disastrously in 2005. Tourists go by in buses and gaze on the scene. We wandered about and took photos. No one seemed to mind.

The three rivers that meet in Pittsburgh run into the Ohio river and from there into the Mississippi, down on to New Orleans. There’s a connection at work here. We could play with this is in a number of registers. Perhaps the “tramps” that have nowhere else to go have been evicted by Godot, who no longer wants them to wait. Perhaps Vladimir and Estragon have decided that they have had enough of being tramps and have occupied the country road: Occupy Godot. Perhaps Lucky disrupts their General Assembly.

Chain of associations: in the original French production of En Attendant Godot, Lucky was played by Jean Martin, a former member of the French Resistance, as indeed was Beckett.

Left Jean Martin as Lucky

A decade later, Martin would play the paratroop colonel Mathieu in the classic revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers (1966). The only professional actor in the film, Martin had been blacklisted for signing the petition of the Cent Vingt et Un (121) in 1960, a statement by artists and intellectuals protesting the Algerian war.

Think of this:

Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

We are paused, vehemently.

Pausing is to dwell in the moment, to extend the moment. That is what Occupy is: an extension of the moment in which it has been possible to challenge authority, to claim autonomy and to refuse to “move on.”

Pause.

Sally Out Against Passive Recreation

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From the middle ranks of the Occupy movement, I have come to hear “occupy” as a question. The question is being put as to when and how I might be able to change. it sounds somewhere between portentous and new-age, I’m aware. It is nonetheless something that I go and practice–in the sense of perform and try out. I spent today at a workshop run by the amazing Lisa Fithian, called “Shutting Things Down to Open Things Up.”

As is now something of an Occupy cliche, change begins with yourself but it also has to be put into some form of practice: which is to say, it’s personal and it’s political. Hence my monstrous hybrid of a title. In the Areopagitica (1644), his great defense of freedom of the press, the poet John Milton declaimed:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.

So it’s one thing, whether good or not, to write about Occupy but you have to go and do it in the face of the adversary as well. And so the second half of the phrase comes from the regulations devised by Brookfield Properties for the appropriate use of Zuccotti Park: “passive recreation.” It is in its bureaucratic, unlovely way, a motto for the service sector of global neo-liberalism that the U. S. has become.

I am painfully aware of my own limitations in this context. The events I have organized or helped organize are details in a much broader picture. I am and will remain a university person. It is, however, one of those times in which you need to test the ideas you circulate by putting them into a form of practice because this is how we learn what to try and think next. Sometimes this is done text to text. Now it’s time for sallying out and seeing what happens, even if the result is another period of reflection.

The performative workshop is a very useful tool for measuring this sense of change and here I want to reflect on two such experiences that I’ve had recently: today’s exercise in taking space, and an earlier theatre of the oppressed workshop, based on the work of Agosto Boal, that I participated in at 16 Beaver. Both were very productive in making us think of ourselves as bodies in space with choices to make that might change the outcome of events. The comparison might help to highlight some tensions in Occupy’s relations to what we might call internal and external repression.

At the Boal workshop, facilitated by Eve Silber, the musician and actor, what had been a physically passive space of talking and listening became a very dynamic and open set of possibilities. Using the “image theatre” technique, Silber built up from a single image of direct democracy to an improvised encounter between protagonist and antagonist. The scenario involved an experience of trying to get access to an OWS Spokes Council, site of some of the most difficult personal interactions in the movement.

One woman present (I didn’t know her name) did a very convincing performance of such disruptions. She was as scary and confusing as the actual performances of such “blocks” and Joe N., playing the facilitator, did what I probably would have done–he played it for laughs, making fun of the rhetorics of facilitation. Afterwards in the discussion, I wondered if we’d missed a moment: instead of trying to work through the hardest place of internal dynamics, we’d stepped outside by being ironical.

Today in Fithian’s workshop, participants were again encouraged to visualize the space otherwise. This time, sets of bodily movement tactics were deployed to see if one set of people, playing protestors, could get past another, playing the police. The goal was to see if space could be taken, even symbolically. For most of those present, this was not an entirely abstract idea, because everyone has been on a demonstration where the police try and prevent you from going where you want.

Nonetheless, on the first effort, a pile of bodies resulted in the middle of the room. The “protestors” felt we had been successful in recovering someone the “police” had tried to arrest, until Fithian reminded us that the point was to get past them to the end of the room. The next sally went better, aided by the protestors numerical superiority and the absence of batons, helmets, shields and pepper spray that routinely appear in New York whenever police are deployed. Just yesterday an unarmed eighteen-year-old, Ramarley Graham, was shot and killed in the Bronx by the NYPD over alleged possession of some marijuana.

So the final venture, co-ordinated by Fithian rather than by us, had the protestors march up to the police and then suddenly sit down. There was a palpable moment of surprise from the “cops.” In that instant, a variety of options for claiming space would have become available. Then the cops recovered themselves and pepper-sprayed the seated demonstrators.

Doing what is not expected turned out to be the best resource, finding ways not to fulfill how power anticipates that we will perform. Fithian showed video of a trans group marching at the demonstrations against the G8 in Rostock, Germany and the complete bafflement of the police they confronted. Another group demonstrated nude.

In September 2011, physical encampments in public space were a brilliantly unexpected move: now the police regard tents as contraband. The difference would not have been that the police did not know an occupation was planned, as New York is now one of the most policed spaces in the world. Today at Penn Station in the shopping area between the subway and the Long Island Rail Road I saw five police officers and two soldiers. The occupation happened because the state did not believe it could be sustained. Paradoxically, the very sense that they have that Occupy is over could be its most useful asset come Spring.

 

Event? Performance? Or Theatre?

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In these observations from the ranks of the Occupy movement, I have often been driven to think about the performative and theatrical dimensions of Occupy. It seems to be catching on.

In a recent essay in the SSCR series “Possible Futures,” Yale philosopher Matthew Noah Smith takes a generally positive view of the movement but disagrees extensively with its tactics and strategies. He argues:

OWS is not a movement—at least not in any sense that we would use the term to refer to other movements. OWS was, first and foremost, an event more than an organization.

That would certainly come as a surprise to many in Occupy who refer to it precisely as the “movement.” Their sense is a widespread turning away from one set of goals and aspirations to another way of understanding being in the world. Rather than define what a movement might be, Smith goes on to claim:

Because OWS was no more than an event, it always had to be located in a determinate place. This is why the evictions from Zucotti and the various other OWS sites were seen as existential threats. A performance needs a theater, and if the theater closes, then the performance ends. Organizations, on the other hand, are abstract entities and so can coalesce anywhere they choose.

For all that Smith is a philosopher, we might be surprised at the lack of precision in his language here: is this a performance in the sense of Austin, Butler, Derrida, or J. Jack Halberstam? It seems that there is a certain tautology at work here: a performance is what happens in a theatre, which is a place where performances happen. At the most literal level, however, performances have mostly not taken place in theatres. Scripted plays may be performed there, but no one is proposing Occupy as following a script.

To be concrete where Smith prefers the abstract: yesterday, there was a call to demonstrate in support of Occupy Oakland and against police brutality. It appeared on NYCGA.net and was disseminated on Facebook and Twitter. Later I saw leaflets at Washington Square Park. I don’t know who did that. I still decided to go. For Smith, this is evidence that OWS is organized but not an organization.

The fineness of this distinction is nonetheless precisely where we disagree. Occupy is a direct democracy between people. The organized democracy that Smith wants to see proposes abstract entities that do the business of what there is to be done: so there is always a House majority and minority leader regardless of who those people actually are. That is the maintenance of authority. It is in the recognition of the other and in allowing that other to invent us that the possibility of autonomy is created. We already have an abstract autonomy, the right to consume. That’s not going so well. We need a real autonomy, and it can only be found in moments of performance.

For Smith, the self gets abstracted in the process of coming to democracy:

One no longer thinks of oneself as a patient or a lone figure in struggle against injustice. Rather, one begins to think of oneself plurally and democratically. That is, one understands oneself as part of a democratic ‘we.’

I’m all for solidarity, I just don’t think it has to be seen outside the event and without a relationship between singularities. Yesterday’s demonstration did not go anywhere in particular, an organized walk to a “specific place.” Rather it made the claim of the right to be seen. So a rabbi walked quietly in the middle of the march, while hundreds danced past Fifth Avenue restaurants singing “A-Anti-Anticapitalista!”

Did they fail because capitalism was not overthrown? Perhaps, unless you think that capitalism is in the process of overthrowing itself anyway. Or you could say that some at least have found a way to articulate their refusal to move on and see nothing. This articulation is the performance of a movement. It proposes a dissensus that allows for the emergence of a politics in which there is no person without part.

Visualizing the Square: Bodies

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The body in space where it is not intended to be is the Occupier. By chastising that body, the original occupation of the colonial police state intends to end the doubled state of Occupy. The two “classic” responses to state violence–carnival and organized non-violence–have been the most prominent means of resistance. Within the space of Occupy, new forms of non-conventional embodiment and self-visualization as bodies-that-think are in process.

Non-violence

Non-violence is the state-approved method of protest. When Mayor Kasim Reed shut down Occupy Atlanta in October 2011 he told reporters: “this kind of behavior isn’t consistent with my understanding and Atlanta’s understanding of traditional civil disobedience.” By this he appears to mean a march carried out where the police tell you to march, so that they can hit or spray you. As a tactic, this non-violence requires the protestor or occupier to submit to violence in order to demonstrate both their commitment to the cause and its moral superiority. It is a demonstration of mind over body in suitably Protestant form. As a thinking movement, Occupy is widely consensed on non-violence. The Occupy form of non-violence is, however, not that approved by the state. It assumes that non-violent bodies can act, not merely be passive recipients of violence. The body engaged in such action is also thinking. The simplest act of Occupy is emblematic: the protest march that occupies whichever sidewalk actors choose to use, using the freedom of public sidewalks, rather than following the prescribed police route, where protestors are so surrounded by cops that the action is in effect sealed.

Carnival and the Mask

To double the action of an actor is dangerous, it is said in Alexis. A Greek Tragedy. The danger is the old fear of the copy, the inauthentic and the mimic, which, by appearing similar to the original displaces the real. The double is out of place, uncanny to the police claiming to regulate the divide.

Masking in Liberty New Year's Eve. Credit: Jean Thevenin.

These two New Year’s Eve revelers are anonymous because they are masked. They are wearing Anonymous masks. Like most masquers, they are not unknown but the addition of the mask makes them into a threat. As Claire Tancons has pointed out, NYC police revived nineteenth-century laws against masks from the period of slavery in order to prevent Occupiers from masking. The carnival overturns the established regime, producing a world turned upside-down.

Authority has always been concerned that the brief autonomy of carnival might resist being turned back and has sought to prevent and contain it. This anxiety rests on the same weakness exposed by Occupy: how powerful can your authority be if the mere act of covering your face or pitching a tent can challenge it? State violence wants a properly abject object: a mocking, satirical costumed body makes the police look like Offissa Pup in Krazy Kat:

The Police Spot a Transgressive Act

Occupy Dis/Ability

Less discussed in the violence-obsessed mainstream media but perhaps more significant in the long-term has been the interaction between Occupy and dis/ability of all kinds. As many dis/ability activists have said, we are the 99%: about one in five of those counted by the US census have a federally-recognized form of disability as defined by the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. Dis/ability activists stress that many more are temporarily disabled, such as a person with a sprained ankle or broken leg and that, as the population’s age profile increases, these numbers will only increase. Hearing impairment, for example, is close to universal now that so many spend their days plugged into amplified music players.

Woman in wheelchair tear-gassed at Occupy Oakland

The dis/abled have joined with Occupy for many reasons:

Such groups cannot always be physically present at an Occupy site and may interface with the movement via Facebook pages such as “Krips Occupy Wall Street” and “Occupy Autism Speaks.” If you read across these pages for a while, you see that it makes no sense to speak of “one demand” for such diverse categories but also that this really is a different kind of movement. This thread of the movement extends to queer, trans, gender-queer and other non-conventional modalities of performed embodiment, as well as drug, alcohol and serotonin-uptake inhibitor dependent bodies. This survey predicts more investigation for us ahead.

Self-visualization

Cops Eye View of Liberty. Credit: Jean Thevenin.

In guise of conclusion, we have the furious comment of an NYPD officer to filmmaker Jean Thevenin at Liberty Plaza on New Year’s Eve: “Everybody here is a filmmaker” He was responding to Thevenin’s request for access to the space because he was a filmmaker. What Occupy offers is an embodiment that visualizes itself both for its own sake and for that of others. As the Occupy Dis/ability network shows, that visualization is by no means limited to the encampments taken to embody Occupy. It is an act of self-visualizing that depends on the affirmation and invention of others to perform properly. It is what I have called the right to look.

Enjoy the celebration:

Everybody Here Is a Filmmaker (New Year’s Eve in Occupy Wall Street) from jaune! on Vimeo.

Visualizing the Square: Space

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Alexis. A Greek Tragedy

If Occupy is a “square,” as I discussed yesterday, what does that space contain? How is the boundary marked? And should it be? These sound like philosophical questions and so they are: but the scandal of occupy, wherever it happens, is the appropriation of such legislative process by those who should stay in their place. This projects a series of questions ahead about bodies in space, the history of the anonymous, their self-visualization in past and present crises and the embodied experience of self-visualizing in the space of Occupy. We’ll walk through these in the week(s) ahead.

To begin with, the very practical and tactical choices about where and how to occupy have pushed the question of public space into widespread discussion. A few months ago, few of us were aware that there were such things as privately owned public spaces (POPS), such as Zuccotti Park and the Atrium of 60 Wall Street where most of the business of OWS takes place. Intended as a sop to the notion of the public, POPS have become a key tactical resource in New York. Meetings are now taking place in such unlikely sites as the Atrium of Trump Tower, where the Donald is unlikely to be in attendance.

It is not the case that POPS are a diminished form of the public. Rather they offer a space of ambivalence that the public never did, permitting the possibility of Occupy. We could do this by theory but here’s an anecdote. There is an Institute for the Humanities downtown, full of people from the universities and the New York Review of Books, all self-designated public intellectuals. Once a friend was speaking and invited me to come. No sooner had I opened the door than a genteel gatekeeper was asking me who I was and why I was there: in this view, the public know who they are and why they should be there. The rest of us should keep out. The POPS are in fact much more the space of public intellectual thought than such enclaves ever were.

Quietly, governments are moving to eradicate such ambivalent spaces. The Danish government recently attempted to resolve the contradiction of the squatter city Christiania, after nearly 40 years of occupation. They forced the occupiers to buy the land where they were living: the residents responded by a campaign to “buy it free.” They stopped by OWS last October, and apparently sold $10 of shares at the New York Stock Exchange. This was seen as being ridiculous but the resulting publicity generated enough support to buy the land. Residents now see themselves as “carers” of the shares, not owners. More informal arrangements are being targeted in the UK, where the neo-liberal Coalition government added a last-minute amendment to unrelated proposed legislation, criminalizing all squatting, even of vacant buildings–which number 700,000 at present.

While such legal loopholes are certainly necessary, the Occupy sites are not simply vacant space in which people have pitched tents, like new typing in a blank document. By interfacing the attention economy of the spectacle with the historical built environment, the space of Occupy is an unpredictable and volatile combination. The Greek neighborhood of Exarchia, where Alexis was set, is evidence of that interface. It gains a certain energy from being adjacent to the Polytechnic, the leading university in Athens where students resisted the military dictatorship in 1973. The gates knocked down by military vehicles back then are preserved as a memorial. Gradually reclaiming the streets, Exarchia became accustomed to a form of autonomy within the system, like Christiania, only for Alexis’s shooting to make visible how fragile that autonomy actually was. That sudden awareness, combined with the rapidly disseminated news of the tragedy, brought people out onto the streets without having been told to do so by any organization. It is as if the spectacle and historical experience are two layers of space, co-existing but not usually coming into contact. A disruption like Alexis’s death brings them into contact, a clinamen of atomized modern experience, producing a catalytic force.

The occupation of Zuccotti Park and its transformation into Liberty Plaza are the subject of two long journalistic essays this week in Vanity Fair and Harper’s [paywall]. Both are interesting first-person accounts–the former is a weaving of many voices, while the latter is told by blogger Nathan Schneider. Each nonetheless misses the opportunity to explain the key phenomenon that made OWS different from so many other attempts to create alternative space in New York: people came. David Graeber, the anthropologist and a leading light of OWS, recalls:

I was thinking, Oh, it’s a couple hundred people. This is O.K. I was feeling a little disappointed, but then more and more people started streaming in, and a lot of them were from out of town. They obviously had no place to stay. So they had to occupy something one way or the other.

As Graeber notes below, they had not all come intending to do so. Many had simply intended to protest and came to decide to occupy. If there were a thousand people, then there are probably a thousand individual reasons why they chose to do that. But in their different ways, each person had learned about OWS, mostly via the Internet or in some cases a personal communication with the relatively small organizing group and thought, “I have to do this.”

OWS had, and continues to have, that spontaneous coming-to-action form such as that which brought Exarchia into the street. It did not have a history to draw on–no one had occupied Wall Street before. But now they have, and the Occupiers (meaning the people who camped) refer to Liberty as “our home.” It has reconfigured the “map” of New York and created a place of fragile autonomy, which is still perhaps stronger than Exarchia was when it took on the colonels. The very density of attention around “New York” guarantees that.

At the same time, there’s a curious invisibility, a “move on, there’s nothing to see here” about the Financial District. If we know where the Stock Exchange is, and the awful bull sculpture on Broadway attracts a crowd of tourists with cameras, who knew who Brookfield Properties were before September 17, 2011? One of the most intriguing new developments in OWS is the organization of a series of Occupy walking tours of downtown, visiting POPS, pointing out the locations of the various now-infamous financial institutions, and de-anonymizing (if that’s a word) the capitalist towers. As the police seek to enclose everything, Occupy moves away from its “home” to visualize the mechanics and spectacle of that enclosure.

 

 

Visualizing the Square: A Performative Method

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Alexis, A Greek Tragedy, a remarkable performance by the Italian group Motus, both investigated the transition to popular action and created a method for critical visuality studies to follow. The project creates a complex interface between, on the one hand, the theatrical Antigone and the historical legacies of her refusal to obey the law and honor the dead; and on the other, between the police killing of 15 year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens in 2008 and the current crisis.

Silvia Calderoni/Antigone

The result was expressed by the device of a square on the stage as the center of the performance space. It was taken to represent the square in the Athens district of Exarchia, near the Polytechnic, the long-standing center of resistance to the military junta. During the performance we were shown video of open public spaces in Exarchia like Nosostros, a performance/meeting/social space.

Alexis’s death on December 6, 2008 sparked what can be called an uprising in Exarchia that has now merged with the protests against the crisis to create a revolutionary moment in Greece. For Motus, the key question at stake is: “How to transform indignation into action?” The term “indignation” has been central to European Occupy projects from the Indignados in Spain to the Indignés in France. The key question here is the moment of transition and transformation in which that sense of frustration becomes concerted action. And then behind that is the question of what “action” properly means: how to move from refusal to something that is not a form of accomodation or replication with and of the status quo?

Ross Domoney’s video tells the story of the riots around Alexis’s murder and their interface with the current crisis.

Exploring Revolt in Greece from Ross Domoney on Vimeo.

Watching the film, there is a certain performative element as the police throw tear gas and the rioters throw Molotov cocktails. Although this is clearly violent and dangerous, the petrol bombs largely land short of the police and don’t hurt anyone. Many demonstrators came prepared for the tear gas as well. I do not mean to say that this is not “real”—what emerges is to the contrary a sense that the tension within Greece is under constant escalation and it is not clear what will happen next: “the waters are too dark.”

In short: how to visualize the square, the crisis, the movement? What’s coming next? As you know, my recent book has stressed the role of visuality in creating authority precisely by means of being able to engage in such visualizing and to apply force to sustain it. The word was coined in English by the conservative Thomas Carlyle, who wanted to see the military technique of visualizing the battlefield applied to the social as a whole. His “hero,” the great man of history, was Napoleon who first epitomized these qualities, according to Carlyle, when he turned his cannon against the Parisian revolutionaries in 1795 and mowed them down in the streets, preventing a radical journée, or day of action.

How do you countervisualize when your goal is not to mow down the other side in the street but to catalyze a sense of alienation into social transformation? In Alexis, a cross historical identification of the abandoned body of Alexis was made with that of Polynices, Antigone’s brother for whom she sacrifices herself. The widespread A for Anarchy in Exarchia was read as also signifying Antigone. Giorgio Agamben’s question: “what life is worth being lived?” is understood as a reading of Antigone’s refusal to submit to Creon’s law and the current questioning of ways of being.

The square was visualized as the interface of four projects:

  • the interface of the ancient text of Antigone with Brecht’s interpretation and the historical legacies of the theme in Greece
  • the multi-year performance of Antigone by Motus
  • the already “historical” events of 2008, an event already forgotten by the media when the group began to investigate them in 2010
  • the moment of Occupy, from Tahrir to OWS and beyond

The method that emerges here is fascinating. The interface of formal work and questions of technique or theory is one “side” of the square. The group discuss theatre technique with the audience, reveal some of their methods and invite the audience into the performance. The play reflects over and again on its conditions of possibility: how can a part be performed? How should the words, even the punctuation, be rendered? Should an actor playing dead body have his mouth closed or open?

This interface was redoubled by the remarkable physical theatre: the performance opens with Silvia Calderoni edging across the stage, one half-step at a time, and at each step, jack-knifing her body–it was a stunning depiction of the pointless frustration of mundane labor under the Law. Calderoni brought the physique, self-possession and technological skills of Lisbeth Salander to Antigone, while also managing to be a welcoming presence.

Double down: one “performer,” Alexia Sarantopolou, is a resident of Exarchia and expresses her skepticism as to whether events such as this can be rendered as art. I was reminded of the disdain expressed  by the former revolutionaries who appeared in The Battle of Algiers, for whom the film was a “game” compared to what they had experienced. Calderoni agrees but then suggests that doing this work is all she can do, while stressing that the formal pretense that the “outside doesn’t exist” has to be abandoned.

So the performance describes and visualizes the events of 2008 and the space of Exarchia in detail, relaying visual images, interviews and film by means of projections from a computer and acting out their encounters. In Motus’s description:

the stage becomes the place of a choral presence, emotionally moving, which acts on a polyphonic and stratified text of a hybrid and lightning-swift nature: dialogues, interviews, solitary reflections, attempts at translation from Greek into English and Italian, audio and video fragments from the web, descriptions of atmospheres and landscapes, political statements and testimonies…

In this visualization, Antigone becomes the sound of Exarchia, the sounds of the revolt and the form of the transformation from subjected to subject.

Of course, it’s only a play. If you were to measure the success of the transformation by the number of people who accepted the performers invitation to join in their visualization of protest, you’d see only a small group–young Occupy types, older people of the all-experience-is-good variety, a few middle-aged hybrids like myself. Would a fully successful performance mean that there was no audience left? or does it mean accepting the immersive performative challenge inherent in the project: one of tarrying with the subject, one of staying with it after it is “current,” learning to countervisualize as we go?

For those few of you still reading, that’s what we’re trying to do here: a durational performative effort to stay with the moment, to understand what transition means and how to visualize it. Already the audience has dwindled. It’s OK. In fact it’s good. It’s all I can do.

Jan 4: Performing Elitism?

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Are certain forms of cultural performance necessarily elitist? Are certain ways of consuming culture equally one percent? New York Times music critic Antony Tommasini recently worried that OWS reinforces the perception of classical music as “elitist and inaccessible.” His counterargument was based on such examples as the free Liederabend concerts at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. What, though, are the cultural requirements of admission? What are the politics of music performance?

I had to Google to find out that “Liederabend” means “song recital” and that the Juilliard is part of Lincoln Center: admission to such events requires cultural capital, even more than whatever price is being charged. While these events are listed on their website, they are not advertised as free until you click through to a specific event, so I would never have known. The Juilliard as a school is unabashedly elitist, according to its own website, admitting 7% of its applicants and charging $33,000 tuition.

Tommasini goes on to worry about the elitist patronage of the arts by people like the toxic David Koch, who uses the “arts” as the respectable side of his financial activism, otherwise devoted to the Tea Party and similar causes. He worries that such “dependence would seem to make the performing arts a natural focus for the Occupy activists.” Indeed, there were two notable actions this fall, one at Julliard and one at Lincoln Center.

At Lincoln Center, Philip Glass presented his new piece Satyagraha, an opera based on Gandhi’s non-violent theory of resistance. As it happens, I was today sent a link to a video by Jean Thevenin of the OWS protest at the première in which the NYPD and Lincoln Center refused to allow Occupy to use the space in front of the Met, on the grounds that it is “limited public space.” Philip Glass himself and Lou Reed joined in the action. You can see some OWS regulars in the crowd but also bow-tie types, listening to the presentations, set here to Glass’s music.

Visible Shape (Philip Glass & Lou Reed occupying Lincoln Center) from jaune! on Vimeo.

For Tommasini: “it was easier to understand the issues that the Occupy Wall Street protesters care about than what policies they were seeking in relation to the arts.” At the low-point of the article, he makes the time-worn argument that the Metropolitan Opera is not elitist because some seats in the highest balcony are available for $40.

Occupy was not talking about the financial price of admission. The question at stake is whether the aestheticisation of politics in designated arts spaces can continue to be acceptable, in a climate where only passivity is permitted in social space.

At a performance by the Israel Philharmonic in London in September 2011, activists intervened inside the arts space, calling on Israel to “end the occupation” by singing words set to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” over the orchestral performance. Composer Janice Misurell-Mitchell, reporting on the happening, felt she could not have joined in but empathized with the “brilliant concept examining ways we may take power through sound.”

It is the sound of Occupy that seems to return here: the use of sound to occupy three-dimensional space that counters both the flattening occupation of monetizing everything and the “politics of verticality” that constitute Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

More on this tomorrow.