Unfortunately the movement for LGBT rights doesn’t shift at the same pace around the country. Certain regions make strides forward – passing gay rights and marriage equality legislation – while others seem to be moving slowly or even backwards. Carolyn Sherer’s exhibit of portraits is helping push the movement forward in the deep south. Legal change and cultural change work hand in hand and the collection of photos (and the existence of the exhibition itself) affect norms in the culture along with the framing of “Civil Rights.” In effect by expanding the perceptions around LGBT rights in the south it is affecting cultural change.

Looking at the images, they are an achievement in presenting the “everyday-ness” of these families. They hold each other as all who love each other do. Their kids mug for the camera. They are beautiful and imperfect. They allow us to admire what could be presented as exceptional and “other,” and see it as rather ordinary and lovely.

For example, today when I was in the exhibit with Carolyn Sherer an older woman approached us after figuring out Carolyn was the photographer. Among other things she said, “I can just feel me heart opening up.”

As stated in the video above, many imagine civil rights to encompass The Civil Rights Movement of the 60′s. In fact it’s a center point for the multitude of battles for civil rights in the past, present, and future. The context of the exhibition – the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama – demonstrates through it’s presence that this too is a civil rights issue. Ironically, there have been complaints about the exhibition from those who simply aren’t ready to see portraits of lesbians, or believe that expanding our ideas of civil rights dilutes the history the movement in the 60′s surrounding African-Americans. But these fears are fighting the tide. Good art gives us new perspectives and challenges our old beliefs. In the battle for civil rights there’s room for everyone and by expanding the network, it becomes stronger.

More on the show at livinginlimbo.org

Carolyn is working on traveling the show, so if you can help her get in touch through her site.

“They denounced my work on the floor of the Senate as they passed the legislation. And President Bush publicly said he thought the work was disgraceful. So here I am 24 years old and the President of the United States knows I exist and doesn’t like what I’m doing, and I think, I must be doing something right, this is good!”

You may already know the work of Dread Scott. He first received national attention as a student in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President George H.W. Bush, declared What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? “disgraceful” and the work was denounced by the US Senate. Since those inflammatory beginnings, Dread has gone on to show in venues like the Whitney Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum. His sculpture has been installed in Philadelphia’s Logan Square and the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, and his artwork is in the permanent collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art,  and the Akron Art Museum. Dread is a revolutionary communist living in Brooklyn, NY.

Steve & Stephen: Tell us how you got into making art with a social impact…and how you tell if your art has an impact?

Dread Scott: For a long time I was an artist and for a long time I was sort of a political activist and a communist, and the two weren’t coming together. And so on the one hand I was organizing, going to demonstrations, on the other hand, I was making art because I just liked it. I was sort of intentionally not bringing the politics into the art, and at a certain point, I said, this is stupid. This is really ridiculous. I’m committed politically to making a whole radically different world, and why shouldn’t art be part of that?

I made some forays and experiments into installation work for audience participation because I wanted to do artwork people couldn’t just dismiss the politics of. Whether they liked it or didn’t like it, whether they agreed with me or didn’t agree with me, I wanted them to have some engagement with the work. So even if they thought, “this guy’s a real asshole and he has no clue what he’s talking about,” I wanted them to be very much bound up with saying, “this guy’s a real asshole and he has no clue what he’s talking about.” And have that be part of the work. I started doing these works that had photo montages on the walls, and encouraged people to take a copy and explain why they chose to take it in the book below. So it was this participatory piece. I started doing these, and I kind of thought they were successful. But look, I was an art student in an art school; it was seen by dozens or hundreds of people on a good day.

POSING A QUESTION…AND GETTING ANSWERS

Then I did this other work that was part of that series, another installation for audience participation. It had a photo montage on the wall, and the text, “What’s the proper way to display a U.S. flag?” Kind of a simple question. The photos included South Korean students burning flags, holding signs saying, ‘Yankee go home, son-of-a-bitch’. Below that were flag-draped coffins coming home from Vietnam in a troop transport. Then there was a shelf where people could write responses to the question, “What’s the proper way to display a U.S. flag?” And there was a three by five foot flag that people had the option of standing, on if they wanted to, as they wrote the response to the question.

So again it was carrying forward this logic of: you’re part of the work. You might disagree with my views on the flag in America, you might agree with them, you might not know what they are, you might not care, but you are part of this work. And by interacting with it you have the opportunity of transgressing. You don’t have to, but you can. So it was this work that ironically posed a simple question and enabled people to enter into the discussion about it, but then it also provided the option for an answer that typically wouldn’t be thought about. That many people who sort of are personally the victims of America and American imperialism or just hate what it does in the world can say, wait, my views are welcome within this discourse. It allows for that to happen. And so people saw that and they debated.

S&S: What did they say?

DS:  Some people wrote, “wow, this is really great,” or wrote, “thank you for this opportunity, the police killed my brother and they walked over to him and kicked over the body to quote, ‘make sure the nigger was dead,’ and that cop who shot my brother wore a flag on his arm. Thank you for the opportunity to stand on Old Glory.” And other people said, “look, you should be shot and be made to pay for the bullets,” and “you should go to Russia and try that.” And “what would you expect from a nigger from Africa like Dread Scott?” or something. And then there more contemplative people who said, “I’m not sure I really agree with you, but seeing people want to kill you makes me rethink what this country’s about.”

The reactions were all over the place, but people stood in line for 45 minutes to an hour to see the work. It was debated. You know, people from the housing projects would go see it. All sorts of people saw it and entered into the dialogue. Then people were having demonstrations for and against all across the country, including right on the steps of the museum, and calling for my death and saying, “the flag and the artist, hang them both high.” That’s what they wanted; when they saw that work, they were like, let’s lynch this guy. And it did get to the point where the U.S. Congress ended up adding words to legislation to “protect the flag,” which specifically outlawed the work. They denounced my work on the floor of the Senate as they passed the legislation. And President Bush publicly said he thought the work was “disgraceful.”

So here I am, 24 years old, and the President of the United States knows I exist and doesn’t like what I’m doing.  I think, I must be doing something right. This is good!

So yeah, that’s my success story.

[laughter]

S&S: That’s intense and amazing, but let’s get back to the point at hand. What exactly makes this successful?

DS:  Prior to that I had come to the understanding that art could affect the world, art could change things. But if you really pressed me on it, I would have said, yeah, if your name is Stephen Spielberg or Chuck D and you make things that are seen by millions of people. I’m a visual artist and even as a successful visual artist my work might be seen by a thousand people.

But here was this work by this art student at an art school in a group show in the Midwest that was being debated and discussed all over the country. At that point I understood you don’t have to be working in mass culture to actually have work that can be successful.

With medicine: did the patient die? Okay, that treatment didn’t work. Math: well did you solve this conjecture? Yes or no. With art? Well, it is a little bit more abstract. If the criteria becomes, “did it sell?” then you’ve got a problem. I think with some art schools and some artists that is what success is: how many paintings you sell. That’s a problem.

BURN BABY BURN

S&S: So is success making something inflammatory and then watching the fire?

DS:  I don’t think that success is only when there’s a big ruckus around something and it’s seen and debated by millions. But it did really open my eyes, like wow, the content and the ideas in the work can matter. Tremendously. There are these questions that are up for discussion and art can make people think about that in new ways. That’s what’s successful – when people are really challenged to look at the world in new and deeper ways. And the point isn’t that you have to change people’s view. It may be successful and fundamentally reinforce views that you already have.

I’m trying my best to make it really interesting work. Having works at the center of some controversy – those works could be shown in one context and nobody bats an eye. In another context they want to string you up. I never know when one of those things is going to happen or not. I think about audience. I think about social impact. I think about when work may or may not be controversial. I don’t let that determine the work per se, but I am thinking about it. You know some people have said, “this guy’s just a shock artist he’s just trying to rile people up.” I don’t think there’s very much wrong with that, but that’s not actually what I’m trying to do. I’m more trying to make work that, as best I can, shows people what this world is, shows people how it could be radically different, and speaks to people’s deepest hopes, dreams, and aspirations and puts that out there. Work that shows some profound contradiction. Including showing what this system is and allowing people to grapple with a different future. I think a lot about how it’s going to impact them.

S&S: I think that you said it much more articulately than ‘I’m gonna sum it up’. There’s two things: one is, your work is about trying to get people to question things, or think about things, not question because as you said they might reinforce what they already thought, but you sort of press the question, put it out in front of them. And then the second thing is to expand the audience. So it’s not eighty kids in an art school, saying, hey, I’ve never thought about that, but instead hundreds of thousands of people  who might never even go to see art or never question the flag or what have you. Is that…?

DS:  I mean, I always strive to have the work seen by more than eighty kids in an art school. I think the critical thing is that art find an audience. We’re in Chelsea now, among successful, major commercial galleries. Not gonna be that many people there. You should always strive for the audience to be greater, but I think that if ideas actually correspond to the deepest interests of humanity and you really wrangle with that and get people thinking about that, then that’s what’s important. Jumping to science, Einstein was working on the special theory of relativity before he even got to the general theory of relativity,  and there were only a smallish number of people that got what he was saying before everybody then popularly understood e=mc2.  Or even Darwin. There was an initial period before it jumped out of the box and became like, oh my god, this person’s calling on us to rethink how we thought about life as we know it. Before it got to that point, here were just a small number of people. Darwin was right, Einstein was right, and those ideas matter, but they weren’t guaranteed to have the ascendancy that they do. But it really mattered for them to have that ascendancy for those ideas to connect with a few people initially, to transform their thinking. And so it’s like, I don’t presume that I’m going to be the next Einstein or Darwin, but the point is the intellectual ferment and the intellectual debate and discourse matters and you never know where those ideas are going to go.  You might be at a time when it’s not possible for certain ideas to resonate broadly, broadly, broadly in society.  At other times they were.

With What’s the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, had that come out five years earlier  or five years later it would not have the huge societal impact that it did. It still would have been a very good and important work and for the people that saw it, it would have been important. And the ideas they thought about would have been important ideological  wrangling. But it wouldn’t have necessarily had this huge effect and impact that it did, and so I do think that yes, you try to expand audiences. But the thing is, you try to get at questions deeply, go for big questions at the moment, and get the work into people’s hands and have them wrestle with it.

IDEAS & ACTIONS

S&S: Let’s talk about ideas and their role in changing society. What’s the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? is a great example of an idea at the right time that spread. But then what? Like, who the fuck cares about ideas? A thought doesn’t necessarily have a direct impact on the world. Everybody has ideas, you know? Let’s say you change hundreds of thousands of people’s ideas about something, then what? What’s the next step?

DS: Well, it depends on what ideas you have. And what ideas you change. And what moment you change them in. Look at the ideas Adolf Hitler had. He happened to, at the right time, get ideas to the right people and create a monstrous society that slaughtered 20 million. That was based on ideas. Those ideas resonated.

On the positive side: a guy named Marx had some ideas. And those ideas were fundamentally looking at the historical development of humanity to a certain point and saying, this is where we’ve gotten to, this is where it could go. This is what capitalism is: we’re in system where a tiny handful controls the wealth and knowledge that humanity as a whole has created. It doesn’t have to be that way. People can make conscious revolution. They can actually seize state power and get to a classless future. People in Russia made revolution based on that idea. Lenin got what Marx understood and deepened that and said, you need a disciplined party, you actually need…

S&S: Ok, fair enough, ideas can have impact. But how do you get from people interacting with the artwork, delivering ideas, and changing people’s minds, all the way to the necessity of the Party and seizing state power?

DS: Well, I agree, I think people need state power, and there’s people working in the world who are actively organizing people to make resistance and support a new society. I know that that’s happening.

My art is art. It is artwork, it is not political machinery, it is not an organization. It does not translate in a one-to-one basis to “people see art, then they’re communists, then we get state power.” It’s not that simple. And God I hope it never gets reduced down to that. My art or anybody’s art.

I don’t even think it has to be so direct. You look at some of the constructivist stuff from the Soviet Union. Those were people very passionately saying, this is work for the revolution. But it wasn’t reductive to: big, strong muscle-y workers with hammers and sickles. They were trying to make a new aesthetic with new ideas. Making a whole new culture, a whole new society, a whole new world. And so that’s kind of how I think the art works.

S&S: So you’ve got ideas over here and the ultimate goal, which is revolution and this new society, on the other end? What are the steps in between ideas or “me making stuff” and the actual change that you want?

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

DS: I think right now what is most needed is people to engage with communist ideas. The world needs a lot more communists and right now there’s, frankly most people, would say: It didn’t work. Move on. I say, actually, no. What’s really urgently needed is communism and it’s not going to happen spontaneously.

I want people to be engaged with communism. I don’t necessarily know what the impact is going to be in a linear sense. I don’t think a lot of work is reducible to that. But it’s very valuable to have those ideas out there and so when different streams come together, when there is more upheaval and foment in society then the ideas start to more get bound up with other people who are organizing to take the political stage.  Communism is an idea that is just out there, but there needs to be some fighting around it.  Does that idea, in and of itself lead to demonstrations and the seizure of power? Well, not necessarily, but you never know.

S&S: Wait, if a communist state isn’t going to happen spontaneously, how is it going to happen?

DS: I think on two levels. On one hand, I think sometimes the work is very directly connected to the either social questions or even organizing—I mean there’s the work that I was sort of a lead artist on called Our Grief is Not a Cry for War, which was a mass public performance right after September 11. These people stood around dressed in black, we wore dust masks, we had signs that said “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War.” And we stood silent and motionless for an hour. And people just watched and we watched back. And people could join in, we had extra signs. It was out there in the public, and we hoped to contribute to sort of an anti-war movement. Whether it stopped the war? No. Whether it made revolution? No. But it did contribute in a very direct way. I think it’s fine for some work to be in service of movements. People need massive resistance from below, independent political action, and artists should be part of that, whether they make their work for demonstrations, whether they go to demonstrations, whether they organize demonstrations. At the same time, most of art shouldn’t be about that.

S&S: Why not? Why shouldn’t all art be about strong-armed, burly steelworkers and linked to the Party?

DS: It’s fucking boring.

Look, I like socialist realism. I think the socialist realist work that came up in the Soviet Union makes for some really amazing art. My god, intellectual life in the Soviet Union would have been stifling as hell, particularly in the arts. You aren’t actually going to get to a classless world if that’s how you manage your state.  If you say, there’s only one proletarian form and every painting must include six workers and they must have muscles this big and they must have hammers this large… It’s like, no, you’re not actually going to unleash the foment that you need. You really aren’t.

One of my favorite books is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It’s not in a certain sense directly political—it’s set in the period just during and just after  slavery. It’s a ghost story in a certain sense. It isn’t about any lynching that’s happened now or any police murder that’s happened now or the treatment of women or abortion rights. Or how black people need to appreciate themselves now. But my God, it’s so profoundly related to one of the biggest questions in America: the question of the situation of black people.  It wasn’t like, “oh, slavery’s bad.” It is. And it shows a lot of the horrors, but it shows how it affects the people that were enslaved.

And that book isn’t calling on anybody to go to a demonstration. It isn’t saying that this police murder was wrong, it isn’t saying that 1 in 9 black men shouldn’t be in prison. But it’s all there. Reading a book like that enables people to have a much richer understanding of what is fundamentally wrong with this society and why nothing good can come from it. You cannot tinker with it and get something good. No matter what you do. Frankly, you can put a black man in the White House but it ain’t gonna solve the problems that Beloved is hitting at.

S&S: While it’s much harder to articulate and measure, there’s a lot to be said for the impact of the poetic. Another way that we can sometimes get a handle on impact is to look at what obviously doesn’t work, so here’s our next question: can you think of a project where you spent a long time planning it, it had the best intentions, but it just kind of fell flat on its face? It just didn’t have the impact that you hoped for.

DS: No! I’m a genius. Everything I do works brilliantly!

S&S: OK, on to the next question.

THE RIGHT TIME

DS: No, I mean, there are. I think all artists – as long as you keep making art beyond a week or two – some of your art is going to be better and some of it is going to be not as good. I want every work I make to be my best work. But it isn’t. It’s not been some linear progression. I want it to have some sort of impact – though not necessarily having presidents denounce it and stuff like that.

But there’s one work Project Lockdown — it’s a project where I’ve been going into prisons and jails, photographing and interviewing people, and telling a story of a country that imprisons 2 million people. I started that in 2000, and after September 11 it became a lot more difficult to do for three basic reasons. One, I couldn’t get funding as much after September 11 because if you were doing anything political or social it had to deal with international questions. You know, black people, people in prison – “we’re not interested in that!”  Also because people were not interested in funding it, people were not interested in showing it.  And finally, getting access to prisons became more difficult. I think it’s pretty good work, but I haven’t been able to finish it.

With that project there were some shortcomings that were my responsibility, but largely it was just timing didn’t work out. The work is still good, and I show it and I think a lot of people should see it. But it didn’t have the effect that I wanted it to. I thought it was going to be like, wow, people are really engaged with how fundamental prisons are to this society and what people who are imprisoned had to say. That they’re not these beasts with no face, they have interesting ideas, they’ve learned a lot by being in the position they are in society, and they have a lot to say. So I thought that it would be more widely received. When I started I thought, this is gonna be a show in major institutions – and it has been shown in some museums. People who have seen the work like it. It didn’t fall flat but it wasn’t the smashing success I thought it was going to be.

It’s like a sports team, you go out, play a good game and if you happen to be playing a team that’s better than you, you probably aren’t going to win. I like cycling. If you’re a great bike rider and you’re riding in the Tour de France, and you happened to be riding in the seven years that Lance Armstrong is riding, you’re probably not going to win. Even if you’re a great cyclist. It’s just the balance of things didn’t work in your favor. Let’s say you’re living in Mexico in 1935, you’re an abstract artist, more than likely you’re not going to get a lot of ascendancy.  There’s this dude, Diego Rivera, working at the same time as you. Even if your work is really good and interesting, probably not your year.

S&S:  It sounds like a lot just depends on context, a larger social context, the same thing you were talking about with ideas. Sometimes ideas have an historical moment and sometimes they don’t.

DS: Well, my goal isn’t utopia; my goal is rooted in material reality. Making revolution in an imperialist country, it ain’t been done before, it’s a long shot, let’s be real. People say, “oh yes, revolution, I’m a revolutionary” but it’s not as easy as that. Look back to the Sixties, I’m sure a lot of Black Panthers thought when they signed up that by 1973 we got it all hooked up. Ain’t gonna be. Sure, there were some shortcomings in their understanding but frankly, Lance was still in the race at that point.  Had there been a revolutionary party earlier, and  not just a black revolutionary nationalist party, but a genuine communist party with an advanced understanding, things might have played out differently. No guarantees, but Lance might not have been as competitive in that race.

And then how do I measure my art against that? Art is contributing to that process. And again, not in instrumental or reductive ways, but is it contributing to people further wanting to get rid of a society that’s based on exploitation and oppression and seeing the means to do that.  And since the work isn’t always, or even usually, tied to: “come to this demonstration!” or: “write this letter to the editor!” or something like that, it’s not so simple. You make the work and then you talk with people, and say, how are you understanding this? And you learn from them, and you try and do better next time even if you’re very successful. But, from my perspective, the yardstick is whether it’s contributing in as strong a way as possible to revolution and communism. Again that’s not like asking, is it making people want to go out and take up arms right now, but is it contributing to a process where they find this system that we now live under worthless and that another system radically better? And some people aren’t going to get that full thing from seeing a work, say, about police brutality, but they might further think, well this system  is kind of worthless, it keeps murdering people time and time again.  Shooting them in the back. And if it strengthens that understanding or makes them rupture with “I wanted to be a cop” then good.

Does that answer the question?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Friends of CAA are hosting a huge gathering of artistic activists in Barcelona from March 27-31.  ‘How to End Evil: 5 Days of Art and Activism’ (or Cómo acabar con el Mal: 5 días de arte y activismo) is open to ALL and needs your support.  This huge event is running on a super-slim, crowd-sourced budget and needs you to help fund it, spread the word, and participate.

Help make this happen!

Come meet the revolutionaries who have changed or are changing the world, and those who study them. We’ll be meeting many Thursdays for a series of lectures, workshops, and other events focusing on the potential for societal change, and what we can do to bring it about through creative tactics and strategies.

Revolutionaries Live! (aka Creative Activism Thursdays) is co-sponsored by NYU Dean for Social Science, the Hemispheric Institute, the Yes Lab, the Humanities Initiative at NYU Working Research Group on Artistic Activism, CAA, and Not an Alternative. Speakers also attend following Yes Lab Friday.

February 9 | Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn: “Occupy this and that! Revolution here and there.”

Introduced by Sam Green, director of The Weather Underground
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are two former leaders of the Weathermen, a splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society that eventually turned to violence and went underground. This talk is especially apropos at a time when many in the Occupy movement are debating the strategic value of “non-violence” versus “diversity of tactics.”
Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, and has taught and written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. He is married to Bernadine Dohrn.
Dohrn is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University, the founder of the Children and Family Justice Center and co-founder of the Center on the Wrongful Convictions of Youth, serves on the Board of the National Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, and is working to abolish the sentence of life without possibility of parole for juveniles in Illinois.

February 16 | Frances Fox Piven

The author of Poor People’s Movements and a prominent target of the lunatic right, Frances Fox Piven has written extensively on how movements—from that of the 1920s unemployed to Occupy—can engage in disruptive tactics to achieve change. She is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

February 23 | What is Revolution? Richard Schechner, Yotam Marom, and others

What is revolution? Is OWS a revolution? Stay tuned!

March 8 | David Graeber

David Graeber is an eminent anthropologist and anarchist who has been politically active for a long time, and active in the Occupy movement since its proto-beginnings in June 2011; he has called Occupy “the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire.” His most recent book is Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. David teaches at Goldsmiths College, London. He will discuss culture as creative refusal—how what we think of as primordial “cultures,” historically, can just as easily be conceived as social movements which were to some degree successful in achieving their aims.

March 22 | Matt Smucker

Matt Smucker is a grassroots organizer, trainer, strategist, and writer.  He is the director of Beyond the Choir, an online space for sharing practical strategies, tactics and tools with activists. He will discuss humor, revolution, and the Occupy movement.

April 19 | Steve Lambert

Steve Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with groups from the Yes Men to the Graffiti Research Lab and Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).  He is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Steve will discuss making engaging, funny, relevant art and how it can help effect change.

Joseph DeLappe, Dead in Iraq, 2007

“It may not effect change in the kind of physical sense that maybe we’ve been talking about, but I think if you can get inside someone’s head, and make the synapses shift for a second, then there’s something really valuable to that.”

Working with electronic and new media since 1983, Joseph DeLappe’s work in online gaming performance, electromechanical installation and real-time web-based video transmission have been shown throughout the United States and abroad.   In 2006 he created a project called dead-in-iraq, entering America’s Army First Person Shooter online recruiting game and typing in the names of all of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq. He is an Associate Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he runs the Digital Media area.

Stephen & Steve: So, we have some questions.

Joeseph DeLappe: And where is this gonna go? What is this for?

SD: Well, your files. (laughs)

SL: Department of Justice.

JD: Oh, my FBI files.

S&S: Tell us some kind of story about the most effective or successful work that you made. What was it and why do you consider it a success?

JD:  In terms of thinking of success as audience, like how many people might have actually experienced the work or the idea of the work, I would probably say a project called Quake Friends. It was essentially an online performance piece inside of the Quake game space.

FROM FRIENDS TO ENEMIES

S&S: Quake is an early first person shooter video game? And you could play it over the internet…

JD: Well, myself and five other gamers, my students, went into a particular server and we re-enacted an entire episode of the TV show, Friends. I transcribed the entire episode. And it took us about 3 hours. We were easy targets and we just got killed over and over again. It was total chaos. And we did it as a creative experiment. I had been doing these kind of in-game performance works for a number of years, mostly on an individual scale.

I would consider this my first work that really reached a broad audience. It got posted on Rhizome. Then a writer from the New York Times picked up on it and wrote an article about three days before we did another performance. Which was just, you know, phenomenal from my perspective as an artist, in terms of my circulation and my reach. Potentially millions of people were getting this concept planted into their head.

I was threatened with a lawsuit by Warner Brothers for copyright infringement, which is another curious way of measuring success. It was really interesting that the producers of Friends learned about the project from the New York Times. You know, that really pleased me – that they were thinking about this. Somehow it got into the mainstream, or whatever you wanna call it, I considered that a level of success.

That really informed my work from that point on in terms of thinking about how my work functions. Because in the computer game there’s maybe twenty-four other players tops, and I often get asked “is that your audience?” And it’s like well, you know, yes, in an immediate sense. But think of Chris Burden shooting himself in the arm. There was a very small group of people of watching it but the concept of it carrying on becomes a big part of the work. So that definitely informed my thinking.

EXPANDING THE THEATRE OF ENGAGEMANT

S&S: So we’re talking about a small primary audience with a much larger secondary audience. OK, so is getting written up in the New York Times your ideal of success?

JD: The next work that I think really was successful, was the dead-in-iraq project which was in a much more serious vein. I go into the America’s Army game –

S&S: And America’s Army is basically military recruiting propaganda, right? It’s a video game developed by the military and given away for free to generate interest in signing up.

JD: Yeah, and I go into the America’s Army game and my character’s name is dead-in-iraq.  I go into this game/recruiting tool and instead of playing, I drop my weapon. Then I type the name, age, service and date of death of each soldier who has died in the Iraq war. This started out as a quiet individual gesture; a memorial and a protest, a kind of balance between the two. I was much more reticent publicizing this project than previous work just because of the seriousness of it. But I sent it to my compatriots, my fellow media artists, saying “hey I’m doing this project.” And I put up some images up on my website, because some of the screen shots were really pretty amazing in terms of the reactions of other players.

Then it got picked up by some blogs, mostly game blogs, and unlike the previous project covered by the New York Times, this built more sort of like grassroots. It started in game blogs and then in Wired magazine and a couple others. It just sort of blossomed from there, and resulted in interviews on CNN – National and International – CBC in Canada, some kind of National Radio in Australia, various print things. So really the internet acted as both a venue for it and then as the distribution of the idea.

S&S: So you really measure success in terms of media hits then?

JD: I also measured success on that piece by the intense level of interaction that I chose to involve myself in online. Like I started with going to Salon.com – and the reactions to it were pages and pages of people battling back and forth, questioning what I was doing. And I decided to insert myself into that process. I considered that part of my role as the artist. I would usually start out saying “Hey, you know, I’m the one doing this project and here’s why. Here’s what I’m thinking.” That was very interesting. Usually you make work in kind of a vacuum, I think as an artist you make work that is appreciated from a distance.

ENGAGING WITH THE ENEMY

S&S:  Yeah, so you’re beginning to engage in some dialogue with the audience after the fact.

JD: The process was actually engaging in debate and dialogue with people who were very opposed to what I was doing on a number of levels. Whether it was politically, or saying “this is a game. We do this to escape from this kind of thing.” You know, it really, really forced me to get into a dialogue with people outside the art world who viscerally disagreed with me. And often times even threatening – you know, in type.

I measured a level of success on at least getting to a point where we could agree to disagree but be civil about them understanding my perspective: that there was a validity to question this game, through this process. Just to get them to understand my particular point of view.

It was a way of, again, getting that idea out there, the concept of calling attention to this very questionable use of technology for propaganda purposes and recruitment purposes. But at the same time putting some new content into it. And from my perspective, closing the loop. You know, there are undoubtedly a number of casualties from the war who actually started their military career by engaging in the game. You don’t see these connections made.  And the kids playing the game don’t think about it.

S&S:  So, it is engagement on the level of the game – those twenty-four or so players. Then it’s an engagement on the level of the media sphere. And then a kind of a re-engagement with people who discovered the project and are responding to that press.  What is your hope with the people in the game, those who either read or see it in the mass media, or actually are, you know, talking to you in the blogs… I guess what we’re trying to figure out is, what do you hope will happen as a result

JD: I think on a basic level it’s about building awareness.  To create that connection. There’s a disconnect between what we are doing in our everyday lives and our complicity in what’s going on in Iraq. The why of it is to force a situation where that connection becomes explicit.  That the game is connected to the war.  That you sitting there at your computer, fantasizing about being in this virtual situation, killing. It’s not an escapist entertainment activity that you are involved in; there are serious connections to be made.

And I suspect, I mean I have no way of really knowing, but the simple act of putting those names into that space– When you play computer games you’re in a very, very sort of familiar, comfortable headspace. It’s like watching television, you’re not generally engaged in deep intellectual thought. You switch into a reactive situation. And my hope is that by putting this important content, these meaningful words, names, that are directly saying “this person died in a situation connected to where you are.” My hope is after the fact, it might still be in their head. They might be angry about it. But it’s still in their head.  They are thinking about this particular issue…

S&S:  Basically, that they are haunted by those ghosts. Hmm, ok. So, what do those thoughts lead to? Like they’re- they’ve made that connection. Then what?

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS

JD: I don’t know. Maybe again, it’s awareness. I can’t quantifiably say that it’s changed any perceptions at all. It may not effect change in a kind of physical sense either. But I think if you can get inside someone’s head, and make the synapses shift for a second, then there’s something really valuable to that. So, I guess that’s why I do it.

S&S: So there’s no way to really tell if you’ve succeeded in this way?

JD: Well, I do know one example – for sure. And this was in recent exhibition of dead-in-iraq that had the projected imagery of the names typing in and the reactions of the other players at a gallery in Santa Cruz. The director told me that at the opening a student ran from the gallery weeping, and she followed after him. She tried talking a little bit. And he said well, he was just, he was crying uncontrollably, and saying “I don’t know why I’m so upset.” And he said basically that his friends play games all the time and he’d never made any connection between real deaths and this sort of virtual experience. And that he was never going to play them again.

S&S: Wow. And is that a desired outcome? For people not to play the game? Or…

JD: Well I don’t know.  That part is sort of out of my control.

When you’re doing some kind of interventionist gesture or something political, it’s almost like a prototype for something, as opposed to the actual thing. And then if it has the actual result that’s maybe an added benefit. I guess if I thought of myself as an activist the failures would be really, really difficult to take. You know what I mean? But when you’re doing the art stuff you have this buffer of “oh, it’s just art,” and if it winds up being something more important, it’s, like, “yeah, I meant to do that.”

S&S: (laughter) We realize you’re joking, but “oh it’s just art” – that’s a cop-out isn’t it?

JD: I think I’ve had to learn to let things happen. I think the dead-in-iraq project is probably a really good example of that.

I sat on that idea for two years before I did it.  In part because I was really wanting to be certain of my motivations. Because I would think okay, if you’re in the family of someone whose gotten killed in Iraq and there’s some asshole putting names in a computer game you’re gonna be pissed. But I got to the point of saying “OK, that’s probably inevitable,” It’s probably unavoidable.

But at the same time, there’s such a disconnection of this issue from our daily lives. It just seemed like the issue was more important, and I could probably do more good than harm.

S&S: Fair enough, you can’t avoid all risk. But, how do you know if you’re doing more good than harm?

JD: I actually had an email exchange with a guy who asked me not to put his brother’s name into the game, but I already had. I identify that instance as where I really had to codify my reasoning behind it, in detail. Eventually we were interviewed on NPR in kind of a dialogue. In the end he respected what I was trying to do, and got to a point of appreciating our positions.

S&S: It’s funny, we started this discussion talking about media hits, but it seems like you’re strength is in one-on-one conversation. Is it that personal exchange that you’re striving for in your work?

JD: When I got out of high school, I was like this close to going into the Army. I mean, I had no kind of guidance towards college or any sense of a future. I had always dreamed of going into the military since I was a little boy. But I had a pivotal life changing experience going through the process of joining. I actually contacted a recruiter who had come to our school. I had a recruiter in my living room and the next step was to take this test in the Presidio, in San Francisco. There they classify where they would have you go. This guy actually talked me out of it.  The recruiter — he was a Vietnam Vet — probably just saw something in me; he said  ‘You know, you really need to be sure there’s something very specific you want to get out of this because it’s not always for everybody. You may want to think about not doing this.”

It changed my life. This one person saying it maybe was not the right thing. And it wasn’t the right thing.

SL: It seems like that might be who you want to be for someone else.

JD: Yeah, yeah. Most definitely. If it does happen with a dozen kids, I can maybe call that a success, I don’t know.

Contact: directors at artisticactivism-dot-org

CENTER FOR ARTISTIC ACTIVISM AWARDED $75,000 GRANT BY GEORGE SOROS’S OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS

Grant to expand CAA’s School for Creative Activism after Successful Inaugural Year

The Democracy and Power Fund, an initiative of the Open Society Foundations, awarded $75,000 to the Center for Artistic Activism.  The grant will allow the Center to expand its School for Creative Activism.   

The School of Creative Activism is a participatory workshop infusing community organizing and civic engagement with culture and creativity.  The School was founded by the Center for Artistic Activism in 2010 and held two successful workshops for activists in the New York area and North Carolina.  In recognition of the workshops’ successes, the Open Society Foundations nearly doubled their funding from 2010 to support continued curricular development and organizer training in SCA workshops over the 2011-2012 year.

Working directly with organizers and community actors, the SCA leverages the strengths of grassroots activism and the attention grabbing and complex messaging of art through a curriculum designed to:

• Teach cultural tactics and creative strategies employed effectively by organizers in the past.

• Recognize and draw upon the cultural resources and creative talents residing within individuals, organizations, and communities in the present.

• Collectively run scenarios and plan campaigns that utilize culture and creativity.

• Build a network of organizers and artists using a model of creative organizing more effective in our media-saturated, spectacle-savvy world.

The Center’s co-founders, Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, are eager to begin work with the 2012 class of organizers and activists. “OSF’s continued support allows us to do what we think we do best: team up with hard-working organizers to help create more creative campaigns,” says Duncombe. “We truly believe this is the most important work we can do,” added Lambert, “we’re very excited.”

2011-2012 workshops will be held throughout the U.S.  Locations and calls for participants will be announced in the coming months.  For more information on the School of Artistic Activism and other CAA programs, visit The Center for Artistic Activism.

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Like this: from number one: “Choose better problems to solve”

We have more processing power, affordable tools, and combined intelligence right this very minute than at any point in the history of design. We are using it to build shit.

And this, from number four “Stop being your own obstacle”

I spent the first 10 years of my career saying things like, “If I could just do this work the way I know it should be done…” and convincing myself that someone else was keeping me from making better choices. [...] What is this strange gene that makes designers handicap themselves?

Stop designing the compromises you expect to have to make. Your fear of being wrong wins out over your fear of having to convince someone you’re right.

You can’t design in fear. Don’t throw the fight before a punch gets thrown.

And there’s more like “stay curious” and “learn to make mistakes faster.” Really great stuff.

via 10 New Year’s resolutions for designers | Feature | .net magazine.