hat are the power relations between art, activists and cultural institutions?

Who ultimately
W
benefits from these relationships? What critical role can art and/or activism really have 
in a situation where any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralised 
by the mainstream? Under such conditions, what are effective strategies of opposition? 
What is to be done (with art)?

1
2
Protest and Survive
Courtesy Rob Webster
Photograph Carl Newland

3
4 5
6
Protest & Survive 2000
Whitechapel Gallery Inaugural
Exhibition, 2009
Photograph Carl Newland

7
 Commons: The idea of the ‘commons’ is generally taken Ideology: Even the denial of ideology is an ideological issue and for the Western news media. A certain lack of reflexivity
as an antonym of private property. The enclosure movement,  in itself (to paraphrase Slavoj Žižek). often exists towards poverty journalism from ‘politically-
at the end of the 18th Century in the UK, demonstrates how engaged’ artists using the documentary style to depict scenes
common land was fenced off and entitled to private owners. Informational Capitalism: Informationalism is the result of exploitation and poverty, raising ethical questions of their
Landowners used the legislative framework at the time to of the restructuring of capitalism’s mode of production to  own gaze.
appropriate common land for private profit, and the landless a mode of information; from a mode of development focused 
working classes became the labour force of the industrial on economic growth and surplus-value (industrialism) to one Refusal: Refusing to work follows the logic that capitalism
revolution. In other words, what was inherently held in common based on the pursuit of knowledge and increased levels of is an irrational system that cannot be replaced by anything
(common-wealth) was stolen. As property rights have been complexity of information (informationalism). Networked through better planning or anything that employs its logic. 
extended from land to capital to information, clear parallels technologies have enhanced the effectiveness of global It derives from Mario Tronti’s essay ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ 
exist to how issues of class and property flow from the capitalism, enabling it to become more flexible, adaptable, of 1965, pointing out that capital uses workers’ antagonistic
commodification of information. Nowadays the term is often faster, efficient and pervasive. To a large extent, in the opposition for its own development. The mistake in Classical
used in relation to intellectual property, the ‘intellectual ‘over-developed world’, the assembly lines have been replaced Marxism had been to simply see the working class as the
commons’, and its meaning comes close to the public  by the network as the organisational model and metaphor for antagonistic subject of capitalism, and therefore the advocated
domain. Behind this is the identification of common assets, production of all kinds. Industrial production is superseded by alternative to break free of exploitative conditions is for work
Activist: Not necessarily one of those people who wears and the ways these are organised, governed, used in practice, information, and capital is regenerated in a new form suitable itself to be transformed through self-determination and made
a Che Guevara T-shirt in an un-ironic way. Activists are those and become part of particular ownership regimes (Copyright  to the general state of science and progress of technology  more autonomous (sometimes referred to as ‘self-valorisation’).
involved in action looking to create social, political, economic, or GNU General Public License, for instance). The importance and to maintain its logic. New forms remain instruments  Creative labour can re-appropriate the instruments that are
or environmental change. The action is either in support of,  of a discussion of the intellectual commons lies in emphasising of domination but also they present new opportunities for part of its very domination in the ‘cycle of struggle’ between
or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument, that this is not simply a legal issue but one that necessitates resistance leading to an alternative vision of communication labour and Capital.
thus habitually adopting a binary/oppositional stance. Some political action to protect the commons from privateers. and the commons.
forms of activism do not necessarily involve direct protest,  Closely related is the term ‘commons-based peer production’ Recessional Aesthetics: A term coined by art historians
but look to change the behaviour of individuals rather than as an alternative form of organisation of productive activity. ISAs: The ‘ideological State apparatuses’ (ISAs), that include Hal Foster and David Joselit presented in a talk entitled
directly focusing on power. Peer production suggests that the commons is good for the family, schools, church, legal apparatus, political system, “Recessional Aesthetics: New Publics or Business as Usual” 
innovation outside of the capitalistic relation of property. trade unions, communications media, arts and culture, and  in New York in 2009, at the height of the global recession.
Apparatus: Apparatus (or dispositif in French) is both so on, are distinct from the ‘repressive State apparatuses’,  Initially looking to propose a series of questions to address 
a ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault’s later thinking, Copyleft: Copyleft is an ethical, philosophical, and political the government, army, police, courts, prisons, and so on.  the condition of contemporary art in a recession era, Foster
according to Agamben’s essay ‘What is an Apparatus?’ (2009). movement that seeks to free ideas from the constraints of Both function through repression and ideology but the essential eventually conceded “David and I know more about receding
Agamben’s essay tries to clarify things: “I will call an apparatus intellectual property law. According to the proponents of difference is that rather than predominantly acting by hairlines than we do about recessional aesthetics.”
literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, copyleft, duplication is part of the very essence of what it repression or violence, ISAs function through ideology and 
orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the means to have an idea and to share it. They say, “sharing is the do so more covertly. State power is thus maintained by the Recuperation: Recuperation is a sociological term, first
gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings”. nature of creation”. The earliest example of a copyleft license State apparatus that includes institutions that represent the proposed by Guy Debord of the Situationist movement. It is 
Seen from this perspective, Agamben’s work, like Foucault’s, is the GPL written in 1989 (see GPL below). In his essay repressive apparatus and the ideological apparatus. This is  the process by which ideas and actions deemed ‘radical’ or
may be described as the identification and investigation of ‘Copyfarleft and Copyjustright’ Dmytri Kleiner takes the not a new phenomena. In pre-industrial times, the ideological oppositional become commodified or absorbed into mainstream
apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new concept further by linking it to waged labour and thus arguing state apparatus worked through the Church predominantly, society and culture.
ways to dismantle them. An apparatus is a kind of network for licenses with different rules for different classes. controlling other apparatuses like education, communications
between elements; it acts within relations, mechanisms  and culture. Writing in 1969, Louis Althusser, in ‘Ideology and Semio-capitalism: Semio-capitalism is the term Franco
and plays of power – bound to processes of subjectification. GPL or GPL: The GNU General Public License, is intended Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation’, Berardi gives to the current system where informational
Agamben says: “It would probably not be wrong to define  to guarantee a producer’s freedom to share and change free thinks this central position has been taken by the education capitalism incorporates linguistic labour (he combines
the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live  software. By free software, the qualification is important  apparatus in capitalist social formations, and the contemporary semiotics – the science of signs, and capitalism – the 
as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses.” that free refers to freedom as in speech not price. The Free conception of cognitive capitalism would appear to confirm this social system founded on the exploitation of labour and 
Software Foundation explain: “Free software is a matter of idea. In education, there is a captive and free audience for the the accumulation of capital). The term emphasises how
The Art Strike: Alain Jouffroy first suggested an art strike liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think reproduction of the capitalist social formation: “the relations  language has become fully integrated into the valorisation
in 1968 to “not to end the rule of production, but to change  of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’” (http://www. of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are process effecting both the economic and linguistic fields, 
the most adventurous part of ‘artistic’ production into the gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). To be free software, the largely reproduced” as he puts it. The ideas of a human subject thus contributing to the crisis of value. The Marxist theory 
production of revolutionary ideas, forms and techniques” human-readable form of the program (the source code) must be are “material actions inserted into material practices governed of value is seen to be inadequate because of the difficulty 
(‘What’s to be done about art?’). In 1974, Gustav Metzger released fully into the public domain. But this goes further than by material rituals which are themselves defined by the in calculating working time related to signification as opposed
called upon artists to support a three-year Art Strike between ‘open source’ because it emphasises the ideological aspect of material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas  to the relative ease of calculating working time against making
1977 and 1980, to protest against the relationship between freedom. There are broader social implications too, in making of that subject”. traditional objects. Similarly there are effects on language
art, the state and capitalism in methods of production, comparisons with other examples of multiple production and production as it becomes increasingly economised: supply 
distribution and consumption. Metzger looked to bring  rethinking the concept of the public. Arguably new forms of New International Division of Labour: The New and demand correspond to an excess of signs and levels of
down the art system through a total withdrawal of labour, creative and political practices emerge from such principles International Division of Labour (NIDL) is an outcome of social attention (the so-called attention economy). Berardi
where artists would refuse to produce, sell or let work go  alongside new social and subject formations. globalisation and processes of production driven by trade sees added consequences in terms of the psyche, as language
on exhibition, and refuse any collaboration with the art world.  liberalisation, technological change and economic reform. acts on the construction of subjectivity itself.
He was unable to gather support from other artists however, Green Imperialism: A form of hypocrisy from the Western Developments in transportation and communication have
and the strike was unsuccessful. Stewart Home and others privileged classes. For example, the case of rich countries enabled companies to search for the cheapest places to What is to be Done?: ‘What is to be Done?’ is the title
took part in an Art Strike from 1990–1993 in opposition  running polluting industries with cheap labour in places like manufacture and assemble components, and from the early of a famous essay by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written in 1901. 
to neo-liberal EU policies, moving beyond the gallery system  China, whilst simultaneously pointing the finger at them for 1950s to late 1990s, there has been a global shift in It addresses key ‘burning’ questions of tactics, party
to question artistic production and the role of the artist.  climate change. Or post-reproductive, wealthy, white men  manufacturing processes from developed to developing organisation, and terror, arguing for the positive role 
More recently, Redas Dirzys and a Temporary Art Strike (such as Optimum Population Trust members like James countries where costs are substantially lower. of intellectuals to direct the efforts of the working class 
Committee called for a strike in response to Vilnius becoming  Lovelock and David Attenborough) blaming the population to reach full socialism, and questioning the liberal notion 
a European Capital of Culture for 2009; and in Eastern Europe, growth of the rural poor in developing countries for global Political Aesthetics: Rather the politics of aesthetics of freedom. See also ‘What is to be Done (with Lenin)?’ by
there have been successful actions by artists including  warming. In the arts, Green Imperialism can be seen in  than the aesthetics of politics, to use Benjamin’s formulation. Slavoj Žižek from 2004. In 2007, Documenta 12 also asked
a strike in Poland where artists refused to exhibit work  the practice of ‘activist-artists’, who are very often, again,  ‘What is to be done?’ – with art.
in state galleries. from the privileged classes, telling audiences how to live their Poverty Journalism: A journalistic activity based on
lives, whilst consistently taking no regard for the energy, capturing images of extreme poverty, usually in the developing
Artivist: An activist looking to create change using the resources and funding streams required in producing an world, through the work of lens-based media (photography and
medium and resources of art. exhibition about such an issue. video) practitioners. Most often, the imagery is created by 

8 9
 In recent times there has been a string of high profile ‘political’ artworks supported by
mainstream art institutions, which have featured heavily in the media. Anti-war protest
art such as Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007), an exact replica of Brian Haw’s one-
man peace camp re-located from Parliament Square to Tate Britain, or Jeremy Deller’s 
It is what it is (2009), which took the wreckage of a car destroyed by a bomb in Baghdad
on a tour of art museums across the USA, have been widely fêted by the cultural
establishment – both artists mentioned have been awarded the Turner Prize, for example.
But what is it that public-funded institutions find so appealing about art that purports 
to be political, especially as such works would seem to directly criticise the policies 
of the very state that funds them? Or perhaps the question should be turned around to
ask, what does it mean for the political efficacy of the artworks to be so whole-heartedly
embraced by the cultural institutions of the state?

Courtesy the artist, and Anthony Reynolds

State Britain, Mark Wallinger, 2007

Performance at Guggenheim Bilbao, 2007

It Is What It Is, Jeremy Deller, 2009

Courtesy Creative Time, New York

Installation at Tate Britain, 2007

Photograph David B. Smith

Photograph Dave Morgan
Gallery London
There is, of course, a long tradition of artist/activists in contemporary art, from
Joseph Beuys to the Artist Placement Group, the feminist art movement of the 1970s 
to the environmental activist groups of today. Reflecting upon one’s own individual
relationship to social conventions, or how ‘my’ experience is translated and represented
in the wider world, is inherently political, inevitably bound up with an awareness of the
distribution of power in society. However, as soon as this process of reflexive inquiry
becomes involved with the institutional structures of art, the focus of the questions 
must inevitably shift away from a straight forward critique of the politics of
representation, to the more introspective issues of recuperation and one’s own
implication in the processes of absorption and neutralisation by the mainstream.

Overcome Party Dictatorship Now,

Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery,

Little Frank and His Carp,
Andrea Fraser, 2001
Joseph Beuys, 1971
Courtesy Tate, London

New York
Since the 1960s many artists, from Hans Haacke to Michael Asher, Fred Wilson 
to Andrea Fraser, have made work which specifically takes as its subject a critique 
of the institution that houses art, and the structures – financial and ideological – that
support them. However critical such art may itself be, paradoxically, it also serves to
highlight the institution’s liberalism by allowing it to be there in the first place. Inevitably
such inclusiveness defuses the very criticism being offered. It is as if the critique has
been turned into a form of validation; as if the act of ‘dissent’ has been drained of 
its power to effect change and turned instead into a hollow signifier of liberal democracy
in action. Thus, despite an individual’s best intentions, as soon as they partake 

10 11
 in the public discourse of contemporary art they are inevitably implicated in a process 
of recuperation.
Guy Debord, who co-founded the Situationist International in 1957, described
recuperation in a sociological sense, as the procedure by which the mainstream takes 
a radical idea and repackages it as a safe commodity for consumer society. According to
Debord, recuperation is a process by which “avant-garde innovations might be recovered
for use by the reigning social order, that revolutionary negativity might be recouped 
to strengthen bourgeois affirmation.” The mainstream apparatus actually feeds off 
the energy of dissent and gains strength from it. As such, the Situationist notion 
of recuperation was a development on from Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’, 
which theorised the ways in which one set of bourgeois values are normalised as
everyday ‘common sense’ by allowing space for dissent.
Of course such an idea is immediately in danger of recuperation itself. Debord’s
strategy therefore, was to employ the language of consumerism but to turn its back upon
itself. In The Society of the Spectacle, he defines the principle of ‘détournement’ as using
mainstream communication but including an element of self-critique within it in order to
turn the attention of passive consumers of spectacle culture back towards the material
considerations of everyday life and historical struggle. As capitalism has fetishised 
the ‘sign’ (the seductive images of consumerism), Debord argued that by adopting the
language of spectacle culture, but including a reflexive critique within it, the underlying
contradictions would be revealed.

Rioting students block Gay Lussac Street,

Paris, 11th May 1968
Courtesy TopFoto
Situationism came to the peak of its influence in the protests of May 1968 in
Thursday 2 December 1976

France. It was decided to bring the group to an end in 1972 as, according to Debord,
they wanted “to destroy the revolutionary commodity it had become”, saying “the more
Courtesy Mirrorpix

our theses become famous, we ourselves will become even more inaccessible, even more
Daily Mirror,

clandestine”. Ironically, the shock tactics and mocking, cynical stance of disengagement
put forward by the Situationists went on to spawn punk in the late 1970s in the UK,
which started out as a radical style of refusal but very rapidly became sanitised and
re-packaged as mainstream popular culture. The resistant attitude of Situationist
ideology was thus itself commodified and recuperated by the market, leaving the likes 
of Joe Strummer to sing in vain about “turning rebellion into money” (in The Clash’s
best-selling record White Man In Hammersmith Palais), while fashion entrepreneurs
Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood cashed in on the new-found marketing
potential of rebellion.

12 13
 Whilst punk would undoubtedly not have had such a far-reaching impact if it were sphere is considered as a space structured by diversity, in which different conflicting
not for McLaren’s instinct for hype and the intelligence with which he played the media interests exist in parallel. With the recognition of dissonance as a productive force, 
at its own game, it is also undeniable that, in the years since, the market has made  the more progressive art institutions therefore seek to create “a democratic space 
full use of the consumer appetite for shock and the re-packaged signifiers of so-called of polyvocality”, as Nina Möntmann describes it, in which the public takes an active role
‘counter-culture’. Indeed, in his book Hello I’m Special, Hal Niedzviecki describes the as producer, and from which new social and artistic structures can emerge within civil
post-punk model of rebellion as the ‘new conformism’, where we are all “invited, urged society. Thus the institution becomes a means for involving art in democratic processes,
and commanded to rebel against the system to gain access to the system”. It could  a means for re-politicising art.
be argued that the true inheritors of the Situationist tools of détournement are the Through the mediation of progressive institutions, art is therefore able to introduce
advertising executives and media spin doctors of the last decade or, in respect of the art subjectivity back into the democratic process or, as Lars Bang Larsen has written,
market, Banksy, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. “introduce levels of desire into political concepts”. Post-1968, Michel Foucault
So, what is to be done? If every action one takes to try to change society is simply fundamentally re-shaped an understanding of the relationship between institutions 
turned into so much fuel to sustain the prevailing order, would it not be better just to  and subjectivity, and their relation to the idea of hegemony. The asylum, the prison, 
do nothing? While reflexivity enables an understanding of one’s own implication in the the school, all of those institutional bodies that form the disciplinary matrix of modern
processes of recuperation, such self-consciousness can lead to a kind of paralysis and society were now analysed as mechanisms of discipline, and the kind of subjectivities
ultimately become an obstacle to change in itself. ‘Institutional critique’, for example, they produced as modes of subjection. Foucault characterised his work as a ‘genealogy
has become a standard strategy for contemporary art within the museum, so much  of the modern subject’: a history of how people are constructed as different types of
so that it appears like an orthodoxy that stifles any other form of critique, effectively subjects, whether as delinquents, homosexuals, mentally ill, or, through such exclusions
marginalising more direct artist/activist practices in a wider social context. Under such as ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’. By focusing on the ‘histories of the present’, such as the
conditions, what are effective strategies of opposition? history of sexuality, madness or criminality, Foucault aimed to show how our subjective
conceptions of reality and social relations are entirely relative, shaped by “a precarious
and fragile history”. It is only by studying how we have become what we are, that we 

Cops and Clown, Clown Army, 2009

can begin to imagine becoming something else. Thus Foucault’s archaeologies and
genealogies are explicit efforts to re-think the subject, so as to enable the transformation
of society.

Photograph David B. Smith

Contemporary art has always been a space for re-thinking subjectivity. The order 

Courtesy Creative Time

of the day then becomes to forge new modes of subjectivity and to re-shape the
‘economy of desire’, as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, redefining desire
as a form of productivity rather than a manifestation of lack, and thus as an instrument
of liberation. In his late work The Three Ecologies, Guattari extended the definition
The maxim (generally attributed to Gramsci), “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity, as well as the
of the will”, deftly sets out the challenge of nurturing a self-critical yet constructive environmental context, as the inter-connected sites for the transformation of society. 
scepticism that still does not fall prey to cynicism or passive resignation in the face  He argued that just as nature is threatened by the forces of globalisation, so is society
of seemingly overwhelming forces. ‘Pessimism of the intellect’ is only constructive if, and our own mental health. It is within this framework, and through the mediation of 
while remaining sceptical in the best Enlightenment tradition, it avoids the cynicism  its more self-critical institutions, that contemporary art can begin to produce a space 
that can undermine ‘optimism of the will’. Thus, whilst the pessimist’s analysis might  of democratic multiplicity that enables an exploration of the relationship between
be that hegemony feeds off dissent, it does not mean that one should not continue  subjectivity and hegemony, ever mindful of the thin line that exists between activism 
to voice that dissent, in full knowledge of its imminent recuperation, and so pursue and recuperation.
change, teetering on the edge between activism and absorption.
Tom Trevor is Director of Arnolfini.
In terms of the institutions of art, parallel to the increasing corporatisation of larger
museums and cultural spaces that has been taking place since the 1990s, new forms 
of more flexible institutions have emerged in close alliance with artists’ critique. Whereas
in the 1960s critique was directed against the institution from the ‘outside’, more
recently this reflexive principle has been internalised by the institutions themselves 
as a kind of auto-critique so as to effect change from within. What is fundamental to the
new concepts of the more progressive institutions is a radically different understanding
of the public sphere and thus the structure of public spaces. Rather than conceiving 
of a singular, homogenised and essentially passive public, which demands a populist
programme of mass appeal, the so called New Institutionalism seeks to actively
‘produce’ multiple and diverse communities of interest as co-generators. The public

14 15
 art is viral as are all cultures of resistance,
protest, and vision. It’s like a critical relay. As
such, even if there are signs of consent, defeat,
or cooption, somewhere else there will be people
jumping up to point this out and grab the baton.
Strong cultures of activism are centred on solidar-
ity, networks, and building resilience. These cul-
tures grow sophisticated early warning systems and
healthy support mechanisms, while always building
towards the society they want.

And above all – what is to be done (with art)?

There’s nothing to be done apart from the core work:
constantly and publicly to ask the question:
“Who speaks, under what conditions, on behalf of
For this issue of Concept Store, a selection of  hat are the power relations between art, activ-
W whom?” (Henry Giroux)
artists and curators were invited to respond to ists and cultural institutions?
the following question: As an artist/artists’ Working definitions: in these responses, ‘cultural To what extent do you feel that the system has

group/curator, you are known for work that prob- institutions’ is taken to mean mainstream organs effectively recuperated the oppositional aspects
lematises power relations both within the art run by the dominant culture; ‘activism’, from PLAT- of your work?
establishment and in a wider social context. To FORM’s perspective, is vision, collaboration, and The key is to have a vibrant internal critique,
what extent do you feel that the system has effec- action towards social and environmental justice; incisively planning for where recuperation might
tively ‘recuperated’ the oppositional aspects of ‘art’ is an imaginative, sensual, skilled, social happen; cross-examining risks, looking for inten-
your work? Reflecting upon your own implication and powerful practice with impacts beyond rational tional or unintentional recuperation or neutralisa-
in these processes of absorption and neutralisa- explanation, that can happen anywhere and which tion. Firstly, you have to know who, or what values,
tion, how can you avoid becoming an agent of recu- belongs to everyone. Activists can be artists, art- you are in solidarity with, to whom or to what you
peration yourself? In other words, are you ists can be activists, and activists can be found are ultimately accountable in terms of the issues
‘recuperated’ or ‘recuperator’? within cultural institutions. core to your work. If this is clear, then it’s pos-
In a healthy democratic society, power relations sible to be honest and clever about recuperation.
Recuperator/Recuperated 1: PLATFORM between these three areas are productively tense, Sometimes a bit of seeming or actual recuperation
Recuperator/Recuperated 2: Thomas Hirshhorn constantly challenging, full of potential and very is a good tactic for a wider goal. ‘Playing the game’
Recuperator/Recuperated 3: Institute for the fluid. In a repressive society, relations are aggres- can get you into certain places which might be very
Art and Practice of Dissent sive, embattled, manipulative and desperate. useful. The main thing is to identify the risks,
Recuperator/Recuperated 4: Sarat Maharaj listening carefully to what allies have to say, and
Recuperator/Recuperated 5: FREEE  W ho u lt i m a t e ly b e n e f it s fro m these plan for the exit, or for when you are spat out. And
Recuperator/Recuperated 6: Piratbyrån relationships? do this together. Every group, every project is cor-
In a healthy society, everyone. In a repressive soci- ruptible by ideological rifts, egos out of control,
ety, it’s a struggle – often literally – to the death. financial pressures, political seductions, let
alone recuperations, so it’s important to take the
 hat critical role can art and/or activism really
W risks together. Build in a shared understanding of
have in a situation where any form of critique the conditions under which you would pull the plug,
is automatically recuperated and neutralised by to “sink the project for a principle”.
the mainstream?
In late capitalism, every interesting, imaginative, Reflecting on your own implication in these

rebellious idea is fodder for market or state appro- processes of absorption and neutralisation, how
priation. However, the strategic aim of activism can you avoid becoming and agent of recuperation
can often be precisely to use this fact to make a yourself? In other words, are you ‘recuperated’
new idea mainstream, to stigmatise a previously or ‘recuperator’?
accepted norm so that it becomes unbelievable that See above. There’s always the possibility of abuse
it ever was considered normal, to create new reali- of power in all directions. PLATFORM is not exempt
ties. The constant danger is of pick-and-mix: that from this.
only part of the thinking or new vision is accept- Finally to return to the point that it’s impos-
able and made mainstream, and that systemic change sible to be totally recuperated or neutralised,
is left off, or contorted. Activists have to keep unless you give your consent, we’re put in mind of
vigilant, keep upping the stakes. Osip Mandelstam who wrote the poem below in response
Usually, everything is happening at once: art- to his imprisonment under Stalin:
ist-activists or activist-artists are at one and the You took away all the oceans and all the room.
same time way out in advance, while being appropri-  You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
ated (whether intentionally or not), while also Where did it get you? Nowhere.
heavily critiquing dominant forces, including their  You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in
own practices. This work may at times have to take silence.
place underground, sometimes for long periods, but
it is irrepressible. PLATFORM is a group of environmental and human rights
artists, activists, campaigners and researchers.
Under such conditions, what are effective strat-
 Jane Trowell & James Marriott.
egies of opposition?
It’s impossible to be totally recuperated or neu-
tralised, unless you give your consent. Activist

16 17
 Where are we, and where are we going now? It’s a quest. I want to begin by looking back
to a time about 6 years ago, when I wrote a text called ‘Liar’s Poker’. The motivation 
for writing this text was just after the Strasbourg No Border Camp, a week long direct
action on the issues of open borders in Europe held in the centre in Strasbourg where 
the Schengen Information System is based. Following the camp, I went to Documenta
11 and looked around at all the works. Every work it seemed was about the problems
of migration, situations of people being subject to the power of the state, the ravages
created by the capitalists and an already neo-liberal all-guard South American self. 
I thought – fantastic, here I am at this big museum after this direct action border camp,
and I see the same things everywhere.
Outside the museum door, there was a partly-public, static caravan that had also
been at the border camp; a sort of mobile theatre structure initiated by an interventionist
art activist group who had suffered imprisonment only a year before. The next thing 
that I knew, the security team of Documenta was descending on the bus, causing and
enforcing its departure.
So I wrote a text called ‘Liar’s Poker’ and it starts like this, Basically, what
I have to say here is simple: when people talk about politics in an artistic frame,
they are lying. Indeed, the lies they tell are often painfully obvious and worse is
the moment when you realise that some will go forever unchallenged and take
on, not the semblance of truth, but the reliability of convention. In a period like
ours when the relationship to politics is one of the legitimating arguments for the
very existence of public art, the tissue of lies that surrounds one when entering
a museum can become so dense that its like falling into an ancient cellar full
of spider webs and choking on them as you struggle to breathe. Now, the mere
mention of this reality will make even my friends and allies in the artistic
establishment rather nervous, but it is a reality nonetheless. And like most of
the political realities in our democratic age, it has directly to do with the question
of representation.
The basic idea of ‘Liar’s Poker’ was that activism in the museum is a kind of game. 
The game works like this, there are actually two ways of playing it: the usual way 
of playing Liar’s Poker is that the artist who claims to hold the great legitimate 
winning card in the game – the Ace of Politics – is bluffing. The artist really has no 
real connection to any kind of social unit and what is more, his or her bluffing will 
never be called because everyone is very comfortable for the artist and the artwork 
to live like a king inside the white cube. The other way of playing the game is to bluff 
that you are bluffing, to pretend that you are only pretending and occupy the museum, 
or engage in a process in the public institution, just up to that point where you must 
in fact play the Ace of Politics. This is the very point at which you then withdraw
whatever resources you have been able to gather, and leave or are rejected from 
the institution.
Now you can ask – where are we now, am I bluffing? Or have times changed, 
is it that I would like to maybe get a job, buy a new house, become a university 
professor or perhaps be a curator. I think that times have changed. I think that times
have been changing slowly for a long time and what is happening now is quite an
acceleration of that. The question that I will go on to talk about changes in a moment.
The overall question is whether we can really succeed or not in changing this artistic
frame, which is essentially the frame of hypocrisy. This frame allows the representation 
of problems and efforts to change them, but only their representation; which allows for
the common play of the image of social and political action, but not the real unfolding 

18 19
of the necessarily antagonistic process. Politics itself, in Western societies at least,  So the questions that I see are: how to create sites where highly differentiated
is antagonistic and involves risking something essential. groups become not only visible to each other, but capable of collaborating with each
So the question: whether it is really possible that we change the artistic frame  other, or at least knowing that they are working in parallel? This is something that 
and to eliminate hypocrisy. The reason that times have changed I think, is that  you can do with an institution like a museum, which is all about showing, telling 
increasing numbers of people know that the way we live really will change in our  and discussing.
lifetime. Our lifestyles are on the way to becoming necessarily different to the ones  How do you legitimate these kinds of projects so that they don’t come under attack,
we have known up to now. What we have now is an explicit situation of triple crisis: either for not being art – that is the classic old refusal from the art establishment that we
economic crisis, ecological crisis and security or military crisis. We have an economic know very well, there are many forms of this attack based in various environments and
melt-down, we have the precipitous melting of polar ice caps, and we have two blazing conditions, or for not being neutral – a great demand of classical institutions, for not
wars going on (in which the UK is involved). being entertainment which is the great demand for the neo-liberal institutions, for not
These crises have finally come into the Western European and North American being bipartisan, which is the great demand in America with anything public that goes 
parliaments after an entire neo-liberal period marked by crisis all around the globe.  for and against the republic? How to legitimate this kind of problem is a major question.
In a recent article Alex Foti notes that climate change means an increased Another question, how do we avoid getting lost in the complexity of what is now
consciousness of precarity for the simple reason that it is a carelessness of life, and  world society and world politics? How do we avoid the contrary dilemma of getting lost 
it touches people who are less fortunate in situations more immediately. We see this  in the passion of politics and the passion of what becomes a sort of extreme version of
very clearly in the United States with Hurricane Katrina, and events in Britain such  political commitment?
as floodings which are certain to continue, growing more intense, and highlighting  Another question: how to make the new perception of the world and the new
this relationship between climate change and a precarious existence. imaginary of what the world could become into subjective forms, forms that are not
Something real, which may or may not become clear, is that climate change also simply confined either to their representation in the museum or to the actions that
brings a new kind of fascist. In fairly large areas of the world – in particular, low-lying people take, but into subjective forms to conceit into daily life and instruct a change 
cities, but also areas subject to desertification, areas subject perhaps to new kinds  in expectations that people have towards their daily life?
of storms that will cause people to flee uninhabitable areas – there is no way to avoid  So, how to ensure the transformation of the artistic frame to make the museum 
the rising conflicts associated with this environmental decay. I think that we are already a very different kind of platform for middle- and long-term activism, without cutting off
in this period. There is already an emphasis on security and border closures, on the the possibility of revolution? The only way to sustain a critique like this is to realise 
homogenisation and purification of national identity, on the biometric identification  that fundamentally it is a critique of capitalism and therefore it is a revolutionary idea. 
of individuals. All these things are the elements of new kind of authoritarian society, I don’t think that there is any other way to sustain critique than realising that the
which we already have experience of, particularly in the United States, in the UK,  entirety of the system is what has produced the triple crisis.
and the regimes approaching Iraq. This is not science fiction, this is something that I have maintained this very intense relationship with the official institutions
already exists and is shown to grow. throughout the last few years but I have also had these ideas of transformations, 
So, under these conditions: the awareness that people have, the kinds of  so I want to go back a little further to a text I wrote in the year 2000 called 
political engagement without a misplaced fanaticism, or a misplaced utopianism,  ‘Reflecting Museums’.
and an awareness of the different types of critiques that have been levelled with  Writing in 1986, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck showed how impossible it
anti-capitalist movements for years. That kind of critique is now dissipating as an is for modern democratic governments and administrations to carry out a critique
awareness of the triple crisis that we’re involved in grows, the question is of how to of the major orientations of society (“progress”). Faced with the risks of techno-
respond to this? Changes which are incremental cannot simply be a dramatic single economic development, embodied at the time by the nuclear industry, such
response to such changes; there could only be a rather deep process-based social a critique appeared extremely urgent: modernity had to learn to reflect on its
response that involves the taking of many, many, many different positions by a vast  own priorities. Beck predicted the growing importance of social movements
range of individuals and with groups of institutions and organisations in society,  as the ‘sub-political’ agents of this critique; he also pointed to the importance
at all different levels of society. of ethical stances within the professional disciplines.
There are many ways that those kinds of conditions have been taken already,  I think that this is very interesting; the conjunction, or at least the parallel, between the
and those kinds of processes are being launched. We here are even one of them with  socially operated, outside the established institutions and frameworks, and on the other
the attempt to bring the critiques embodied by direct action movements, embodied  side, the ethical commitments that professionals who are bound by the obligations that
by non-governmental organisations, embodied also by figures of public intellectuals,  they have to mandate the institution, but at the same time have an ethical sense which
into an institution that is no longer a classic institution, but a neo-liberal institution  gives them the power, the courage really, to take certain kinds of stance where of course
in the ultimate neo-liberal state that we live in. Obviously there are going to be  their professional career is placed at risk. The understanding that there are two very
problems with this and these problems are something that we should think about  different kinds of input into this sort of reflective process is very important.
and work on, because in a way we have no time, and in another way we have: this  Can the museum become a site for artistic demonstrations of this social reflexivity?
is the time that we have, this is the time to be doing this, and there is no other time  Can it become a social laboratory, redefining the meaning of progress? With the
to be doing this. intensifying grip of the informational economy on all aspects of human

20 21
 communication, we reach one of those moments “when knowing if one can think
differently and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one
is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” To bring about this shift in perception and
thought, one would first have to dispel the postmodern enchantment, and cease
to believe that culture, politics and the economy are always inseparable, caught
in a system of reciprocally produced effects with no exit. Concretely, for an artistic
institution, that would mean seeking other publics, outside the flows of international
tourism, outside the productive loops of immaterial labour.
The museum has to open its doors, or better, shift these resources, toward the sources
of a healthy alienation located in social and psychic spaces within the distance of
dominant systems, or in direct opposition to them. This is extremely difficult for
museums to do, not only must they invent new processes for working with their publics
– at risk of upsetting the internal hierarchies of the institution; they must also legitimate
results before funding bodies and trustee boards without help from the usual criteria. 
I would like to say that over the last decade this has really been key. It is not at all 
the case. It will not be the case until the financial casino is transformed into centres 
of ecological sensibility, where people learn about different aspects of life, and different
relationships within society. To get there it would involve all kinds of direct action,
conscientious objection, ethical stances, social movements, educational processes – 
all sorts of things which can represent the principal of hope in society. There would 
need to be some kind of generosity in a social condition which we now know will change.
Where we can become the agents of our healthy change by maintaining a dialect
between, on one side, a sort of refusal – the position of radicality, and on the other,
willingness to work.
This is the basic outline of what I would like to bring up here. I think that the
notion, one of the key notions that is being developed here, that is being denounced
here, and also maybe where an alternative is being suggested, is the notion of desk
murder: a kind of harm and aggression and an actual force of destruction that is exerted
at a distance essentially for money. These processes of remote control face what 
money does. Money controls people, it dictates our actions. There’s a real resistance
happening here and also an attempt to open up a sensible space where we can feel
things differently, we can imagine things differently and from there you can go out 
in front of the world.
Brian Holmes is a theorist, writer and translator living in Chicago.

This text is the edited transcript of a talk given by Brian Holmes at the symposium Who’s Recuperting Who? at Arnolfini,
26 November 2009.

Letter from The Arts Council of Great Britain

to the Artist Placement Group, 1972
Courtesy Tate

22 23
 interpreted negatively. But the point is to never

The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, Thomas Hirschhorn, 2009

exclude or reject the negative, it is precisely about
confronting the negative, also and involving
oneself in it. It is always a matter of not being
negative oneself. Through my work, I want to create
a new truth beyond negativity, beyond current

Poor-Racer, Thomas Hirschhorn, 2009

issues, beyond commentaries, beyond opinions and

Exhibition One-day Sculpture, Christchurch,

beyond evaluations.

Photograph Vittoria Martini

New Zealand, 2009

Courtesy the artist

Das Auge, Thomas Hirschhorn, 2008

Courtesy Arndt & Partner Galerie, Berlin

As an artist, you are known for work that prob-

lematises power relations both within the art
establishment and in a wider social context. To I n other words, are you 'recuperated' or
 And above all – What is to be done (with art)?

Secession, Vienna
what extent do you feel that the system has 'recuperator'? I can only speak for myself and say what I have to
effectively 'recuperated' the oppositional Neither. Why should I be one of them? Why should I do, what I want to do and what is a pleasure and joy
aspects of your work? take things on these terms? I never use these terms to do: it’s to work! To work for a non-exclusive
Nobody and no one 'recuperates' my work. I never myself? As an artist, shouldn’t my work consist in audience! I want to give form and I want to build a
think of or about this. To think of this is a defeat- creating new terms, new notions? Yes, I am an artist platform with my work. Not making a form – but giv-
ist attitude and a loss of energy. To believe that with the ambition to create a new term for art – with ing form. A form which comes from me and can only
art can be 'recuperated' is faithless to me, it’s an my work! I want to create something new. Not more come from me because I see it that way, I understand
opinion, it’s journalism, it’s an evaluation and it’s and not less. I want to work ahead towards something it that way and am the only one to know that form.
a complete weakness. I am for the weak and I am often – I do not want to look back. But I am convinced that To give form, as opposed to making a form, means to
weak – but I am fighting against weakness and I am I can only create or fulfil something new if I be one with it. I must stand alone with this form.
fighting my own weakness. Furthermore I am against address reality positively, even the hard core of This means raising the form, asserting this form

Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

cultivating weakness. I never give a thought for reality. It is a matter of never allowing the pleas- and defending it against everything and everyone.

Thomas Hirschhorn, 2006

Superficial Engagement,
concerns about ‘being recuperated’ or to ‘recuper- ure, the happiness, the enjoyment of work, the posi- It means confronting the great artistic challenge:

Gladstone Gallery, New York

ate’ because I have my work to do! I have work and tive in creation, the beauty of working, to be How can I create a form that takes a position? How
I want to work! There is no ‘oppositional aspect’ asphyxiated by criticism. I do not want to work with can I create a form that resists facts? I want to
in my work. There is no more of an ‘opposition- the fear of being 'recuperated'. This means to be understand the question of form as the most impor-
al aspect’ in my work than in any other artwork! active always. Art is always action, Art is never tant question for an artist. What I want is to build
Because all art – is opposition. Art is opposition reaction. Art is never merely a reaction or a cri- a platform with my work. Creating a platform enables
to culture, to tradition, to un-freedom, to exclu- tique. It doesn't mean being uncritical or not mak- others to come in contact with the work. I want all
sion, to calculation, to education, to sentimental- ing a critique – it means being positive despite the my works to be understood as a surface or a field.
ism, to control, to fear, to security, to harmony, eflecting upon your own implication in these
R sharpest critique, despite uncompromising rejec- This surface must be a locus for dialogue or for
to consumption, to capitalisation, to correctness, processes of absorption and neutralisation, tion and despite unconditional resistance. It means confrontation. I think that art has the power and
to the past. how can you avoid becoming an agent of recupera- not to deny oneself passion, hope and dream. Creat- capacity to create the conditions for a dialogue or
However I have faith in art. I have faith in the tion yourself? ing something means to risk oneself and I can only a confrontation, one-to-one, without communication,
autonomy of art, in the universality of art and in I am not trying to avoid becoming this or that, nor do that if I work without simultaneously analysing without mediation, without moderation. I always
art as resistance. Not resistance against something trying not to be an agent of this and that. I am what I am making. To take the risk, to have joy in want to ask myself: Does my work possess the dynamic
or resistance against someone or against ‘the sys- trying to work hard and I am trying to use art as a working, to be positive, are the preconditions for for a breakthrough? Is there an opening, is there
tem’. No, art as such is resistance! That is perhaps tool! I understand art as a tool to encounter the making art. Only in being positive, can I create a path into my work? Does my work resist the tendency
the misunderstanding about the faithless concern world. I understand art as a tool to confront real- something that comes from myself. I want to be posi- toward the hermetic? My work must create an opening;
for 'recuperation'? Today, the terms 'political art' ity. And I understand art as a tool to live within tive, even within the negative. But if I want to be it must be a door, a window or even a hole – a hole
and 'political artist' are used too often as sim- the time in which I am living. I always ask myself: positive, I must gather the courage to touch also carved into today's reality. The notions I am con-
plifications, abbreviations and cheap, lazy clas- Does my work have the ability to generate an event? the negative – that is where I see the challenge, cerned with today are: Precariousness, Presence and
sifications. I am only interested in what is really Can I encounter someone with my work? Am I trying the problem and the hardcore. I want to be critical, Production! I want to make my artwork with the will
political, the political that implicates: Where do to touch somebody through my work? Can something but I do not want to let myself be neutralised by to create a breakthrough. The question to me is:
I stand? Where does the Other stand? What do I want? be touched through my work? I want to consider the being critical. Can I – with and through my work – contribute to the
What does the Other want? The politics of opinions, work that I am doing today – in my milieu, in my construction of a ‘critical corpus’?

It’s burning everywhere, Thomas Hirschhorn, 2009

of comments and of commonly accepted views, does history – as work which aims to reach out of my
not and has never interested me. I am concerned with milieu – beyond my history. I want to address and Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist based in Paris.
doing my art politically – I am not, and was never, confront universal concerns. Without being afraid

Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Dundee, 2009

concerned with making political art. To me, doing of what you call 'absorption' or 'neutralisation'
art politically means deciding in favour of some- or 'being an agent'! Therefore I must work with what
thing, for something, towards something – it’s never surrounds me, with what I know, with what I love and
'recuperating' something! My decision is to position with what affects me. I must not give in to the
my work in the realms of love, politics, philosophy temptation of the particular, but on the contrary,
and aesthetics. One of these realms is politics. To try to touch universality. The particular, which
choose politics means that I always want to ask: always excludes, must be resisted. For me this means
What do you want? Where do you stand? This also that I want to do my work, the work that I am doing
means that I always want to ask myself: What do I here and now, as a universal work. The essential
want? Where do I stand? I am aware that politics – question to me as an artist is: does my work have
just as the field of aesthetics – could be the power to implicate a non-exclusive audience?

24 25
 In the past decade, we have witnessed how governments have phased out democratic
and cultural institutions. At the same time, art has become norm as an asset in creative
industries and the experience economy. In the so-called creative city, talent, invention
and desire became normative and prescriptive for work, for the building of the economy
and for the production of subjectivities. In this way, aesthetic modalities have become
instruments for state and commerce to re-organise the workplace and to re-enchant
markets. Such mechanisms lie in continuation of those of the culture industry, but they
also go beyond this logic. Analyses of the culture industry have typically revolved around
a critique of the mass-consumption and mass-mediation of art, and not about the
production of subjectivity, the marketing of cities or the reinvention of work.
Art was also normative and prescriptive in the 19th and 20th Centuries to 
be sure, but today it is so in a specific sense that is relatively independent 
of what art meant within the cultural order of the bourgeoisie. In this way 
the question of how one makes, consumes and engages with art when art 
is a norm, a must, a mechanism of control, urgently reasserts itself.1 From
the point of view of artistic production, a not unusual response to art’s new
normativity is to engage with forms of activism. Through direct action, art
activism makes art re-appear on a political stage in a de-hierarchised form.
However if the historical avant-gardes reflected a limit between political
representation and artistic representation, art activism is often less certain
what to do with the artistic side of this question; while the creative
industries and the experience economy are now putting pressure on the 
art concept, we can ask if art activism – from a quite different angle – may 
in fact be doing the same. The following is a generalising deliberation of art
activism and its relationship to the art concept that I hope can serve to
continue a discussion on this subject and break open up new questions. 
I should also mention that I am writing from the point of view of art history
and critical theory, and not as someone with activist experience; just like 
I would write about art without being an artist.
We cannot pretend to fully know what we talk about when we say ‘art activism’, and 
thus be pulled into a categorical piousness or ontological showdown.2 Perhaps because
it is a critically-charged practice, important aspects of which are to explicitly address
urgencies, support and negate, construct and start over; or insofar as it operates 
with binaries such as inside and outside the institution and subversion of pre-existing
repression, art activism both employs and provokes judgment. The last thing we need
today, in debates concerned with art activism and its connections to aesthetics and
democratic debate at large, is to reinforce judgment. The jury stays out. I will argue 
that a deferral of judgment (in favour of knowledge production, scepticism and
speculation) is not inimical to activist art forms; at least I wish to emphasise other
aspects in order to confront paradoxes that manifest themselves in art activist practices
that see art as a problem-solving device.

Action, ethics, gesture

The hybrid term ‘art activism’ was coined in the 1970s, the counter-cultures and student
revolts of the late 1960s having paved the way for it. These movements “posed questions
to politics without themselves being reinscribed in a political theory”, as Michel Foucault
put it, and thus often developed anti-authoritarian practices through aesthetic tropes 
of play and creativity.3 However it was not uncommon that happening inspired protest,
street theatre and artistic behaviour transferred onto social process developed into

26 27
explicitly anti-artistic forms post-1968. At this point many activists dropped symbolic  debate between ‘activism’ and the ‘properly artistic’ is often marked by
A
production altogether in order to engage with forms of direct action that were perceived refrains and mutual blindness to heterogeneous concatenations of politics,
to be more real such as squatting, solidarity work, urban activism and production affect and aesthetics. Beyond that a criticism of work that engages with
communes.4 After the ‘festival of life’ of the late 1960s, came a hardening of the art’s social forms must obviously be historically informed; we can look behind
attitudes upon which the concept of art activism recuperated artistic agency, after the 1990s to projects such as Group Material, whose ‘cultural activism’ 
militant stances had eclipsed art.5 was socially collaborative without falling into traps of intentionality. Ethics,
However if post-1968 militancy negated art, art activism tended to negate however, is indeed a panic of signification that reinstates judgment and, 
the entire question of art versus anti-art by exceeding and replacing the  in aesthetic work, risks collapsing in an evangelical common sense. When 
art concept with terms such as ‘cultural democracy’ (Lucy Lippard), or by art resorts to ethics, disagreement and thinking – that is, politics as an
responding like Nina Felshin: “[activist artists] are creatively expanding art’s experimental and open-ended, interpretive process – is trumped; in activism
boundaries and audience and are redefining the role of the artist. In the by the reappearance of the Kantian Judge in the garb of the street fighter,
process, they seem to suggest that the proper answer to the question educator or labour organiser who delivers a critique of the status quo through
‘But is it Art?’ is: ‘But does it matter?’”6 demands to truth expressed in transparent forms. One can further argue that
This appears to be the right question: only for a retrograde, segregating interrogation,  when it is the case that art activists predicate their work on the good act –
or for the capitalisation of such clear-cut differences, would it be relevant whether on what must be done – they take a super-ethical stance, in which they
something can be unequivocally called art, while other events and objects are discarded. overrule as insufficient the way existing social institutions represent 
On the other hand such a position doesn’t necessarily encourage an integrated  citizens, and instead take democratic representation in their own hands. 
analysis of the work or event that takes into account a multiplicity of (linguistic, Any normative art revolves around the conversion of art into value: not only
affective, sociological, epistemological, scientific, etc.) perspectives necessitated  into economic and cultural values, but also apodictic ‘human’ and ‘social’
by a contemporary concept of art. As long as agents prefix their work with the term ‘art’, values. It is impossible to rely on the good act for a subversion of normativity
and as long as there exist such things as the art institution and a domain of aesthetic as such, insofar as one wishes to maintain an art concept that is more than
thinking, aesthetic discussion remains relevant. Moreover, since art activism tends to merely instrumental.
circulate within the art system, its relation to the art institution, beyond that of a tactical Giorgio Agamben writes how Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics distinguishes between
use of the latter’s resources and infrastructures, should be analysed. Lastly, in Felshin’s production and action: “Action [praxis] and production [poiesis] are generically different.
assertion, there is a modernist remainder of the idea that an art that sublates itself  For production aims at an end other than itself; but this is impossible in the case 
into the life world, through a rejection of the bourgeois concept of art as the ultimate art of action, because the end is merely to do what is right.”9 The good act doesn’t have
form. This is the avantgardistic Aufhebung of art; to realise something through a negation to await interpretation, analysis or meditation the way the art work does, and hence 
that is capable of abolishing and maintaining it at the same time.7 the good act sacks artistic parameters. This may matter little to art activists who work
Just as it can be conservative or unproductive to insist on categorical from an instrumentalised or sociological interpretation of art. However one may take note 
stability, the refusal to reflect on concepts depletes critical insight as well  of the fact that according to the Aristotelian definition (and this is ironic vis-a-vis art
as experience. Hence the consideration of whether or not a phenomenon falls activism since it is explicitly heteronomous), action, by being in itself an end, relies 
within the theoretical and linguistic domain of aesthetics, is not the same  on autonomy as much as the art concept does, or did. What should matter to activists 
as a traditionalist re-territorialisation of art. In fact, art activist resistance  is the fact that action is not (the same as) production. Action is a supplement. This
to such a discussion is often informed by a quasi-modernist concept of art reveals a vacuum at the heart of agency which must be qualified if it isn’t to remain
that doesn’t take into account the integrated analyses that contemporary  self-fulfilling; and it cannot be qualified by way of art, if art is repressed or sublated 
art calls for. Art is based on the concept of art and on ways in which  in the process.
culture and individual subjects re-imagine that concept – as it must always If producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means,
be re-imagined. Agamben sees the gesture as that which breaks “the false alternative
Art activism resolves aesthetic problems in social space. This is an idea it shares with between ends and means that paralyses morality and presents means which,
artistic strategies since the 1990s that revolve around participation and collaboration. as such, are removed from the sphere of mediation without thereby becoming
Art historian Claire Bishop sees a tendency in “socially ameliorative art”, and critical ends”.10 The gesture is “undertaking and supporting”, Agamben says,
discourses around it to equate social labour with artistic success.8 Her criticism of and therefore “opens up the sphere of ethos as the most fitting sphere
an ‘ethical turn’ in art focuses on socially collaborative practices in which the good of the human.”11 Today, much art activism is gestural. In our era of desktop
collaboration becomes the good art work. These are set to work to heal (through publishing and immediate access to the internet as a global medium, it isn’t
empathy, recognition of difference, empowerment), and may even operate with more  enough to take over means of production that are accessible anyway. Instead
or less transcendent modalities (happiness, consensus), under which Bishop detects activists create effects through enterprising and effective gestures; the
unarticulated religious sentiment. In this way, she asserts, we tend to judge such  media freaking of the Yes Men is a famous example. However the gesture –
art for its artistic intentionality rather than for how it produces aesthetic reflection  hovering between action and production – is a highly ambiguous concept that
and affect. differs from structural and analytical efforts; just like it brings aesthetics

28 29
 back into play and hence displaces the essentialism of the good act and the counter-public sphere, alternative networks of distribution, and so on. In this way the
artistic intentionality. In the context of the media happening however, it is plaisir of interpretation, that informed so much post-structuralist theory, is supplemented
difficult to see how gesture escapes mediation, understood as a condition by parameters such as use value, social value and political effect (or it is, in some cases,
that can no longer be a choice for contemporary agency and production.12 annulled altogether).
Put differently in the words of Henri Bergson, the gesture is profoundly different from But while art activism often foregrounds instrumental reason, 
action because it is an automatism, “a mental state that expresses itself (...) from  it is not entirely based in rationalism. Brian Holmes writes in his 
no other cause than an inner itching”.13 He considered the gesture as “something ‘Affectivist Manifesto’,
explosive” that disturbs or arouses us and “prevents our taking matters seriously.” Expression unleashes affect, and affect is what touches ...
Accordingly, one can polemicise media happenings by characterising them as socio- An artistic event does not need an objective judge. You know
cultural tics. The fact that a protest reaches hearts and minds doesn’t change the  it has happened when you can bring something else into existence
way that the matrix of mass media society replaces the event; it reaffirms this matrix, in its wake. Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up
prevents us from taking it seriously. The gesture is then a recording of a loss rather than expanding territoriums.17
the re-appropriation of what we have lost. Such a strategy arguably had greater impact Somewhat counter-intuitively, Holmes defines strategies for social change in terms 
and reason in the 1960s when the focused unseriousness of the Yippies, for example, of an interiority, namely intimacy; art activism does indeed operate with a concept 
was pitted against bourgeois culture. Today there is a fine line between media-freaking of desire, then. In this way it can neither claim, nor be taken to task for, an exclusively
and the effervescent imagery that spin doctors plough into the collective memory.14 sociological reading of art. But Holmes’ concept of affect is affirmative and hence one, 
Thus agency can be problematised from the point of view of gesture,  I would argue, that again passes artistic parameters by. As he sums up, “I am interested
of how it differs from production, and of how it necessitates an aesthetic  in art that goes outside of art”.18 Because of its focus on what we can call sociological
and linguistic analysis supplemented by the sociological insight of how outsides, art activism is often insensitive to the vague and indefinite perception and
mediation has eclipsed production in the info-society. signification; outside of any instrumentalised production of space whether governmental,
corporate or anti-authoritarian.
Reconstruction, structural agency and affect One artistic parameter that could be used to put an affirmative concept of
When one begins to problematise normative power, laborious processes of reconstruction affect into perspective is Antonin Artaud’s concept of cruelty, with which 
are needed. These processes may be of a semiotic kind or the kind that art activists he coupled agency with theatre. When Artaud in the early 1930s wrote that
often take it upon themselves to undertake through self-organised, collective practices. “everything that acts is cruelty”, he couched cruelty in terms of “diligence,
In both cases, it is about developing new sites from which to speak, and thus self- unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and absolute determination.”19 As
organisational and self-institutionalising processes are an important, structural form  a Nietzschean concept it had little to do with blood and sadism, but touched
of action. They also embody the particular time-space of art activism; the slowness  instead on something that also activists can subscribe to; something “very
that is a result of the group author as an explicitly produced space of production that  lucid, a kind of strict control and submission to necessity.”20 There is, in
is intrinsically opposed to the desire for immediate effect, when such a time-space  this sense, cruelty in decision-making, in making visible, in stirring up affect, 
is characterised by collective processes that are painfully democratic. Such a slow in social relations, in language itself. An activist’s discipline in the face of
temporality, such a tarrying militancy, is in itself a valuable asset of art activism  the chaos they take upon themselves is cruel; it is always easier to play the
that knows how to make its own time through self-organisation, and does not buy  game. So why does much activism only have an affirmative language for this?
into the proliferation of pretexts to make art. Art activism must be credited for such Artaud’s theatre of cruelty is of course a hyperbolic, modernist position, but
attempts, within any multitude, at providing conditions of possibility for articulations  one that can be used to stir up transparent public ideals.
that recompose social corporeality. One may replace art activism’s positive intensities (intimacy, recognition, togetherness,
However one cannot stop at reconstruction. An aesthetic event is indeed  ‘shared heartbeats’), with a register of ambiguous and negative ones that come with 
in excess of the sociological analysis that will have lead to the conclusion an avant-garde pedigree (provocation, shock, absurdity, pleasure).21 However even
that reconstruction is required. At the same time, the reconstructive process if such ambiguities may be better equipped at opening up to artistic experiment and
is an inextricable part of the artistic enuncitation: it will always mumble self-reflexivity there is, in late capitalism, no such thing as uncontaminated tropes.
along, the way the ideological setting of the salon des refusés informs Indeed, one must struggle to regain and rearticulate a concept such as ‘pleasure’ 
readings of the work of Pissarro or Manet.15 from the abuse it has suffered, not to mention shock and provocation. In this way, one
Art activism typically has aspects of functionalism in so far as it has a pronounced cannot replace affects for structural work; one remains on the level of intensities and
therapeutical, ameliorative or enlightening purpose. It is meant to work within the direct strategic calculations of their effects. If the revolution that ushered in the modern
mode of address that underlies a politics of visibility.16 Such an operationality revolves subject in 1789 was an appeal to democratic reason, then it can in fact be claimed 
around the possible from the point of view of critical organisation. It typically takes  that much post-1968 activism has appealed to life through (a departure from) art. Such 
place in ‘the outside world’ – outside the studio, gallery or institution – in protest against a position is not only aesthetically ambiguous, but also politically unreconstructed when
market and professional exclusion, and in order to include marginalised subjects. Where notions of affect are in themselves no longer transgressive, but have been transformed 
this is the case, the production of space is of special interest; the self-organised space, to the very infrastructure of cognitive capital.

30 31
 14. I am paraphrasing Michael Taussig here: “What is ‘spin’ if not the intoxicating and unstable mix of power and fear bound to
 he above remarks may hopefully serve as a few starting points for 
T
effervescent imagery plowed into collective memory so as to change the future?” (Taussig, M. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago:
a discussion about art activism’s relationship to aesthetic processes.  Chicago University Press, 2004. 235.)
Beyond that one can also consider the larger relationship of activism  15. Bishop doesn’t take into account such a politics of enunciation; to me, this is a sociological and aesthetic blind spot in her
reading that revindicates the individual author and that disregards parameters of the particular kind of institutional critique
and democracy. The fact that anti-democratic political movements such  that self-institutionalising art projects embody. It also exacerbates the rift between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ art that
as fascism also appear in activist forms annuls an inherent relation  is so apparent in the U.S. Bishop pits ‘socially ameliorative art’ against what she sees as more complex artistic takes on
collaboration, exemplified by works by Jeremy Deller, Artur mijewski, Phil Collins, Carsten Höller and Thomas Hirschhorn.
between activism and democratic reason. In contemporary society, 
Their many qualities notwithstanding, none of these projects operate on the levels of self-institutionalisation and integrated
we can also take note of another development. We are used to thinking  collective authorship; while this is perhaps a point in itself for Bishop, it comes across as conventional that none of these
of activism as pre-institutional, either according to the demands for rights artists are women or non-European. Furthermore, where it is no doubt necessary to consider how rhetorics deployed by New
Labour are “almost identical to the practitioners of socially engaged art in order to justify public spending on the arts”
claimed by a marginalised collectivity, or in a broader sense in terms of (Bishop, ibid.), we cannot isolate the problem to cultural policies, but need to address the fact that cognitive capitalism
Marx’s description the bourgeoisie as the first ruling class whose authority in general colonises aesthetic tropes. Seeing how contemporary biopolitical regimes are linking up life, work and social
imagination, the instrumentalisation of art is much more viral than that.
was based not on who their ancestors were, but on what they themselves
16. Peggy Phelan writes about visibility politics, “Visibility politics are additive rather than transformational (to say nothing of
actually did; their purposefulness, organisational abilities and production  revolutionary). They lead to a stultifying ‘me-ism’ to which realist representation is always vulnerable. … Visibility politics
of visions as an ‘activist’ class.22 But if we take into account how militancy are compatible with capitalism’s relentless appetite for new markets and with the he most self-satisfying ideologies of the
United States: you are welcome here as long as you are productive. The production and reproduction of visibility are part
has risen in the wake of the onslaught on cultural and democratic  of the labor of the reproduction of capitalism.” Phelan, P. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London and New York:
institutions – from anti-global resistance to the Tea Party movement in  Rotuledge, 2006. 11.
17. Holmes, B. “The Affectivist Manifesto. Artistic Critique in the 21st Century.” 2008 < http://brianholmes.wordpress.
the US – we can also consider it a post-institutional and post-political
com/2008/11/16/the-affectivist-manifesto/>.
phenomenon that defies governmental representation. 18. Brian Holmes in a talk at Platform Garanti, Istanbul, for the launch of his book Escape the Overcode. Activist Art in the Control
If democratic reason is a measure for forms of activism, it is more unpredictable  Society (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum/Zagreb: WHW, 2009), in connection with the opening of the 11th Istanbul Biennial,
13 September 2009.
than ever how the latter relate to it. What do such departures from parliamentary  19. Artaud, A. The Theatre and its Double. London: Calder, 1999 (1933). 65 and 79.
politics entail for the ways in which we reimagine society in the 21st Century?  20. Ibid. 80.
21. Claire Bishop writes, “By contrast, I argue that shock, discomfort, or frustration – along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt
And how does aesthetics factor into this, as one of the spaces still available 
or sheer pleasure – are crucial to a work’s aesthetic and political impact.” (Ibid.)
to us for democratic deliberation? 22. Engels, F. and Marx, K. “The Communist Manifesto.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.
473–83.
1. In my pamphlets ‘Kunst er Norm’, ‘Organisationsformer’ and ‘Spredt væren’ (‘Art is Norm’, ‘Forms of Organisation’ and ‘Dissipated
being’, published by the Art Academy of Jutland, 2008–2010), I discuss art’s new normativity. Lars Bang Larsen is an independent writer and curator based in Bilbao and Copenhagen.
2. Julie Ault sums up various definitions of the notion of an activist art: “Vanalyne Green and Margia Kramer, for example, described
activist art as an art of ‘unique, compressed, intense, visual constructs of experience, information and material’ that responds
to specific social needs, an art distinguished form ‘fetishized consumer commodity art’ ... Lucy Lippard, for her part,
characterised activist art as a paradigm for the practice of contemporary political art wherein ‘some element of the art takes
place in the ‘outside world’, including some teaching and media practice as well as community and labor organising, public
political work and organizing within the artist’s community ... Greg Sholette further refined the term as ‘the opposite of those
aesthetic practices that, however well-intentioned or overtly political in content, remain dependent on the space of the museum
for their meaning.’ (Ault, J. Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002. 339.)
3. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Pairs: Pantheon, 1984. 34.
4. See for example my book Palle Nielsen: The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968). Barcelona: MACBA, 2010.
5. ‘Festival of life’ is the term Abbie Hoffman uses in Revolution for the Hell of it – by Free. New York: Pocket Books, 1970.
6. But Is It Art? The Spirit Of Art As Activism. Ed. Nina Felshin. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. 13. Commensurately, the New York City
radicals Black Mask wrote in the late 1960s, “We are neither artists nor anti-artists. We are creative and revolutionary men.”
(My translation from Motherfuckers! De los veranos del amor al amor armado. Madrid: La Fulgueta, 2009. 110.)
7. Miwon Kwon writes about community-based activism that while it understands itself as heir to the historical avant-gardes, it in
fact reverses their project. The avant-gardes saw it as their mission to provoke and disturb with inorganic (explicitly produced)
art, while activism focuses on healing communities and reintroducing an organic social bond: “A culturally fortified subject,
rendered whole and unalienated from or through an encounter or involvement with an art work, is imagined to be a politically
empowered social subject with opportunity (afforded by the art project) and capacity (understood as innate) for artistic self-
representation (= political self-representation). It is, I would argue, the production of such ‘empowered’ subjects, a reversal
of the aesthetically politicised subjects of the traditional avant-garde, that is the underlying goal of much community-based,
site-specific public art today.” Kwon, M. One Place After Another. Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 2004. 97.
8. Bishop claims in ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ (Artforum, February 2006) that there “can be no failed,
unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening
the social bond.”
9. See Agamben, G. “Notes on Gesture.” Infancy and History. On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso, 2007. 154. Italics
as in original. I am grateful to Niels Henriksen for this reference.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid. 154.
12. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi puts it succinctly, stating that we now live in a milieu where “mediatization prevails over any other form of
relation with the human body.” Berardi, F. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. New York: Semiotext(e), 2009. 114.
13. I am relying on Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s discussion of Bergson’s text ‘Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic’ (1911)
in their Global Culture Industry. London: Polity Press, 2007. 92–3.

32 33
 Banksy vs Bristol Museum Banksy vs Bristol Museum

The exhibition Banksy vs Bristol Museum was presented at Bristol’s City

Museum and Art Gallery from June 13–August 31, 2009. The following
facts and figures evaluating the exhibition were compiled by Destination
Bristol and provided by the museum.

Douglas
HG YO Thematic Key
Thematic Key
BD Cheltenham
1<5 1<5
FY BB 5 < 10
Gloucester 5 < 10
PR Leeds HU
HX 10 < 25 10 < 25
WF 25 < 40 25 < 40
BL OL HD Witney
Missing Data 48 < 56
DN
Manchester Excluded Merthyr Tydfil Stroud Oxford Mising Data
Liverpool WA Sheffield Not selected Excluded
SK LN Not selected
CH
CW

ST Nottingham Talbot Pontypridd

Newport
TF PE Swindon
WS NR
SY Leicester Bridgend
Caerdydd
Birmingham
Bristol Reading
CV IP
NN Barry
CB Newbury
LD WP Bath
HP MK
SG CO
LU
GL OX GM
NP HP EN
Basingstoke
WD Aldershot
CF N SS
RM Farnham
SN
SL London
Bristol DA
RU BR
KT SM ME
CT Bridgwater
BA GU
SP RH TN
TA Winchester
EX Southampton BN
DT BH Eastleigh
Yeovil
PL Southampton
TQ

Fareham Havant
TR

Gosport

34 35
 Banksy vs Bristol Museum Banksy vs Bristol Museum

Visitor Ages Repeat Visitors /

Place of Residence

120,000 180,000

160,766
160,000
99,665
100,000
91,584 140,000

80,000 120,000

100,000
60,000
53,891
80,000

39,326 63,590
40,000 60,000

24,242 40,000 34,727

20,000
22,658
20,000
8,735 11,761
6,482
0
0 0
0–16 years 16–25 years 25–40 years 40–60 years 60+ years < 5 miles 5–25 miles UK > 25 miles Overseas

Previous Museum Visitors

New Visitors

36 37
 Banksy vs Bristol Museum Banksy vs Bristol Museum

Headlines:

• A total of 308,719 people attended the exhibition

• 106,744 visitors lived within 25 miles and 201,975 lived farther away

• 6,482 overseas residents viewed the exhibition

ACORN Clasification All
Visitors
•9
 7.8% of non-local visitors (197,531) had prior knowledge of the exhibition,
45% the rest found out about it after their arrival in the city
40%
•6
 9.4% of all non-local trips were motivated by the exhibition –
35% that is if the exhibition had not been on, these people would not
have visited the city. The exhibition therefore generated a total
30%
of 140,170 additional trips to Bristol by non-local people
25%

• Of these additional trips, 88,307 were day visits and 51,863 were
20%
staying trips, (averaging 1.51 nights per trip)
15%

• Non-local visitors spent:

10%
23,612 nights in friends and relatives homes,
5% 50,165 nights in hotels, and
4,792 nights in other accommodation
0%
Wealthy Urban Comfortably Moderate Hard
Achievers Prosperity Off Means Pressed
• Spending generated by non-local visitors whose trips were solely
motivated by the Banksy exhibition was:
£6,169,610 by staying visitors
£4,238,736 by day visitors

Banksy is a graffiti artist from Bristol.

38 39
 This publication asks, what are the power relations between art, activism and the
institution? What is the role of a critical art practice that is immediately recuperated 
by the mainstream? In this relatively short essay I have less than 2000 words to describe
two changes that have developed but gone largely unnoticed by the artworld. Both 
of these changes are complex and have implications for the questions posed by this
publication. The first of these two changes is in how art has been defined ‘institutionally’
in recent years, going from a wholesale exclusion of activism as legitimate art practice,
to a recent re-emergence of activist art or activism as art within the institution. 
The second change is broader than the milieu of the artworld. It is in the understanding
of the role of culture within bourgeois society, which could be described as the shift 
from Gramsci to Foucault (described later in this text). Because these changes have
gone largely unmarked, questions of recuperation and opposition, market versus state, 
left versus right, continue to be asked within the artworld and not just by this publication. 
I believe there are more generative lines of enquiry, which might reflect a more nuanced
understanding of the state of culture and society today, if we acknowledge these changes 
instead of harking back to 20th Century frames of reference.
My perspective comes from a somewhat ‘sociological’ or outside view of the
artworld despite the fact that I am an insider. By this I mean that I am interested in 
how the artworld operates within society; I am interested in its normative structures,
how it self-regulates and also how the artworld works within wider bourgeois society.
Both my artwork and my writing explore the individual relationship with a system, 
be it a microcosm or wider society. It is the characteristics of this relationship that
fascinate me. First I will try to describe the shifts briefly, though I am aware that any
in-depth description or analysis chafes at the word count.
I’ll begin with a description of the Institutional Theory of Art. Its most famous
proponent is Arthur C. Danto who, in 1964, when confronted with the philosophical shock
of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, concluded that “To see something as art requires something
the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history 
of art: an artworld.”1 The paradox that Danto describes is when two sets of materially
indistinguishable objects – a grocer’s brillo boxes and Warhol’s Brillo Box – are exactly
the same, and yet only one is art. Danto concludes that it is criticism, philosophy and
theory that make one art and the other not-art. In other words, it is the artworld that
makes art. There is no quality, be it aesthetic or anything else, that necessarily makes
one thing art and another not-art. This was a great shift from previous theories of art
which were based on beauty or other transcendent or universal values, as described 
by Kant, among others. Philosopher, George Dickie takes the institutional definition
seriously concluding the following:
A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.
An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work
of art.
A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree
to understand an object which is presented to them.
The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.
An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist
to an artworld public.2
In other words, anything the artworld says is art, is art. There is no criteria other than
artworld consensus. The making of art may therefore be understood as a highly social-
political act. This is especially so given Pierre Bourdieu’s observations about art, class
and value. Because, according to Bourdieu, art carries markers of social distinction, 

40 41
it has ‘cultural capital’ which has a fungible value. Art has cultural capital that may  of us is our own agent of power, self-managing as good citizens and helping others also
be exchanged for large sums of money proportionate with its cultural capital.3 to act as the good citizen of a liberal market democracy. Each of us embody and enact
It is important to understand this relationship because we realise through  the values of society and each of us help to acculturate ourselves and others through
the institutional theory of art that the category of art therefore rests on numerous discourse. Tony Bennett uses both Gramsci and Foucault to describe and analyse how
exclusions. One of the little acknowledged jobs of the artworld is to police the boundary culture, including museum culture, is implicated in this process. He asks:
of art; to determine what is and is not art. Generally an artworld assumption is that  Are museums not still concerned to beam their improving messages of cultural
the definition of art is always an expanding, progressive one, going from exclusion  tolerance and diversity as deeply into civil society as they can reach in order to carry
to inclusion. The artworld is generally proud of art’s ability to shock whenever there  that message to those whom the museum can only hope to address as citizens,
are new, highly visible inclusions in the definition of art. We can think of a parade of publics and audiences? … If this is so, however, we shall have to see these contact
shocking incursions into the definition by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Carl Andre, zones as both the sites and artefacts of government and, as such, tethered to the civic
Martin Creed and Tracey Emin; but this belies a historical reality of constant flux.  programs which put them – and intellectuals who work within and criticise them –
Since Danto’s 1964 text, the definition of art has accommodated and expelled a variety at work in the world.6
of practices including both the highly commercial and the highly political. The definition It is also worth remembering that since the 1990s, centre-left governments of the UK
of art has both expanded and contracted over time. It is only recently that the political  and USA entrenched economic policies which leave the notion of separate public and
or activist has been reintroduced as a legitimate art practice in the UK. (The notable private spheres in tatters. There is now little grounds for imagining socio-politics in
exception during the 1990s was artists whose backgrounds were expected to be bipolar terms of left/right, public/private, market/state.7 Gramsci wrote from a time
‘political’, like those from Latin America, China and Russia.4) That decade saw the when political dichotomies prevailed and so describes the State as an ‘educator’ 
highly commercially orientated becoming legitimate art practice for the first time since where the State is “the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with 
the late 19th Century. The fall in Warhol’s artworld credibility in the 1970–80s and  which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages 
then his reinstatement as an artworld great in the 1990s is one example of this trend.  to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.”8 While his analysis has certain
In the 1970s and 80s in Britain and USA, it was a politicised art production that was  components which help us today understand how the State does in fact create 
de rigueur, while in the 1990s that same mode of practice became marginalised  consensus in its citizenry through its various educative outlets, like museums and
or invisible as Martha Rosler bemoans in Interventions and Provocation: Conversations culture, it is also predicated on an idea of a dialectic – a push and pull between two
on Art, Culture and Resistance.5 We see a waxing and a waning of both the commercially opposing forces, the working class and the ruling class. Foucault instead describes 
orientated and the political as legitimate art practice within the institutional definition  how each and every one of us order and shape power relations. For Bennett, the site 
of art during the post-war period of the 20th Century. Far from a story of growing of a politicised engagement therefore must not be understood as an outmoded dialectic
inclusion, what counts instead as legitimate art practice is specific to its moment  but in the ‘politics of detail’ that entails ways of addressing and acting effectively 
in time and space and is perhaps somewhat arbitrary. Thinking about Danto, we could  in relation to the governmental programmes through which particular fields of conduct 
say that by the late 1990s and early 2000s the likes of Claire Bishop, Nicolas Bourriaud, are organised and regulated.9 In other words, it can no longer be understood as helpful
Jane Rendell and Grant Kester (to name but a few writers on a politicised art practice) to use the old dichotomies, the old binaries, when understanding the artist’s role or the
almost follow his dictum in their creation of a space for this type of practice through  institution’s role within society. We are each of us constitutive of the various worlds we
the creation of a legitimating artworld discourse. It should be no surprise that activism  operate in and a politics of engagement must start from that understanding. This essay
is back in the institution by the early 2000s. aims at shifting our perception of that engagement and our participation in it in the hope 
What I am saying is that the questions of power and recuperation asked here are that the questions we ask in the future take us forward in a generative, relevant way.
basically irrelevant if we consider the history of art as seen through the prism of the
1. Danto, A. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 15 Oct. 1964: 571–84.
institutional definition of art. Together, artist, institution, critic, historian, dealer, (et al) 2. Dickie, G. Art Circle: A Theory of Art. Chicago: Spectrum Press, 1997.
comprise the artworld and therefore create art. Instead of talking about recuperation,  3. Bourdieu, P. The Production of Belief. Cambridge: Polity, 1983.
4. See Julian Stallabrass on this point in Art Incorporated, 2004.
we could ask which type of art practice is legitimated as art at any given moment and 5. Martha Rosler interviewed by Robert Fichter and Paul Rutkovsy. Interventions and Provocation: Conversations on Art,
why that particular type of art is deemed to be art as a more interesting line of enquiry, Culture and Resistance. Ed. G. Harper. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. 13.
6. Bennett, T. Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage Publications, 1999. 213.
but this is a question for another essay. I want now to describe the relationship of
7. As Anthony Giddens remarks in The Third Way, 1999, these were the neoliberal policies of right wing governments
culture, specifically the artworld, to bourgeois society as this shift too has not quite  which the left adopted for various reasons.
sunk in. 8. Gramsci, A. The Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 258–260.
9. Bennett, T. Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage Publications, 1999. 83.
Though many in the artworld have been quoting Foucault for decades, it seems
hearts still lie in the oppositional politics of Gramsci or even the Frankfurt School, Alana Jelinek is an artist, curator and writer, and is currently AHRC Creative Fellow at Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology
and Archeaology.
judging by the questions raised by this publication and elsewhere. I am not going to
argue that these theorists have no relevance for the contemporary moment (and here 
I’m thinking in particular of Adorno as well as Gramsci), just that it is no longer accurate
to describe the cultural milieu of the UK in terms of dichotomy. Foucault’s description 
of power in liberal democracies is far more nuanced and more accurate – where each 

42 43
 ratio this platform offers. In other words we are IAPDH Budget Breakdown
doomed from the start if we believe that by partici-
With Our £2000 Artist Fee We Are Going to COP 15
pating in the culture industry we can say something
very important to the rest of world. At most, and EXPENDITURE £2000 RUBBISH
if we’re very lucky, our 10% may encourage a con- Harwich - Esbjerg Ferry Return Ticket £332.10 £1667.90 A4 receipt

nection made subsequently with others. Our email, Liverpool - Harwich Train Return Ticket £142.80 £1525.10 tickets
3 croissants Delicie de France @ Euston £4.05 £1521.05 Delicie de France bag + napkins
image and budget is our 10%. We suppose there’s
3 baguettes 2 waters @ Upper Crust £13.97 £1507.08 Upper Crust bags + napkins + 2 bottles of Buxton water
always hope. Harwich International Terminal Cafe £8.65 £1498.43 3 Ribena juices, straws, plastic, 3 Walkers crisps, 2 polystyrene
The image is our promise that our artist’s fee cups with lids

of £2000 from the taxpayer for our commissioned work Ferry Food: Dinner and Breakfast £100.80 £1397.63 some food waste + napkins
Ulla Present: L’Oreal and Glenlivet £53.15 £1344.48 packaging for makeup and whiskey - to be dealt with by Ulla
with PLATFORM for C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital,
3 bottles of wine and bottle opener £43.35 £1301.13 3 bottles, packaging for wine opener, 2 plastic bags from Duty Free
Culture (Arnolfini, 2009) will fund our activism at Shop
the Copenhagen Climate Change Su m mit (COP15), Virgin Mobile Top Up for L&G £20.00 £1281.13

December 2009. The budget that we have sent you is Extra in £ on Carmel’s dog & wine £4.65 £1276.48
M&S Food @ Euston for train journey £20.90 £1255.58 3 drinks carton, 1 water bottle, 4 banana skins + packaging around
a breakdown of what we spent the money on.
them, 5 packs of crisps, 3 plastic boxes for ham, 1 plastic box
s an artists’ group, you are known for work that
A for cheese, 3 plastic small wraps for cheese, chocolate chip cookies
problematises power relations both within the wrap, chocolate raisins bag, 2 plastic bags

art establishment and in a wider social context. Wizz Kidz donation @ Euston £1.00 £1254.58

for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home,

Two Virgin train teas £3.20 £1251.38 packaging from two teas, 2 cups, 2 paper bags
To what extent do you feel that the system has

Red Banner on Canal Barge, The Institute

Taxi home £5 £1246.38
effectively 'recuperated' the oppositional 3 LFC scarfs - present for Ulla and kids £17.97 £1228.41
aspects of your work? Reflecting upon your own postage includng envelope £5.59 £1222.82

implication in these processes of absorption and Cash Book £0.65 £1222.17

Esbjerg - Copenhagen Train DKK 608 ... train tickets
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are you 'recuperated' or 'recuperator'? back to the shop for DKK 1 ...
chocolates DKK 51 ... chocolate wrappers

Arnolfini, 2009
crisps and teas on train DKK 72 ... crisps packets, 2 teacups, 2 bags of tea, more napkins which are used
Dear Tom,
as tissues
In answer to your email questions we are sending bus tickets in Copenhagen DKK 42 ... bus tickets
you an image, a budget and this email. 2 pints and 3 juices near Ulla’s DKK 140 ... 3 bottles from juice but café will deal with it

It is important for us to say two things by way 8 beers and 5 juices from shop DKK 195 ... 8 cans of beer + 5 bottles of juice - will be recycled, says Ulla
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how they operate between us and you, Tom Trevor, cial transparency about our funding. That in itself
given to Ulla for hot chocolate DKK 100 ...
Director of the Arnolfini, and the cultural isn’t going to change the world but it might help butchers - leg of lamb, Louise dinner DKK 237 ... meat packaging - some paper
institution(s) that you and we work for. It strikes some of us reflect on our conservative positions rosemary DKK 40 ...

us that 90% of what could be said in these pages has regarding art’s function in the world. So, we are potatoes and parsnip DKK 30 ... veg packaging
given to Ulla for beef soup-dinner club DKK 500 ...
already been said by accepting the invitation to not being oppositional as such, to you or the culture
ice skating DKK 115 ...
contribute. We are now, already, participating in a industry or Concept Store, but positional in rela- muffins, coffees, hot juices DKK 155 ... stuff around muffin, juice bottles that café deals with 4 falafels +
set of complex relations – sometimes referred to as tion to it. Exposing the machinations of the culture lemonades DKK 200 ... foil in which falafels were wrapped, one plastic bag, lots of

the culture industry – something that, for whichever industry is a form of opposition to it, but getting napkins, 4 cans
wine and beer DKK 250 ... cans of beer - not sure how many, lots; box of wine
reason, tends to maintain political and social strapped to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ see-saw is something
Copenhagen - Esbjerg train DKK 775 ...
inequalities both within the gallery system and in we haven’t yet dedicated our energies to. We are bowling next to Klima Forum DKK 175 ...
wider society. What we now choose to say from this part of the problem. sandwiches at Klima Forum DKK 100 ... 4 sandwich wrappers

platform is largely, almost entirely, irrelevant. teas and juices at Klima Forum DKK 55 ... 3 plastic cups, 2 teabags, 2 paper cups, 1 wooden stick
cakes at Klima Forum DKK 60 ... 2 paper plates, 4 serviettes for cakes
That’s the 10% that’s left for the artist (or whoever) The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at
bread at Netto DKK 33 ... 2 bags of bread packaging, also eggs cartoon
to play with. We have noted that usually the most Home is a home-run initiative, run out of the spare tooth fairy DKK 50 ...
instructive feature of artists’ participation in room of a council house in Liverpool. It is run by food for train journey DKK 227 ... 5 banana skins, 1 plastic bag, packages from 4 sandwiches,

the culture industry is the silence they maintain a family of two adults and three kids, collectively, 4 plastic bottles from apple juices
one cup of tea on train DKK 18 ... 1 paper cup
about their own participation. Most artists, and twoaddthree (Gary, Lena, Neal, Gabriel and Sid).
toilet on Esbjerg train station DKK 2 ...
you can’t blame them, see the opportunity to present www.twoaddthree.org Carmel’s present: beer, sausage, chocolate DKK 300 ... 1 plastic bag
work in a gallery (or in this journal) as a chance Carmel’s present: dog + wine on ferry DKK 450 ... 3 bottles of wine

to express or explore something dear to them. In dinner on ferry DKK 796 ... minimal food waste, 2 toothpicks
breakfast on ferry DKK 327 ... some blue napkins
our experience it is rare that artists or groups of
DKK 8049
artists want to look critically at their own posi- £ 974.06 £248.11
tions within the processes of production, both recipts in general

within the gallery and in wider society. And who 26 nappies out of which 14 were soiled
45 wipes, two of which were randomly used, one was bloodied
can blame them, it sounds really boring, doesn’t it?
1 nappy bag
Of course we can feel proud to have been invited, 8 cosmetic pads
even seduced by the idea that other important art- Klima forum magazine

ists may be contributing alongside us. We all have packaging from Ali Kazam and 2 Jack the Pirate costumes
Art not Oil Diaries £50.00 £198.11
egos and enjoy the recognition, but if we are really
honest with ourselves we can’t ignore the 90% to 10% £198.11 is the left over money that we are sending to vacuum cleaner in Stanley Picker gallery in a package. We will deduct p&p expenses.

44 45
 Does art have something to do with the creation of subjective autonomy in the sphere of
immaterial production and Semiocapitalism? In order to answer this question I’ll briefly
explain what Semiocapitalism is. In the classical form of manufacturing capitalism; 
price, wages and profit fluctuations were based on the relationship between necessary
labour time and the determination of value. Following the introduction of microelectronic
technologies and the resulting intellectualisation of productive labour, the relationship
between different magnitudes and different productive forces entered a period 
of indeterminacy. Deregulation marked the end of the law of value and turned its 
demise into a political economy. In his main work, L’échange symbolique et la mort
[Symbolic Exchange and Death], Jean Baudrillard intuitively infers the overall direction
of the development of the end of the millennium: “The principle of reality coincided 
with a certain stage of the law of value. Today, the whole system has precipitated 
into indeterminacy and reality has been absorbed by the hyper-reality of the code 
of simulation.”1
The whole system precipitates into indeterminacy as all correspondences
between symbol and referent, simulation and event, value and labour time 
no longer hold.
Isn’t this also what the avant-garde aspired to? Did not the experimental art of the XX
Century wish to sever the link between symbol and referent? In saying this, I am not
accusing the avant-garde of being the cause of neo-liberal economic deregulation.
Rather, I am suggesting that the anarchic utopia of the avant-garde was actualised 
and turned into its opposite when society internalised rules and capital was able to
abdicate both juridical law and political rationality to abandon itself to the seeming
anarchy of internalised automatisms, which is actually the most rigid form of
totalitarianism. As industrial discipline dwindled, individuals found themselves in 
a state of formal freedom. No law forced them to put up with duties and dependence.
Obligations became internalised and social control was exercised through a voluntary
albeit inevitable subjugation to chains of automatisms.
In a regime of aleatory and fluctuating values, precariousness became 
the generalised form of social relations, which deeply affected the social
composition and the psychic, relational and linguistic character of a new
generation as it entered the labour market. Rather than a particular form 
of productive relations, precariousness is the dark soul of the productive
process. An uninterrupted flow of fractal and recombined info-labour
circulates in the global web as the agent of universal valorisation, yet 
its value is indeterminable. Connectivity and precariousness are two sides 
of the same coin: the flow of semio-capitalist production captures and
connects cellularised fragments of de-personalised time; capital purchases
fractals of human time and recombines them on the web. From the standpoint
of capitalist valorisation, this uninterrupted flow is undifferentiated and finds
its unity only in the resultant value: Semiocapital. However, from the
standpoint of cognitive precarious workers the supply of labour is fragmented:
fractals of time and pulsating cells of labour are switched on and off in the
large control room of global production. Therefore the supply of labour time
can be disconnected from the physical and juridical subjectivity of the
worker. Social labour time becomes an ocean of valorising cells that can 
be summoned and recombined in accordance with the needs of capital.
When industrial capitalism transposed into the new form of Semiocapitalism, it first and
foremost mobilised the psychic energy of society to bend it to the drive of competition

46 47
and cognitive productivity. The ‘new economy’ of the 1990s was essentially a ‘Prozac- in the media, and the media are into life. Here the circle of Gesamtkunstwerk and of Dada
economy’, both neuro-mobilisation and compulsory creativity. Art, in this situation,  is fulfilled. Hyper-speed optic fibre circulation of the image is producing an effect of mise
far from being a factor of autonomy and self-empowerment, becomes an element  en abyme of desire, an effect of hyper-stimulation and perpetual postponement of pleasure.
of aestheticisation and mobilisation of everyday life. The same word ‘activism’  Pleasure becomes asynthotic, in the kingdom of dromocracy and image pervasion.2
is undergoing a similar destiny. Art and activism are united under the sign of the The sensuous body is simultaneously provoked and deceived, and at the end it is erased.
mobilisation of nervous energies. Should we not free ourselves from the thirst for More sex-images, less time for caresses. This is the final realisation of art in the sphere
activism that fed the 20th Century to the point of catastrophe and war? Should we  of Semiocapitalist acceleration.
not set ourselves free from the repeated and failed attempt to act for the liberation  Once upon a time pleasure was repressed by power. Now it is evoked and
of human energies from the rule of capital? Is not the path towards the autonomy of  promised, and finally deceived. Pleasure is shown and simultaneously
the social from economic and military mobilisation only possible through a withdrawal dissolved. This is the pornographic feature of Semioproduction in the sphere
into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage? of the market. The eye has taken the central place of human sensory life, 
By the beginning of the 21st Century the long history of the artistic avant- but the eye’s domination is the domination of merchandise as a promise
garde was over. Beginning with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and resulting in never fulfilled and always postponed. Acceleration is the beginning of 
the Dadaist cry to “Abolish art, abolish everyday life, abolish the separation panic and panic is the beginning of depression. The voice is forgotten, 
between art and everyday life”, the history of the avant-garde culminates  erased and cancelled in the erotic domain of Semiocapitalism. The voice 
in the gesture of 9/11. Stockhausen had the courage to say this, whilst many and the words are forgotten. Sex has no more words and no more voice, 
of us were thinking the same: terrorising suicide is the Gesamtkunstwerk, when it becomes marketing overload, when the education of a new
the total work of art of the century with no future. The fusion of art and life generation of humans happens in an environment where the body of the
(or death, what difference does it make?) is clearly visible in the form of mother is replaced by display machines. When sex loses its voice and 
action that we might call ‘terrorising suicide’. Let us take Pekka Auvinen  its words, it becomes a desert with no pleasure. Desire becomes frenzy: 
as an example. The Finnish youngster turned up to his class at school with  lost is the time of caresses when lost is the time for words.
a machine gun, killing eight people, himself included. Printed on his T-shirt The voice is the gate of poetry.
was the sentence: “Humanity is overrated”. Was not his gesture pregnant Poetry is the gate of self-therapy.
with signs typical of the communicative action of the arts? Therapy is the gate of pleasure.
At this point I want to oppose the concept of poetry to the concept of art. The realm of And pleasure, the gate of autonomy.
sensibility is involved in this ongoing process of cognitive reformatting that is implied in When I say therapy, I do not mean normalisation at all, I do not mean restoration of 
the Semiocapitalist mutation. Central to this mutation is the insertion of the electronic the working self either. Rather, I mean the ability to listen to the voice, the ability to
into the organic, the proliferation of artificial devices in the organic universe, in the body, understand words. This is why I want to oppose the voice to images, and poetry to art.
in communication and in society. Therefore, the relationship between consciousness and This is why I think that the way toward social recomposition and autonomy
sensibility is transformed and the exchange of signs undergoes a process of increasing necessitates the de-visualisation of imagination, and the therapeutic action
desensitisation. The digitalisation of social communication leads on the one hand to  of the voice.
a sort of desensitisation to the voice, to the caressing power of words, to the continuous
1. Baudrillard, J. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. 12.
flows of slow becoming, and on the other, it leads to a ‘becoming sensitive’ of code:
sensitisation to sudden changes of states and to the sequence of discrete signs.  Franco Berardi (Bifo) is a writer, media-theorist and media-activist, and Professor of Social History of Communication at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Milan.
This mutation produces painful effects in the conscious organism that we read through
the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression and 
a sort of suicidal epidemic.
Aesthetic perception – here properly conceived of as the realm of sensibility
and aesthesia – is directly involved in this transformation – in its attempt to
efficiently interface with the connective environment, the conscious organism
appears to increasingly inhibit what we call sensibility. By sensibility, I mean
the faculty that enables human beings to interpret signs that are not verbal
nor can be made so or the ability to understand what cannot be expressed 
in forms that have a finite syntax. This faculty reveals itself to be useless 
and even damaging in an integrated connective system. Sensibility slows
down processes of interpretation and renders them aleatory and ambiguous,
thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent.
Let’s think of the relation between image and sensibility. Let’s think of youporn.com as
Art. Youporn is the final realisation of art because life is in the image, and the image is

48 49
 Almost everything is ‘taken for granted’ in the art
world as ‘oppositional and radical’. Theory, above
all — even though it seems to have become increasingly
the central ‘spectacle’ in art fairs and biennales
(its original point was to query ‘spectacle’).
Also, we appear to have forgotten the pointed
link Adorno drew between the museum/gallery and
the mausoleum – that art only gets to the former
to be ‘interred‘.
There is a tendency to focus on ‘de-territori-
alising’, without enough attention to what comes in
its wake — ‘re-territorialising’ (recuperation). The
philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, tended to give equal
importance to both processes. To the latter, not so
much a ‘shock horror’ or ‘scandal’ or ‘sell out’ but
as a part of the ongoing force of creation, the
solidifying and dissolution of mental and emotional
territories and fields of action.

Sarat Maharaj is a curator and writer. He is a research

professor at Goldsmiths’ College, London, and is
currently Professor of Visual Art at Malmö Art Acad-
emy, Sweden.

Courtesy WHW/What, How & for Whom

Art & Hammer , Dejan Kršic

50 51
 Inspiration Comes Standard (Chrysler)
In the mid-1930s, at the close of the first thesis of his essay ‘The Work of Art in the 
Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, Walter Benjamin wrote of how various concepts
used in the discussion of art had become outmoded, useless for both art criticism 
and artistic production. These categories included creativity and genius, eternal value 
and mystery, “concepts”, he noted “whose uncontrolled [and at present almost
uncontrollable] application leads to a processing of data in the fascist sense”. 
Effectively Benjamin notes the recuperation of art into oppressive political and social
systems through a language of criticism, or rather, more appropriately, and especially 
so in the Nazi context, where criticism as such was banned – recuperation through 
art appreciation.
I think about Benjamin’s sneer at ‘creativity’ often these days, as the word
‘creative’ has returned forcefully. For a long time now there has been discussion of 
the co-option of the notion by the urban gentrifiers – at least since Richard Florida’s
well-distributed and implemented thesis on the Creative City, which stimulated countless
‘creative city’ branding exercises, hitching creativity to economic development as 
a motor, in the context of the New International Division of Labour. It might have been
thought that such a political wielding of the term creativity would tarnish it, contaminate
it, set it out of bounds for any contemporary soi-disant critical practice. But creativity
persists, and as a politically loaded term wedded to the theory and practice of anti-
globalists, artivists, art activists or hacktivists in its various forms. Creativity articulates
how culture can re-animate democracy.
Recently there was an exhibition of ten years of anti-global art and culture called
Signs of Revolt: Creative Resistance and Social Movements Since Seattle. Activist art
comes in from the heat of the struggle or coldness of the outside-world and finds a refuge
for a week, its energies, humour, anger and resistant creativity blu-tacked up for marvel.
It is as uninterested in framing each piece, as it is uninterested in the gallery itself 
as a frame. The Artivism network of Germany website likewise mobilises the force 
of the creative: it “looks for creativity that threatens the conventional wisdom with
progressive ideas”. The group PLATFORM are engaged in “promoting creative processes
of democratic engagement to advance social and ecological justice”. And so on. Perhaps
these initiatives have to proclaim their claim on the creative more loudly than the art 
that is ‘political’ but was always, all along, designed for the gallery, even as it fired off
critiques of the institutions under whose spotlights it glowed. Incidentally, the high-end,
high-tech ‘political art’, such as that curated at Laboral in Gijon, by Steve Dietz and
Christiane Paul, Feedforward: The Angel of History, does not need to make reference
to creativity nor the institution. It is comfortable enough with its own relation to both 
and to its funders global company Fundación Telefónica – no insecurity there, even as 
the show exhibits back to us the insecurities in which we exist, with “sections relating
to five themes: the ‘wreckage’ of the 20th Century created by wars and conflict; 
the countermeasures of surveillance and repression that the state as well as global
capital set up in an attempt to maintain control; the aesthetics and symbolic language 
of the media of our times; the forces of economic globalisation such as outsourcing 
and migration; and the possibilities of reconstruction and agency”. The post-conceptual
artists represented there are examples of what John Roberts has proposed as the
collaborators in a ‘general social technique’, who gather up their new labour skills 
(post-creative ones in a traditional sense) from here, there and anywhere in the network
that is the context of today’s digital and media technologies of communicative action
and build Guantanamo Bay in Second Life, a virtual Berlin Wall, a self-composed

52 53
surveillance database the FBI can only dream of, fictitious off-shore finance companies, the everyday and, for that reason, creativity is proposed as stimulus to a compassion
or technologies of obfuscation to parallel the media ones. And yet they remain artists. that is unusual, or as an alibi for the world’s usual coldness, or a catalyst of the new,
The ideology of the artist, the assertion of autonomy, are sustained – even as the world when it is needed.
out there is mediated, sliced, recombined, broadcast and narrowcast in the gallery. If creativity returns as sign that is as a sign of an alternative world, of course,
The artworld, that nebulous composite of galleries, funders, collectors, critics  something wonderful is being presented – a world organised in relation to the 
and theorists, have embraced all these different forms of being political and creative. creative not the economically productive, a new economy or non-economy. 
Perhaps the thesis of the general social technique helps to explain it – political art,  But at the same time, the proposition of a creativity unleashed, motivating 
in all these contemporary guises, more or less draws on technology, media, mass  the anti-global movements, creativity showcased as proof of said mobilisations, 
forms and so appears to be a part of the general hubbub of the contemporary that  in some sense, is to react, to reinstate a familiar situation. Artists are to assume 
is so sought after. But, in addition to being contemporaneous with what is, and therefore for themselves all the creativity and the right to dispense it whenever and wherever 
relevant, it remains art, which means it carries with it that irreducible meaningfulness, they please – in the name of the better world. The rest get to watch the spectacle 
the gravity absent from all the forms that might approximate it, use the same of themselves – or others – being marshalled in a more or less hopeless gesture 
technologies, the same points of reference. It is what it is with the creative added  towards a better world.
in as bonus. ‘The Author as Producer’, from 1934, investigated the prospects for contemporary
critical culture workers, examining strategies that would avoid the pressures on 
Passionate About Creativity (Citibank) artists to be individualistic, competitive or promoters of art as a new religion or an
Of course, it seems obvious. In the artworld how can there not be references to evasion of the ‘political’. Benjamin evaluated artists’ efforts to work out cultural forms
creativity. Creativity is the opposite of alienation. It is that which is expunged from  that could not be recuperated by fascism. He assessed what the new mass cultural 
the labour process as it becomes increasingly automated, rationalised, standardised, forms that existed – radio, film, photography, photomontage, worker-correspondent
alienated, subdivided into tasks, unfree. Creativity is proper to art, but art is the  newspapers − meant in the wider scheme of the social world, and how facts such as
problem. To re-spin that which has been spun so much, since Marx and Engels said  mass reproduction change humans’ relationship to culture of the past and the present. 
it 161 years ago: art is – potentially – just another ‘profession’ now, another type  The artist as producer abandons traditional skills and their associated creativity in favour
of wage labour. Its quality, creativity, is recuperated into art, which is recuperated  of an alignment with new technical relations of production. That is to say he assessed
into the system of labour and consumption. As Adorno insisted, some 40 years ago, – and more importantly urged on the overhauling of relations between the creative 
without even having seen the TV show School of Saatchi – art is a branch of the culture and the non-creative, artists and audiences. The revised social and political relations 
industry. Though it is also, he maintains, imperceptibly, possibly, tendentially, hope of art proposed by Benjamin set out from a circuit of participants. When he wrote of 
against hopefully, also ‘functionless’, or rather its social function is to be, apparently, “the author as producer” he meant thereby that everyone was an author of meanings 
without function. It is for those reasons – that art is politically and socially and or no-one was.
economically implicated and imbricated – that any mobilising of the notion of creativity Rather more traditional relations of aesthetic production and consumption 
need be probed to see what its attractions and detractions are. Benjamin’s hostility  are proposed by something such as the Artivist network of Germany, whose starting 
to it might cast the term into suspicion for us and even allow us to understand that point is that art has the power to inspire, imagine, dream. That may be true, but 
process whereby art and politics seem to collapse so desirably together in this way  is it not a concern that it is the same starting point as that of business, as articulated
and now. Might the assertion of the value of the creative be the logical outcome  quite succinctly in Carey Young’s video piece, ‘Product Recall’, from 2007. Young
of an aesthetics that refuses to remainder art, or, in other words, the spin-off  is on the psychoanalyst’s couch trying to remember what global brand used what 
a certain desire for recuperation – and one that now happily finds its recuperators  slogan as its advertising tagline – all associate the product with inspiration and
in the galleries. As the Artivist network in Germany says “In a flashy culture of  creativity: “Change the way you see the world”, “Imagination at work”, “Where
screens and Second Life, political artists are forced to the margins and must struggle  imagination begins”, ‘It’s not that hard to imagine’. In the advertising slogans, 
to find exposure and support”. Why? Or rather might not their continued insistence  it is not the labour process that is to be associated with creativity, rather it is 
on their own existence as artists be a part of the problem of creativity? Is not  the product – or, more intangibly, the brand, the image of the product. The fetish 
thereby any ‘political value’ re-converted back into ‘exhibition value’ – and perhaps object is sprinkled with the Disneydust of creativity. These brand tags stem from
without remainder? companies that have typically already recuperated the power of art – as quality 
of hipness, as humanising coating, through their sponsorship of art institutions, 
Think Different (Apple) fairs and exhibitions. What does the endless roll-call of the creative mantras reveal: 
Benjamin’s decision not to refunction the term ‘creativity’ (in a Brechtian sense) but  a simultaneous assumed power and actual blandness of the notion? Creativity makes 
to replace it with ‘production’ was a tactical move, made on the basis of the historical for a limber politics – so unlike the old-style dull moralism of ‘hardcore’ politics.
associations of the phrase, its relationship to genius, divine inspiration, otherworldliness, Creativity melds well with the out-of-nowhere, into anywhere, eventalism of Deleuzian
associations that stems from the Romantic period and characterise the artist as politique. It’s a flexible concept appropriatable by all who want to gesture towards
exception, visionary fool who is to be admired, then, later, perhaps rather tolerated,  their own virtuousness. And why shouldn’t art galleries or funding bodies be the first
but not taken seriously in the workaday world. Creativity is outside society, outside  amongst them?

54 55
 It is fair to say that critical art’s recupera-
Your Potential, Our Passion (Microsoft)
tion is felt more keenly during periods of conserva-
Recuperation is a powerful force – and it only works in one direction, in the Situationist tive backlash against previous avant-garde gains.
schema, according to which there would be only one answer as to who is recuperating As we can see with YBA, for instance, when the market
leads developments in contemporary art the result
whom. In ‘Basic Banalities’ from 1963, Raoul Vaneigem notes that Situationist poetry, is not a return to previously sellable works, but
not that of the professional poet or culture worker, but that of everyday resistance  the commodification of the latest thinking. And one
of the key elements of thinking on art at the time,
to domination, “is irreducible and cannot be recuperated by power (as soon as an 
evident in Technique Anglaise, Blimey and High Art
act is recuperated it becomes a stereotype, conditioning, language of power)”. Once Lite, was the recuperation of critical art.
recuperated, any resistant object or technique crosses over to become part of the How convenient! Imagine young artists in the
company of fame and fortune being able to comfort
lifeblood of the system that gave rise to it as moment of negation in the first place.  themselves with the latest postmodern catchphrase
But the true poetry is that which cannot be recuperated, notes Vaneigem, though  from Baudrillard, telling them that there is no
it is surrounded by power, which “encircles the irreducible and holds it by isolating it”. difference between complicity and critique in a
The Long Avant-Garde world characterised by simulacra. Under such cir-
Perhaps the culture industry is even more rapacious than it was in the 1960s – preferring cumstances critical artists, political artists and
to recuperate than isolate, where possible. Preferring to turn outwards – screening the Since Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde did engaged artists are regarded as naïve (or worse).
to political art what Adorno and Horkheimer had done John Roberts showed this fashionable position to
world, interfacing with the world – as this gesture, which undoubtedly, under the same to Reason in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, the be a “retreat from complexity” in his unflinching
motivations that have propelled the success of reality TV, speaks to contemporary accusation that art’s critique of its own institu- defence of ‘critical postmodernism’ in his agenda-
audiences who seek in culture some revelation about present-day iniquities, be that tions has been recuperated by those very same insti- setting book Postmodernism, Politics and Art.
tutions has been a perennial argument of art’s
between self and celebrity, first world and third world, tourist and migrant, the self  discourse. In fact, the theory of the incorporation
as worker and as consumer. of the avant-garde into art’s commercial and offi-
cial mainstream has become almost too easy to
Indeed the culture industry, or in its new guise as creative industry, is so fearless,

Freee, 2007, Billboard Poster

assert. It is a cliché.
it is able not only to showcase something akin to constructed situations in galleries.  The problem with the theory of recuperation is
It even re-releases the concepts into the city spaces for which they were originally the implication that prior to the process, or for

Protest is Beautiful,
those who steer clear of institutions etc, there
destined. Thereby it recuperates even the base concept of Psychogeography, its remains the possibility of not being institution-
fundamental unit, into its ‘creative cities’ visions: psychogeography, the ‘plaque alised. As a theory, recuperation is structured
around a paired opposite of two terms, one signify-
tournante’, the turning plate or hub, those magical turbulent junctions in the city  ing independence, critique, resistance etc, and the
where an excess of energy, a clash of ambiences, a disruption of planning’s logic other signifying neutralisation, institutionalisa-
generates resonant affectivities, proposes portals of transformation. We know  tion and corruption. This opposition, which is too It wasn’t just Roberts’ arguments, impressive as
black and white to navigate the complexities of they were, that convinced. Roberts’ case was lit-
the language of the hub. Indeed the Arnolfini’s director has spoken of it: in relation  art’s relation to power, leads to simplistic tac- tered with examples of conceptually sophisticated
to this spot, in the interests of bringing in tourist revenue in a post-industrial context: tics. Artists in the 1980s, for instance, attempted politically engaged art, thus drawing together a
to dilute the effects of recuperation by announcing,
“When we moved to our current venue, there was nothing here at all. Now the  up front, that they were corrupt through and through.
formidable cast of critical artists, including
Terry Atkinson, Art & Language, Jo Spence, Rasheed
habourside is packed. This part of the city has become a real hub”.1 Araeen and Mark Wallinger. These artists were not
The gallery is that agent that can make something out of nothing. That is the ignorant or neglectful of the issue of recuperation,
but their response was not to retreat from critique
ultimate creative act – to pluck something from the air. That is the truly immaterial act. but to “problematise the political status of art at

Freee, 2009, Billboard Poster

None of this is to say that galleries, funding bodies, the artists who benefit  the same time as asserting this is where art is to
from them are wrong or cynical. The question rather is what sort of space is the gallery, find its conditions of relevance”.

Revolution is Sublime,
Peter Osborne is convinced that critical art
what sort of mechanism is funding? Do both do anything to the things they suck up?  (especially institution critique) can be judged in
Or do they do nothing? Do they neutralise? Do they, in turn, put the brake on? Simply  terms of its reception by the institutions it
addresses. In 1971, he says, three major exhibitions
by turning the radical and creative gesture of negation into positivity and spectacle? were closed or cancelled, and this is a measure of
‘We Call It Recuperation’ comes from an Audi car advertisement from 2009.  their critical success. He argues that these rare
We call it recuperation. What Audi calls recuperation is the way energy produced by moments of institutional rejection show that such
Why would anyone subscribe to this strict divi- projects “reveal where a limit was by surpassing
applying the brake is captured, stored and used later to recharge the battery. I wonder sion? We should note that it is not only presupposed it”, but the epistemologisation of recuperation
how much this notion of recuperation could be applied to the current affection between by those who cynically insist that since recupera- cannot hide the all-or-nothing opposition that it
tion is unavoidable then there is no argument spells out for culture. When art’s institutions came
political art and galleries. The recuperated energy in the car is used to keep the system against business-as-usual. It is required, also, to understand the value of institution critique, or
going, to top up the depleting energies of the engine. The energy produced by critical for the radical to pitch themselves against a cor- “smartened up”, as Orborned puts it, such work “never
political art’s efforts to apply the brake to the system – the global system, the neo-liberal rupt and corrupting world. The division has another seriously challenged” art’s institutions again.
related purpose, too. Recuperation is used as an Proof: no more shows were cancelled or closed.
device – is gathered up in the gallery, diverted even to the gallery, to keep at least it,  insult by one section of the left to another: it In one sense Osborne introduces a Realpolitik
if not the hub of which it is a component, dynamic. distinguishes between the true radicals who of critical art, testing its success against whether
staunchly resist recuperation, and the liberal left the existing Ideological State Apparatus is pushed
1. Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines. who sacrifice the cause for a share of the spoils. beyond its tolerance, but its binary is too stark
Recuperation is an idea that lends itself to roman- to respond to specific historical circumstances.
Esther Leslie a writer and editor, and is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. ticised notions of resistance. Crystal clear oppositions of this sort are always

56 57
 abstract even when their intention is to bring us schools, the family, the law, the political system, only interpellate her pupils, but interpellates ness if resistance and struggle are not going to be
firmly to the ground. Osborne adds urgency to the the media, and culture) reproduce the existing herself as a ‘good teacher’. Or, as Lecercle explains, lost. The Left have been better at theorising the
heroism of resistance (in one of the shortest win- social relations (always relations of domination) the policeman does not only interpellate you as impossibility of social and cultural transforma-
dows of opportunity for avant-gardism available), not by repressing individuals but by transforming subject to his authority, he also interpellates tion, and they have excelled in theorising the ease
but as a formula for recuperation it lacks nuance. individuals into subjects. himself as the holder of authority: “the policeman with which the existing structures absorb all oppo-
Compare Osborne’s formula with what Rancière He argues that the present society is structur- whistles not only at ‘little Louis’ but also at sition. Williams is one of the few on the Left who
calls the politics of the part des sans-part. For ally dominated by a combination of two ISA’s, the himself”. As such, interpellation should not be have attended seriously to questions around the
Rancière something outside the system forces its school and the family. “What do children learn at thought of only in terms of something that happens persistence of hope and critique in the most objec-
way into the system but, by doing so, reconfigures school?” he asks. He answers that in the very proc- to individuals, or even as things that one indi- tionable of circumstances. Recuperation is a com-
the system itself. This is the work of politics. ess of learning techniques and knowledge; children vidual does to another, but as acts that we perform plex, conflictual process. It is never one-way,
Following Rancière we would have to say that poli- learn to behave like good citizens. Althusser points by ourselves and on ourselves. automatic, inevitable, 100% complete and irrevers-
tics in its full sense does not take place until the out, therefore, that as well as being an Ideological ible. It is the persistence of the avant-garde’s
act of recuperation backfires on the system. So long State Apparatus, the school is protected from its struggle after recuperation that we would call the
as the part des sans-part remains in its designated ideological function by the ideology that it is a ‘long avant-garde’.

Workers of the World Unite, Freee,

place outside the system then it has not fulfilled “neutral environment purged of ideology”. The Ideo- Even when Althusser first devises his theory of
its political mission. Without such a shift, of logical State Apparatuses are certainly the insti- ideology as always ‘state ideology’ through the
course, the part des sans-part is depoliticised by tutions where we encounter dominant ideas such as Ideological State Apparatuses, primarily the family

2008, Billboard Poster

occupying the very place that the system has allot- ‘God’ and ‘beauty’, but we do not understand ideol- and the school, he refers to those teachers who
ted for it. We might think of recuperation as one ogy very well unless we see ISA’s as the places where resist the official dogma as ‘heroes’. They are
aspect of the process by which this allotted place citizens are produced as subjects. heroic because they act against the apparatus from
is challenged and changed, reconfiguring the whole Althusser adds another new concept to the ISA’s within its own institutions. So, there is no call
system as a result. It is clearly too one-dimension- in order to explain the functioning of ideology. He to be dismissive of art’s institutions who “smarten
al, therefore, to regard the process of recuperation uses the word ‘interpellation’ to name the process up”, as Osborne puts it. In fact, the very process
as an event whereby the institution cancels critique by which individuals are constituted as subjects. of ‘smartening up’ shows that recuperation must be
by incorporating it. Althusser argues that subjectivity is not ‘mental’ Since interpellation forms and reforms subjec- a two-way transformation if it is to occur at all.
but ‘practical’, existing not in consciousness but tivity, we can expect recuperation to have an emo- Institutions which do not change cannot recuperate
in rituals, practices and institutions. Interpel- tional effect. If its interpellation is successful practices that are critical of them. And what’s more,
lation is the process by which institutions produce recuperation must feel great. Recuperation is an those individuals within art’s institutions who
the subjects they require. They do not just wish affirmation that feels like victory. If the inter- work against the existing “partition of the sensi-
Protest Drives History, Freee,

for subjects, they use rituals and simple physical pellation of recuperation fails, however – which ble”, to use another of Rancière’s phrases, should
acts (such as kneeling, praying, sitting, standing means that a previous interpellation still stands be given credit.
2008, Billboard Poster

and singing) to produce these effects. – then recuperation must feel awful, like betrayal It is not better for critical art to stay in the
We can see then that Althusser’s analysis does or disgust. And, of course, one interpellates sub- wilderness for as long as possible. Critical art
the opposite of vulgar ideological critique: instead ject can feel disgusted on behalf of another who doesn’t stay critical for longer because art’s insti-
of dismissing ideas as quickly as possible to reveal had been successfully recuperated. tutions lag behind developments. Art moves on any-
the reality behind appearances, Althusser sees the At roughly the same time that Debord and the way. We saw this during the period of what Bürger
ideological content of simple physical acts and Situationists developed the idea of recuperation, called the historical avant-garde, when artists
regards practices, rituals and institutions as the Habermas articulated the twin processes by which moved on at an accelerated rate without needing
Recuperation is one of the names the Left in material existence of an ideological apparatus. the ‘public sphere’ – the social space designated institutional recuperation to egg them on. Any
Europe has given to the various processes by which This is why we have to think about recuperation for open critical opinion formation – had been ‘colo- theory of critical art that prefers art’s institu-
its critique of existing conditions is fatally com- through the Althusserian concept of Ideological nised’ and ‘debased’ by market forces and the state. tions not to ‘smarten up’ is irresponsible, trite
promised by being channelled through dominant State Apparatuses. Despite his reputation for a parliamentary and con- and vulgar. The thesis of the short avant-garde had
structures. Debord points out that militants are One can enter a church without being subject to sensual politics, Habermas is one of the key theo- to be replaced with an understanding of the long
transformed into passive consumers of their own it, without performing the subjectivity that it rists of the ways in which grass-roots activism and avant-garde. The persistence of the avant-garde
militancy by the spectacle. This is recuperation. institutionally produces, but inevitably one will critique is colonised by the two ‘steering media’ despite and through its recuperation is secured by
And the same effects are produced by the State, as enter a church as one subject or another, as a tour- of money and power. One of the key differences the continuation of the struggle for emancipation
well as market forces, when it legitimates and funds ist perhaps, or someone who appreciates architec- between Habermas’ conception of the ‘debased public in and against the current conditions.
its own opposition. As such, the theory of recupera- ture. And these other subjects will have been sphere’ and Debord’s conception of the recuperation
tion is part of a shift in Left thinking that brought produced by their own institutions, rituals and of critique is that when Habermas theorises the Dave Beech is an artist and writer. Freee is a col-
about an extension of the Left’s agenda from politics practices. Here, ideology functions effectively conditions of recuperation he also, simultaneously, lective whose members are the artists, Dave Beech,
and economics narrowly understood to questions of without having to pass through the consciousness provides a theory of the continual struggle, after Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan.
ideology and hegemony, that is to say, from produc- of the subject. It does this, not by persuading them, recuperation, between power and emancipation. www.freee.org.uk
tion to reproduction. And the current state of play but simply by welcoming them into institutions, During the same period Raymond Williams argued
in political theory on the Left continues to develop providing them with meaningful tasks, and identify- that the Left needed to supplement the theory of
these themes in the writing of Badiou, Rancière, ing them as members of a community. So, if we know revolution as a coup d’état with an understanding
Balibar, Habermas, Lecercle, Butler, Laclau, Mouffe, from J L Austin that speech acts “do things with of the ‘long revolution’ of culture. He, too, knew
Žižek, and many others. Ideology remains at the words”, we can say, after Althusser, that ideology well that culture and the media had been cynically
heart of Left thinking today. interpellates individuals as subjects with speech prevented from reaching its democratic potential
In order to understand the core issues raised acts and ritual acts. for the sake of private gain. His conclusion was not
by recuperation in terms of contemporary theories Jean-Jacques Lecercle adds: “the function of to pronounce popular and critical culture as recu-
of ideology we need to grasp the essentials of ideology is to interpellate individuals as subjects perated, but to argue that men like Rupert Murdoch
Althusser’s rearticulation of the material and – a task in which it never fails: all individuals “must be run out”. Here, again, we see how a politics
social reality of the production of ideas within are always interpellated”. Hence, the individual of critical culture need not be brought to a prema-
what he called the Ideological State Apparatuses. will be interpellated as one kind of subject or ture conclusion at the first recuperative blow. And,
In addition to the State apparatus itself (comprised another. No-one escapes, not even the agent of the following Williams, we might develop a theory of
of the police, the courts, the prisons and the army) Ideological State Apparatus who interpellates you. the ‘long avant-garde’.
with its various mechanisms of coercive force, the It is inevitable that, while teaching her class of Williams reminds us that recuperation is never
Ideological State Apparatuses (including churches, toddlers to be good citizens, the teacher does not final but calls for perseverance and resourceful-

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 Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital.
It’s called Democracy. Alan Badiou 1

Critique is an essential part of capitalist production. The ability to express one’s opinions
in public allows the system to verify itself as democratic. Through such means, it is able
to generate its own critique and then quickly neutralise it. Within the neo-liberal spaces
of contemporary art, thereby some opinions not readily acceptable in other public places
can be displayed but the politics easily contained. The critical artist offers soft politics
that is easily recuperated to legitimate the art institution’s self-reflection. But it’s not
quite that simple – and far more dialectical. On the one hand, art appears to have lost 
its critical power as any form of critique is automatically recuperated; but on the other,
the new situation opens up different strategies of opposition that respond to the ways 
in which power is organised.2

Les Liens Invisibles, 2010

Courtesy the artist
Repetitionr,
What is required is a more detailed examination of the power relations at work, 
and how they are configured as part and parcel of informational capitalism, and how
social relations and control structures are managed. With no longer a centre of power 
to be found or established opposition as such, it is clear that the (class) enemy is
increasingly hard to identify across its networks, and yet power continues to produce 
its own vulnerabilities. Correspondingly, the recommendation of those developing
oppositional tactics is to take advantage of the vulnerabilities in networks (much 
like successful computer viruses do) by exploiting power differentials that exist in the
operating system.3 Such tactics draw on methods informed by network and information
theory, as well as reverse engineering mass culture.4 The approach offers direct
responses to recuperative processes, and yet the effect of tactical media is paradoxical,
as Lovink contends, leading equally tactically to “benign tolerance”.5 That may be sadly
the case, but the reappraisal of recuperative processes and interventionist responses 
is necessarily ongoing, not least in the context of how social media have changed the
face of the representational political process. This is evident in the apparent success 
of various campaigns that hope to influence the outcomes of elections and in the rise 
of services that offer effective participation in the political process.
The tactics of dissent have changed too. Seppukoo, a recent hack of Facebook
by Les Liens Invisibles (2009),6 provides an example where users were able to commit
virtual suicide in a ritualistic removal of their virtual identity.7 Critique here operates
in the challenge to the living-death user-experience of Facebook and other similar
programs that express the social relation in restrictive form. The action provoked 
a litigious response by Facebook not least.8 Part of the friendly (inter)face of capitalism,
restricted social relations are perpetuated through networks of friends (everyone is 
a potential friend rather than enemy), such that antagonistic social relations are masked
and the politics nullified. Evoking Schmitt’s notion of enmity (in The Concept of the

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 Political, 1927), the political differentiation of friend or enemy (aka Facebook or Another project by Les Liens Invisibles, commissioned by Arnolfini in 2010, uses the
Seppukoo) lies at the heart of this, and offers a certain definition of politics. The tactic of over-identification to respond to such tendencies.15 In the age of over-mediated
reference to the Japanese ritual suicide of Seppuku (literally stomach-cutting) evokes democracy, Repetitionr provides a platform for activism with minimal effort, an online
the stubborn refusal to fall into the hands of the enemy – and the preference for petition service with a difference; offering advanced Web 2.0 technologies to make
autonomy even at the cost of one’s life.9 Virtual suicide stands as the refusal to operate participatory democracy a truly user-centered experience.16 The success of every
under intolerable conditions of service and as an affirmation of creative autonomous campaign is guaranteed as just one click is all it takes to generate a whole campaign
practice. Refusal responds to the way in which those in power regenerate themselves with up to a million automatic fake signatures. The project reflects the acknowledged
through constant upgrades to break opposition; the position derives from Tronti’s essay need for new institutional forms that challenge existing systems of governance and
‘The Strategy of Refusal’ of 1965, following the logic that capital uses workers’ representational structures, as a blatant expression of non-representational democracy.17
antagonistic opposition as a motor for its own development. But crucially, capital does The approach challenges the limits of representational democracy and the discourse 
not wish to destroy critique entirely, as it is fundamental to its operations, but obscure of neo-liberalism in general, offering a means to rethink politics within network cultures.
its origins and subdue its effectiveness. Moreover, this is its friendly face whether you If this is an example of over-identification with real existing participatory democracy,
like it or not. For instance, in the case of Facebook, they keep your account details for then the provocation is that we need to develop far better strategies and techniques 
perpetuity and commercial exploitation. The Seppukoo ‘about’ page explains: “Suicide of organisation.
is a free choice and a kind of self-assertiveness. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t give  In opposition to informational capitalism lies commons-based peer production.
to its users this faculty at all, and your account will be only deactivated.”11 Indeed, concerns over the commons are encapsulated by the title of Hardt and Negri’s
recent book Commonwealth, to indicate the ‘common-wealth’ of land, water and the
atmosphere.18 Current political, economic and ecological crises derive from aggressive
and primitive forms of property (such as disputes over copyright and intellectual property) 
and energy production (geopolitical disputes over carbon fuels) – a lack of recognition 
Les Liens Invisibles, 2009

of the common. Historical parallels between the ways in which the commons were turned
Seppukoo (screen grab),

in private property (through the enclosure movement), and the ways in which intellectual
Courtesy the artist

property is being privatised have been well established. In addition, the way that code 
is being privatised offers a useful focus to discuss wider issues of organisation and 
power struggles.
The cultural significance of this is captured by the term recursive public to account
Democracy and authoritarianism operate dialectically. This is in keeping with the for the ways in which the public is “a collective independent of other forms of constituted
liberal tradition, as Balibar explains, and the distinction between individual opinions  power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of
and collective actions in the ways they “reciprocally ‘underwrite’ each other”.12 actually existing alternatives”.19 Somewhat related to the concept of the public sphere,
Individuals voice their diverse opinions, both for and against the ruling power, in order  a recursive public is capable of modifying itself through participation, relatively
to legitimate its effects. Expressing the violence of participation, this is the basis of unmediated by higher authority. For Kelty, the collective technical experiment of the 
liberal democracy as well as the basis of its democratic renewal – what we together  Free Software movement is an example of a recursive public that draws attention 
refer to as participatory democracy. Individuals actively imagine their participation in to its democratic and political significance and the limitations of our understanding 
what ultimately is part of their subjugation. This comes close to Lazzarato’s discussion  of the public in the light of the restructuring of power over networks, struggles over
of participative management in the workplace as a technique of power in restructured intellectual property rights and sharing of code. In this sense, the concept of the public
form, and one that appears to grant special privileges to artistic labour. Indeed, Lazzarato sphere itself is taken as open to modification and reuse – made recursive in other words.
thinks the technique is more totalitarian than the production line as it involves the  As a consequence, a reconceptualisation of political action is required that combines
willing subjectivity of the worker in the participatory process.13 Again, popular social traditional forms of expression such as free speech with coding practices and sharing
media platforms like Facebook come to mind, and more specifically applications such as associated with Free Software. Making reference to the work of Arendt, Kelty’s
Causes through which users can imagine the effectiveness of their political engagement intervention is to extend a definition of a public grounded in discourse – through speech,
by creating petitions in support of a particular cause. The ‘about’ statement expresses writing and assembly – to other legal and technical layers that underpin the internet in
the ambition of no less than changing the world: recognition of the ways in which contemporary power and control are structured – through
Facebook Platform presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, both discourses and infrastructures.20
most of whom are on Facebook, in seizing the future and making a difference in the Such a reconsideration of public space or a politics of the common exposes the 
world around us. Our generation cares deeply, but the current system has alienated sad reality of liberal participatory democracy. To Rancière, the origin of the political lies
us. Causes provides the tools so that any Facebook user can leverage their network in the properties of its subjects and in how they come together, how they ‘part-take’, 
of real friends to effect positive change. The goal of all this is what we call ‘equal or in other words how they participate in contradictory forms of action. “Politics is 
opportunity activism.’ We’re trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals a paradoxical form of action” according to Rancière, and hence can be defined in the
to change the world.14 contradictions at the heart of action – between acting and being acted upon. It is the

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very “axioms of democracy” (of ruling and being ruled) that require rupture to open up
discussion of the constitution of the subject and its relations.21 New publics are required
– in coalitions of human and non-human agents involved in radical networks – to engage
with and to modify the infrastructures they inhabit as an extension of the public sphere.
Evidently publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, arguing and
protesting but also through modification of the domain or platform through which these
practices are enacted. Democracy requires an upgrade but only if released fully into the
public domain.
1. Badiou, A. “Prefazione all’edizione italiana.” Metropolitica. Naples: Cronopio, 2002. There are far too many other references
to mention here that take a critical view of Western representational democracy, but a particularly polemical view appears
in the first section of Muammar Al Qathafi’s ‘The Solution of the Problem of Democracy’ in his The Green Book.
2. I prefer the word ‘antagonism’ to ‘opposition’ in recognition of how important it is for neo-liberalism to dilute it in order to function
effectively. Amongst others, this is in keeping with Chantal Mouffe’s position in “Artistic and Agonistic Spaces.” Art & Research.
vol. 1. no. 2, 2007 <http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe>.
3. Galloway, AR and Thacker, E. “The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.” Electronic Mediations. vol. 21. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007.
4. The exhibition Craftivism at Arnolfini Nov 2009–Feb 2010, is an example of ‘reverse engineering’ aiming to question and disrupt
the prevailing codes of mass consumerism <http://www.craftivism.net>.
5. Lovink says: “The ideal is to be little more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical media set
themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that ‘modders’ do in the game industry: both dispense with their knowledge
of loop holes in the system for free. They point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical
media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement.” Geert Lovink quoted in Raley, R. “Tactical Media.” Electronic Mediations.
vol. 28. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009: 28. ‘Tactical Media’ broadly refers to contemporary forms
of dissent somewhere between creative experimentation and a reflexive engagement with social change; particularly important
are the collaborative writings of Lovink, as in ‘The ABC of Tactical Media’, 1997 (with David Garcia), and ‘New Rules for the New
Actonomy’, 2001 (with Florian Schneider) and the Next Five Minutes conferences, held in Amsterdam from 1993.
6. Les Liens Invisibles are an imaginary art-group from Italy, comprised of media artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini
<http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org>.
7. Seppukoo <http://www.seppukoo.com>. Also note similar projects, such as Cory Arcangel’s Friendster Suicide <http://www.
coryarcangel.com/2005/12/friendster-suicide-live-in-person-dec-2005> and moddr_lab’s Web2.0 Suicide Machine <http://
suicidemachine.org>.
8. See the ‘cease and desist’ letter from Facebook’s lawyers, and the reply – both linked from the Seppukoo home page <http://
www.seppukoo.com>.
9. Thanks to Tatiana Bazzichelli for pointing out that the inspiration for the project is Seppuku, the ritual suicide that some members
of the Luther Blissett Project committed in 1999, to declare the end of their multiple identities project <http://www.lutherblissett.
net/archive/452_en>.
10. Tronti, M. “The Strategy of Refusal.” Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e). vol. 3, no. 3. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980:
28–34.
11. Seppukoo <http://www.seppukoo.com>.
12. Balibar, E. Spinoza and Politics. London: Verso, 2008. 27.
13. Lazzarato, M. “Forms of Production and Circulation of Knowledge.” Readme! Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge
of Knowledge. Ed. Josephine Bosma et al. New York: Autonomedia, 1999.
14. <http://apps.facebook.com/causes/about>
15. The psychoanalytic term ‘over-identification’, often associated with Slavoj Žižek, has been taken up as a tactic by many
activist-artists, including The Yes Men, to expose a position by exaggerating a position, wildly pushing the system to its
extremes in order to conclude that it is unacceptable.
16. <http://www.repetitionr.com>
17. ‘Non-representational democracy’ describes democracy decoupled from sovereign power, as discussed in Ned Rossiter’s
Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions. Rotterdam: NAi, in association with the Institute of
Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2006. 39. Rossiter also cites Paolo Virno’s The Grammar of the Multitude.
New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.
18. In addition, “love provides another path for investigating the power and productivity of the common. [… Such a] notion of love
gives us a new definition of wealth that extends our notion of the common and points toward a process of liberation.” Hardt,
M and Negri, A. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009. xi–xii.
19. Kelty, CM. Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 3.
20. Ibid. 50.
21. Rancière, J. “Ten Theses on Politics.” Theory & Event 5.3, 2001 <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/
v005/5.3ranciere.html>.

Geoff Cox is a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics at the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University, Denmark, and Associate
Curator of Online Projects at Arnolfini.
Les Liens Invisibles is an imaginary art-group from Italy, comprised of media artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini.

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66 67
68 69
70 71
72
73

The Yes Men are an activist-duo consisting of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.
 What were once the values and philosophy of the hacker ethic has become the domain 
of business companies contributing to the development of Web 2.0 and the notion of
social media. According to Steven Levy, the first to use the term, the hacker ethic was 
a “new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a dream”.1 With its own language and
rules, and its own representative community, its roots go back to the 1950s and 1960s,
crossing the activity of the hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
and in the 1970s, the rise of the sharing computer culture in California (well represented
by the Community Memory Project in Berkeley and the Homebrew Computer Club in
Silicon Valley). Embracing the ideas of sharing, openness, decentralisation, free access
to computers, world improvement and the hands-on imperative (Levy 1984), the hacker
ethic has been a fertile imaginary for many European hackers as well, who started to
connect through BBSes in the 1980s.
At first glance it may seem evident that business enterprises in social
networking and Web 2.0 built their corporate image by re-appropriating 
the language and the values of the first phase of hacker culture – 
a language once very representative of certain networking art practices 
as well, from mail art to net.art. Tim O’Reilly, one of the main promoters 
of the Web 2.0 philosophy, and organiser of the first Web 2.0 conference 
in 2004 (San Francisco), wrote in the autumn of 2006: “Web 2.0 is much
more than just pasting a new user interface onto an old application. It’s 
a way of thinking, a new perspective on the entire business of software.”2
However, both what has been called Web 2.0 since 2004 (when Dale
Dougherty came up with the term during a brainstorming session) as 
well as the whole idea of ‘folksonomy’ which lies behind social networking,
blogging, and tagging, are nothing new.
According to the software developer and venture communist Dmytri Kleiner, these 
forms of business are just a mirror of the economic co-optation of values of sharing,
participation and networking which inspired the early formation of hacker culture and
peer2peer technology. As he pointed out during a panel at the Chaos Communication
Congress in Berlin in 2007, “the whole point of Web 2.0 is to achieve some of the
promises of peer2peer technology but in a centralised way; using web servers and
centralised technologies to create user content and folksonomy, but without actually
letting the users control the technology itself.”3 But even if the Web 2.0 business
enterprises do not hide their function as data aggregators, they make openness, user
generated content and networking collaboration their main core strategies. The user
contribution becomes a key to market dominance. Google was one of the first companies
to base its business in involving users to give productive feedback, releasing beta
versions of its applications, such as Gmail for example, to be tested by users without
being formally part of the production process.
This idea of ‘perpetual beta’ (O’Reilly 2006) was well anticipated by the
‘bazaar method’ of Eric S. Raymond (1999), as the capability to create
software and other products of intelligence and creativity through the
collaboration of a community of individuals acting to make communication
channels open. Raymond’s well-known essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’
is obvious support of the open source ‘cause’ (Raymond is co-founder of the
Open Source Initiative) but also an apology for greater involvement in the 
free market.4 His metaphor juxtaposes the methodology of open source and
its deterritorialisation of development (the bazaar method) to the one of free
software, often developed in laboratories or closed groups of programmers

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 (the cathedral). This text, considered controversial by many hackers for  storage and transfer facility – while the Free Software Foundation bases 
being heavily negative towards the work of the Free Software Foundation, its GNewSense, a free software GNU/Linux distribution, on Ubuntu.11 This
created a shift from the idea of open source (as user rights of free ambiguity of values, which is contributing to the end of the time of digital
infrastructures, well explained by the Free Software Definition and the Open utopias, is described well by Matteo Pasquinelli: “a parasite is haunting the
Source Definition), to the model of networked collaboration, “not only referring hacker haunting the world” (2008), analysing the contemporary exploitation
to computer programs, but evoking broader cultural connotations” (Cramer of the rhetoric of free culture, and the collapse of the ‘digitalism’ ideology,
2006). By shifting the target from users to producers, this vision focuses corroded by the ‘parasite’ of cognitive capitalism.12
more on business opportunities than on an ethical idea of software However, there are other possibilities for analysing the matter, which once again could
distribution. It makes open source more a branding exercise than a philosophy, probably open a field of action for artists and activists. The question is whether the
moving away from the emphasis on freedom and rights for users stressed  co-optation theory of the counterculture might be the right explanation to understand 
by the free software movement – the same conceptual trick used by the the present development, or better, implosion, of the hacker and networking culture.
Creative Commons initiative, as Anna Nimus (aka Joanne Richardson and Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool (1997) and Fred Turner’s From Counterculture
Dmytri Kleiner)5 and Florian Cramer pointed out in 2006.6 to Cyberculture (2007) may point the way; both books analyse how the endless cycles
A predictable consequence of Raymond’s networking vision emerges when O’Reilly, of rebellion and transgression are very well mixed with the development of business
involved since the early days of the Open Source Initiative, openly refers to what he  culture in western society – specifically in the US. As Thomas Frank suggests
calls the “open source paradigm shift”, showing the business advantages in building in the late 1950s and early 1960s, leaders of the advertising and menswear businesses
applications on top of open source software. This shift implies the idea of building developed a critique of their own industries, of over-organisation [sic] and creative
modular architecture to allow cooperating programmes, encouraging Internet-enabled dullness, that had much in common with the critique of mass society which gave rise
collaborative development, having users as co-contributors, and creating viral distribution to the counterculture. The 1960s was the era of Vietnam, but it was also the high
and marketing (O’Reilly 2007). The idea of applying collaborative software development watermark of American prosperity and a time of fantastic ferment in managerial thought
in Web 2.0 companies therefore, becomes a strategic business advantage without and corporate practice. But business history has been largely ignored in accounts of
stressing the accent on the rights of users and making life easier for producers, with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. This is unfortunate, because at the heart of every
subsequent decreases in costs. Many companies have adopted the bazaar method and interpretation of the counterculture is a very particular – and very questionable –
the open source built-in communities model, from IBM, Google, Apple and Facebook,  understanding of corporate ideology and of business practice.”13
to Creative Commons and Wikipedia. The American counterculture of the 1960s was very much based in mass
Writing about the problem of intellectual property and the producer-consumer culture, promoting “a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became
dichotomy that the CC licenses fail to resolve, Nimus pointed out: mainstream itself” (Frank 1997) and becoming attractive for corporations
What began as a movement for the abolition of intellectual property has from Coca Cola to Nike, but also for IBM and Apple.
become a movement of customizing [sic] owners’ licenses. Almost without Fred Turner explains how the rise of cyberculture utopias is strongly connected with 
notice, what was once a very threatening movement of radicals, hackers the development of the computer business in Silicon Valley, as the background of the
and pirates is now the domain of reformists, revisionists, and apologists Whole Earth network by Stewart Brand and the magazine Wired demonstrate.14 It should
for capitalism. When capital is threatened, it co-opts its opposition”.7 not surprise anyone today that Google is adopting the same strategy of getting close 
This shift of the hacker principles of openness and collaboration into commercial to counterculture – hackers, burners at Burning Man, etc. – because many hackers 
purposes is the mirror of a broader phenomenon. We are facing a progressive in California were already close to the development of the business we face today. 
commercialisation of contexts of software development and sharing, which want to The cyber-utopias of the 1980s and 1990s were pushed by the market as well, and they
appear open and progressive (highly emblematic is Google’s claim “Don’t be evil”),  were very well connected with its development. Turner demonstrates how the image of 
but which are indeed transforming the meaning of communities and networking, and  the authentic counterculture of the 1960s, antithetical to the technologies, and later
the battle for information rights, placing it within the boundaries of the marketplace.  co-opted by the forces it opposed, is actually the shadow of another version of history. 
The artistic works of Aaron Koblin, based on crowdsourcing and the Amazon Mechanical A history which instead has its roots in a “new cybernetic rhetoric of systems and
Turk, are good examples of this phenomenon of the aestheticisation of networking information” born already in the research laboratories of World War II in which scientists
practices, which become part of the business field.8 and engineers “began to imagine institutions as living organisms, social networks as
Like Google, many social networking platforms try to leave an image of webs of information” (Turner 2007). Once again, with Web 2.0 enterprises, we are facing
themselves as ‘a force for good’.9 At the same time, the free software the same phenomenon.
community is not alien to this progressive corporate takeover of the hacker Accepting that the digital utopias of the 1980s and 1990s have never been
counterculture. Google organises the Summer of Code festival every year  completely extraneous to business practices, might be an invitation for
to get the best hackers and developers to work for the company.10 It artists and hackers to subvert the false idea of ‘real’ counterculture, and to
encourages open source development, supports the development of Firefox start analysing how the cyclic business trends work, and what they culturally
and funds hackerspaces – i.e. the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. Ubuntu represent. Analysing how the hacker culture became functional to accelerate
One, an online backup and synchronisation utility, uses Amazon S3 as its capitalism, as it happened for the youth movement of the 1960s, might

76 77
 change the point of view and the area of criticism. The statement “if you
can’t beat ‘em, absorb ‘em” could be reversed by the artists and hackers
themselves. If hackers and activists can’t avoid indirectly serving corporate
revolutions, they should work on absorbing the business ideology for their
own advantage, and consequently, transforming it and hacking it. A possible
tendency might not just be refusing business, but re-appropriating its
philosophy, making it functional for our purposes. Some artists are already
working in this way, creating art projects that deal with business and which
subvert its strategies, such as The People Speak (Planetary Pledge Pyramid
2009), or Alexei Shulgin (Electroboutique 2007), UBERMORGEN.COM
(Google Will Eat Itself 2005, and Amazon Noir 2006), both created with
Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico (The Sound of Ebay 2008), and the
community of Seripica Naro (2005), just to mention a few.15
Even if it is easy to recognise co-optation as a cyclic business strategy among hackers
and activists, it takes more effort to accept that business has often been part of
counterculture and cultural development. In this phase of ambiguity, it is fundamental 
to look back to analyse the reasons for the shift in networking paradigms and hacker
values, but it is also necessary to break some cultural taboos and avoid dualistic
oppositions. Artists should try to work like viruses to stretch the limits of business
enterprises, and hack the meaning of business itself. Instead of refusing to compromise
with commercial platforms, they should try to put their hands on them, to reveal hidden
mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion, and to develop a critique of the medium
itself. Once again adopting the hands-on strategy of the hacker, hacktivists should
directly face the economy that has made these strategies its core business.

Something Wrong is Nothing Wrong,

JODI and Adam Mignanelli, 2010
1. Levy, S. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1984.
2. Musser, J, O’Reilly, T and O’Reilly Radar Team. “Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practices.” O’Reilly Radar Autumn 2006

Courtesy VICE, January 2010

<http:// oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf>.
3. Panel with Kleiner, D, Mars, M, Prug, T and Medak, T. “Hacking Ideologies, part 2: Open Source, a capitalist movement.”
24th Chaos Communication Congress. bcc Berliner Congress Center, Berlin. 23 Nov 2007 <http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_
m4v_2311.html>.
4. Raymond, E. “The Cathedral & the Bazaar.” O’Reilly 2000 [1999] <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
cathedral-bazaar>.
5. Nimus, A. “Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons.” Subsol 2006 <http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/
nimustext.html>.
6. Cramer, F. “The Creative Common Misunderstanding.” nettime 2006 <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0610/ JODI: Something Wrong is Nothing Wrong, Ad by Motherboard TV (DELL). The image, published in VICE magazine Vol 7 Nr 2 (2010),
msg00025.html>. is an advertisement for the social networking platform Motherboard TV, sponsored by DELL. Those familiar with digital culture
7. Nimus, A. “Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons.” Subsol 2006 <http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/ will immediately recognize something else. The advertisement shows a reconstruction of the homepage http://wwwwww.jodi.org,
nimustext.html>. a work by the Dutch artists JODI, a very well known symbol of early net.art. The advertisement, branded by DELL, might also be
8. Aaron Koblin <http://www.aaronkoblin.com>. a symbol of something more as my article explores.
9. Panel with Fry, S. Stone, B and Hoffman, R. “Social Media – A Force for Good.” Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, Cambridge
University. 19 Nov 2009 <http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/11/19/social-media-force-for-good>.
10. Google Summer of Code <http://code.google.com/soc>.
11. As Florian Cramer made me notice, discussing Ubuntu in private e-mail correspondence.
12. Pasquinelli, M. Animal Spirits. A Bestiary of the Commons. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
13. Frank, T. The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1997.
14. Turner, F. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007.
15. Respectively: <http://www.pledgepyramid.org>; <http://electroboutique.com>; <http://gwei.org>; <http://www.amazon-noir.
com>; <http://www.sound-of-ebay.com>; <http://www.serpicanaro.com>.

Tatiana Bazzichelli is a communication sociologist, currently undertaking PhD research at Aarhus University, Denmark, on the evolution
of social networking.

78 79
 working on them instead of seeing it as an abstrac-
tion that you can only be for or against. This should
be done with the cultural industries as well, by
whoever has the means and time, to discover that
they are in fact assembled as societies with dif-
ferent parts that can be disconnected and modulated.
In relation to what we do, some activities amplify
the effect of it, some neutralise it, some straight-
forwardly try to attack it, but they can also be
turned against one another.
We don't feel that we have to protect our ideas
and activities from recuperation because the
essence of what we are is not a position but a
movement. A way of moving and traversing different
political issues.
We have always followed the way of Kopimi, the will All projects are events and movement. So the
to be copied, which flips the question of recupera- question is how these events interact with different
tion around.1 It is ‘we’ that recuperate ‘them’. If parts of activist, capitalist and cultural logics.
you think like a hacker, the more advanced the media This can only be answered by experimentation.
industry makes things, the better the hacks will
be. The iPhone is super advanced, which means a 1. kopimi (pronounced, and sometimes also spelled
jailbreak of the iPhone gives you a great device. copyme) is the opposite of copyright, specifi-
Same thing with Despotify, the software that made cally encouraging that the work be copied–for
it possible to save tracks from Spotify, the music any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.
industry streaming service.
Really, I don't think recuperation is such a big Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) describes itself
problem. It's good if it happens, because then you as a ‘conversation’ about the technological, the
can advance one more step. The worst that can happen artistic to the political.
is if you are stuck in the same problem, repeating www.piratbyran.org
the same conflicts. And given that innovation hap-
pens at the edges of the network, the more the complex
hierarchical organisations of the industry try to
move in the direction of the network, the better it
is. Because the internet will always be faster and
further than what they do. If they try to recuperate
what we do it only means that we have a better plat-
form to work on and that the problem becomes more
advanced, that is, filled with more potentiality.

Chto dielat’? Nabolievshie voprosy nashego dvizheniia,

I am also simplifying things here by talking

about us and them, systems and mainstreams. Lately,
we have instead been thinking in terms of tunnels.
Large and small, temporary or reinforced, with con-
nections to each other. This is what the internet
Courtesy of British Library

is, a system of tunnels, there is no surface or

Stuttgart, 1902

centre. And you can extend this logic to things

outside the net as well. For example, in the last
years, we stopped considering the EU to be a system
which sends out laws, and instead a system of
bureaucratic, legal, communication systems and dis-
cursive tunnels that are surprisingly open. Some-
times you have to dig a bit, but it is completely
possible to enter into these processes and start

80 81
 In 2004, a group operating under the name Cast Off – described by one journalist 
as a “coalition of militant knitters” – congregated on the Circle Line on London’s
underground, equipped with needles and balls of yarn.1 To the bemusement of fellow
riders they settled in and started to work, swapping tips and gossip as their socks 
and mittens and scarves took form, stitch by stitch.
As its name implies, the Circle Line is without terminal points. It goes round and
round the city until the tube closes for the night. It was a pragmatic choice – people
could join in or depart as was geographically convenient – but also a symbolically 
apt one. Like many contemporary DIY groups, the question lurking behind Cast Off’s
activities is well expressed by the title of the old American hymn: ‘Will The Circle 
Be Unbroken?’2 The instinct that lies behind an activity like this one is tacitly political
(Cast Off sometimes engage in more overtly activist projects, carrying banners with
slogans like ‘drop stitches, not bombs’) but also historical. In their simple act of knitting,
there is an attempt to disconnect from the confusions and conflicts of the present. 
Even when sitting on the rumbling modern machinery of London’s transport system, 
craft provides a connection to something remote, small-scale and reassuringly slow. 
For each knitter this yearning to touch the past may well have a biographical aspect.
(Many crafters have a story about learning from an older relation – ideally a grandmother.)3
But the maneuver is also easily understood according to the calculus of ‘retro’ hipness.
Much like a musical style, a hairdo, or a trouser leg cut, it is only when a skill has gone
way out of fashion that adopting it can seem cool again.4

Wartime Knitting Circle, Sabrina Gschwandtner, 2007

Courtesy Sabrina Gschwandtner and the Museum
of Arts & Design, New York
Photograph Alan Klein
Concept Store invited Glenn Adamson and Ele Carpenter
to offer their opinions on the recent Craftivism trend.

The knitting circle has another symbolic meaning too, for craft and enclosure seem
to go together. Both imply continuity, and also self-sufficiency. One thinks of the covered
wagons of the American frontier, circling for protection at night, or (in a more pointed
mode) the monumental triangular palisade of craft that is Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.
Both of these examples are about creating a safe space to inhabit by keeping something
Craft + Activism = Craftivism

else out: hostile Native Americans, narratives of masculine dominance. For Cast Off and
their many kindred organisations in the contemporary DIY movement, what is held at bay,
seemingly, is the otherwise pervasive rush of mass-produced capitalist commodities.
This is at best a provisional tactic, though: there are many ways to puncture the
knitting circle’s seeming independence and authenticity. Let’s start, as crafters themselves
might, with the question of materiality. Those needles, that yarn: where do they come
from? Some DIYers actually do fashion their tools from a sustainable grove of backyard

82 83
bamboo, and source yarns locally (some even clip, card, and spin their wool themselves). the clicking needles, and instead meet the gaze of the people sitting across from us. 
But for most people who do it, DIY is not so pure. Knitting a jumper by hand rather than This is essentially what all these artists are trying to do, each in their own way, and the
buying one at Gap may seem a way of dropping out, but in reality it is simply a shift from same is true of many of their ‘craftivist’ peers.
one commodity framework to another. The craft industry is a vast capitalist enterprise in Sabrina Gschwandtner’s 2007 installation Wartime Knitting Circle is particularly
its own right, which profits not only through the sale of tools and ‘raw’ materials (which, explicit and effective in this regard. Gschwandtner is practically a craft industry in her
needless to say, are often very much processed), but also ‘how-to’ instructional kits, own right: author of a book called KnitKnit, based on an occasional journal that she
patterns, magazines, books, videos, and innumerable other aids to the hobbyist. And it’s edits of the same title, she also makes films, writes penetrating critical analyses of 
not just the physical accoutrements of DIY that are furnished by the corporations that DIY, and keeps up an active online presence.5 What distinguishes her Wartime Knitting
crafters so dislike. Even the grandmotherly, homespun rhetoric of the scene is arguably Circle from its often-hectoring counterparts in the craftivist art movement is its lack of
modelled on sales techniques developed and mastered by yarn companies long ago. dogmatism. The idea is simple: people sit around a table, knitting useful military
Things become more complex when we look at political protest art in the DIY equipment such as balaclavas and squares for blankets, much as women on the home
mode, or ‘craftivism’, of which there is an increasing amount. We are experiencing  front were encouraged to do during the First and Second World Wars. The perimeter 
the return of explicit political ideology to craft, not seen since the days of hippies  of the installation is defined by a set of blankets, machine-knitted, based on archival
and the Whole Earth Catalogue. I have been particularly struck by one motif that runs photos of people doing just that. In these charged surroundings, participants are
through much of this work: pink yarn. An iconic example is the collaborative work led  encouraged, gently, to talk about war. Gschwandtner prescribed no political position.
by the Danish artist Marianne Jørgensen, in which a network of knitters were asked  People could choose to make mittens to a pattern devised by artist Lisa Anne Auerbach,
to contribute small pink squares which the artist then fashioned into what can only  in which the current body count of the Iraq War is used as a decorative feature; or they
be called a tank cosy. Similarly, for her MFA show at the California College of Art, the could actually support the war effort, perhaps by making slippers to be sent to naval
young queer crafter Lacey Jane Roberts used the material to cover a barbed wire fence, personnel in the Middle East. In effect, she invited people to express their own position
while Canadian artist Barb Hunt employs pink yarn to create a knitted landscape of through their knitting. She was tacitly exploiting the fact that crafting is always a
antipersonnel ordnance as a protest against unexploded land mines around the world.  commitment of sorts.
We might understand such art projects as a new spin on a familiar story: the appropriation Gschwandtner’s work suggests what craft-based art could be if it is conceived 
of marginalised craft to raise the voice of protest. It’s another joining of a circle. Pink in sufficiently open terms – if the figure of the knitting circle is rendered permeable, 
yarn, a product once confined mainly to the shelves of DIY stores, has been repurposed. as it were, rather than closed. Another way of putting this is that, if ‘craftivism’ is
It now speaks not of suburban sentimentality, but rather Feminist conviction, ironic chic sometimes negligible as art, and naïve as politics, maybe that’s OK. The real value of
and childlike delight. It is our moment’s macramé, the expression of our very own 21st craft in the DIY circle, as in any social configuration in which craft appears, is its power
Century folk revival. to bind people together for a time, and simultaneously act as a physical articulation 
of this binding. And for that purpose, the circle is again a perfect emblem: for that is 
a project that will never end.
1. Campbell, J. “It’s A Knit-in.” The Independent Review 23 March (2004). 6. Cast Off was founded by Rachael Matthews and
Amy Plant in 2000.
2. Written in 1907 by Charles Gabriel and Ada Habershon.

Pink M.24 Chaffee, Marianne Jørgenson, Copenhagen, 2006

3. For a typical example of such an origin story, see Stoller, D. Stitch’n’Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook. New York: Workman Publishing
Company, 2004.
4. Guffey, E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Foci, 2006.
5. Gschwandnter, S. KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2007;
“Let ‘Em Eat Cake.” American Craft Aug/Sept (2008); “Knitting is …,” The Journal of Modern Craft July (2008): 271–278.

Glenn Adamson is Head of Graduate Studies in the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Courtesy the artist

Should we object to political artworks made from pink yarn (or other currently
fashionable media such as low-fired clay, sequins and such), which tend to operate on 
the assumption that colour and material are adequate signifiers of women’s (or queer)
identity and authentic political expression? There is something worryingly retrograde
about such ideas. But we might come to a different conclusion if we lift our eyes from 

84 85
 Is the Craftivism movement really activist? And what are the woolly threads that
unravel the argument?
Many are sceptical of the political claims of the DIY and craft movement, but the search
for an authentic object can be misplaced in a contemporary networked and decentralised
field of production. At the same time critical enquiry has to negotiate the hazards of
knitted cakes!
Notions of craft and activism are continually readdressed through visual art 
such as David Medalla’s 1960s collectively darned Stitch in Time, and Germaine
Koh’s extended Knitwork performance started in 1992. These works raise issues
of collective production, experiential and durational performance, valuing the production
process as a meditation on making and a focus for dialogue. Artists often turn to folk 
or craft culture for both metaphorical and tactile exploration of social and hand-made
production, situating art practice within the everyday.
Each generation has its radical crafters. In the 1980s, the publication The
Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine was inspired by the
exhibition of the same name curated by Pennina Barnett, and the AIDS Memorial 
Quilt gained global media coverage.1 But it took the 1990s generation for the DIY
and Craft movements to be aligned with socially engaged art, and the 2000s for craft 
to be thoroughly subsumed within popular culture. The Calgary Revolutionary Knitting
Circle (est. 2000) carries out Knit-In’s and Peace-Knit’s as public protest within the
peace and anti-capitalist movements. In a more gentle reclamation of public space for 
creative action, London’s Cast Off Knitting Club (est. 2000),2 organises public knitting
in locations such as the Circle Line.3 But the most iconic symbol of activist craft
is a protest against Denmark’s involvement in the Gulf War by Danish artist Marianna
Jørgensen. She coordinated the collective production of a pink knitted cover for a M.24
Chaffee tank exhibited in Time at Kunsthallen Nikolaj, 2006.4
In these practices the social, performative and critical discourse around the work
is central to its production and dissemination. Here craft is not simply a luddite desire 
for the localised handmade, but a social process of collective empowerment, action,
expression and negotiation. In the Craftivism exhibition at Arnolfini (2010) art-activist
craft practice is increasingly performative and interventionist, although its efficacy 
is subdued by the aesthetics of the gallery context, where works become a symbolic
model of themselves more akin to a design proposal, rather than transformative of 
a social or political space.
At the same time the massive resurgence in contemporary craft online (stitch 
‘n’ bitch, www.ravelry.com) has been made possible through the social connectivity
of the web and it’s use by communities of interest and practice. Here the stitches 
aren’t perfect, the patterns are circulating, the politics evolving, but the correlation
between craft and free libre open source culture is not always apparent.

Will knitting spark revolution? Or are Molotov cocktails the answer?

This often-gendered polemic offers military violence as an effective political tool, 
whilst undermining non-violence as woolly activism. It’s important to take on this
challenge within a cultural as well as a political framework for political change,
identifying the misnomers, and revisiting the activist history of women’s Non-Violent
Direct Action.
Firstly, the complex and multiple approaches to Craftivism are as diverse as
approaches to art and activism. Individual commitment to follow through political ideals
waxes and wanes with the economy and socio-environmental fears, and can be trapped

86 87
in the impotency of neo-liberal political normalism where capitalism is seen as natural, effect in Jørgensen’s Pink M.24 Chaffee. Whilst a seemingly fleeting gesture, the image
and therefore the only way of organising labour and value.5 But whilst it might seem of the pink shrouded tank circulating on the Internet can be understood as part 
trite to claim to be saving the world by sewing a button on your shirt, it becomes  of the effect of the work itself. This symbolic transformation of military hardware into 
a political act when thousands of shirts are thrown into landfill simply because they  an object of comic irony seeks too disarm the offensive stance of a machine justified 
are missing the very same button. Making and mending by both men and women  by its defensive capability. Whilst the sinister Trojan undertones of disguising a real
is an expression of material and environmental care and often a necessity, regularly weapon as soft and fluffy lead us to review the deaths from ‘friendly’ fire, as well as 
perceived as too specialist and time consuming. Even DIY culture reveres the creation  the women and children who suffer the largest percentage of deaths in most conflicts.
of new products over repair of the old. Activist craft has many forms of symbolism and disguise. I remember weaving bracken
But mixed up in the revolutionary fervour is a passion for domestic making into the fence at Greenham to disguise a hole in the perimeter fence cut by peace-women
epitomised by the fashion for knitted cakes.6 Rather than a call for social reform, on their way to dance on the cruise missile silos. The web was a powerful symbol 
nostalgic creativity mimicking 1950s feminine ideals seems to intentionally confuse of networked participation at Greenham before the Internet was in public use. Meters 
attempts at criticality. Instead of acknowledging the feminist politics of knitting  of patchwork wrapped the airbase whilst others wove webs of wool across the bodies 
to reclaim public space, knitted cakes attempt to re-value domestic skills and  of women lying in the road blockading the gates.13
re-glamorise motherhood, snapped up by the ‘yummy mummy’ phenomena of older The Greenham women put into practice the concept of conflict transformation
mothers with disposable incomes. In other words, knitted cakes symbolise capitalist rather than conflict resolution, using fabric, metaphor, song and physically obstructing
recuperation of feminist critique. The cupcake is nearly synonymous with chocolate  the British-American Nuclear Weapons programme. In 2006 the pink tank is also an
as the answer to ‘what women really want?’ further commercialising women’s desires  effective Craftivist gesture transforming the hardware through soft-wear. The tank 
as bodily sustenance and nurture without nutrition or subjective choice. Unlike the  is a manifestation of military expansionism traded and paraded globally, but its pink
1950s post-war advertising of labour saving devices enticing women back into the  outfit proposes an alternative of care, compassion, or conflict transformation. But most
home, the knitted cupcake is a uniquely female celebration of domestic space and  importantly the Pink M.24 Chaffee enables, or should enable, an alternative critical
work. But the nostalgia for wartime ‘make and mend’ where women were often in  discourse about global militarism. If the cover prevented the use of a tank in conflict, 
charge of a household economy in the old-fashioned sense, has been translated into  it would be an effective direct action.
a contemporary shopping extravaganza consuming brands such as Nigella Lawson 
and Cath Kidston. As Charlotte Raven writes in her article ‘Strike a Pose: How the  Does Craftivism reinforce gender stereotypes?
‘new feminism’ went wrong: from pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern Craftivism, when muddled up with the retro feminine fashion for knitted cakes can 
woman thinks she can do it all’: be seen to reinforce gender stereotypes.14 However, as the Craftivism exhibition
The Madonna-ised woman views femininity as a tool for getting what she wants, demonstrates, the issues of openness, economy, ecology and reverse engineering 
whatever that might be. In this moment it is more or less compulsory for intelligent are consistent across all kinds of creativity including electronics, engineering, poetry 
women to reveal a passion for baking cupcakes. The domestic goddess is a pose, and baking.15 The hybrid tech-craft culture is also evolving through Maker Faires which
not a reversion to old-style femininity. Now that ‘attitude’ is out, and old-fashioned include all kinds of programming, electronics and knitting, providing opportunities 
feminine virtues are ‘in’, so Madonna-ised woman is ready to reveal that cake-making for cross fertilisation of ideas and practices, experimenting with wearable technologies
is her number one ‘guilty pleasure’.8 and increasingly including women’s tech groups.16
Craftivism sells itself short when it attempts to identify itself with the frivolous and However, the commercialisation of knitting blurred by those darned cakes,
non-essential activities of baking cakes, knitting cakes, and eating chocolate. Moore confuses the political intention of activist craft. The work is too often promoted as 
and Prain’s book Yarn Bombing (2009) adopts military terminology to give a ‘cool’ cool, daydreaming, ‘stupendous feats’,17 but we urgently need a more critical vocabulary
edge to knitted interventions in public space.9 This flirting with opposite materials, for unravelling the relentless media support of war and its ‘heroic’ deaths, and an
network models, and gender stereotypes, lacks self-critique of its use of language.  intellectual feminist critique of engendered militarism.18 This invites a rethinking
It’s no coincidence that Moore and Prain acknowledge the “never-ending supply of of female relationships to technology beyond a softening of military hardware. In the
chocolate” to enable them to write Yarn Bombing. 10 Open Source Movement, women are creating spaces for peer2peer learning of technical
Knitted cakes are also an irritatingly joyful distraction from the important history  processes both in hardware and software.19
of craft as Non-Violent Direct Action (NVDA), from Ghandi’s handspun fabric to the The popularity of DIY is a modern response to the separation of labour and
Greenham Common Women’s woven-web blockades,11 and AWE Aldermarston Women’s domestic skills, and the legal restrictions on making and mending anything, but
knitting actions.12 NVDA is direct form of activism which works at the point of power specifically electronics. Using the hacker language of reverse-engineering as 
transaction. The action seeks to prevent an exercise or an abuse of power by disrupting, a learning process – taking apart your jumper or video player to learn how to fix or reuse 
interrupting or transforming it. NVDA, like much socially-engaged art, functions as both it – is very different from buying a knitted cupcake complete with strawberry frosting,
gesture and agency. Here the simplest action is carefully planned to take or reveal even if it is locally made. Womens’ networks such as MzTek.org in London takes 
responsibility for a socio-political convention, explored through collective creativity and a playfully serious approach to developing spaces for women to learn technical skills,
individual volition. It is active resistance and transformation. balls of wool and knitting needles are replaced with arduinos and a soldering iron. 
The ‘pink wool’ phenomena in contemporary knitting culture was used to maximum Here women are learning the craft of electronics, de-black-boxing their Casio along 

88 89
with their wardrobe. The culture of DIY is applied to coding and knowledge production, 
as well as developing practical skills and resources.
Alongside the cutesy approach to selling craft back to women as a form of artificial
liberation, another form of capitalist recuperation is taking place in the word of DIY. The
commercial adoption of low-tech, DIY aesthetic by mainstream advertising for globalised
mass production has led to the mass production of non-ironic artificially distressed 
new products (think pre-scuffed shoes, distressed furniture and jeans).20 At this point
the more reified production of contemporary visual art has the opportunity to reclaim 
its stake in critiquing visual expression through complex and problematic forms. 
The Open Source Embroidery project examines the moment at which craft gives up 
its aspirations to join the fine art market, and engages with contemporary visual art
discourse on participation, production and distribution. Instead Open Source Embroidery
invests in process, dialogue and social relations that transform the very idea of culture,
reclaiming making and thinking from the cultural industries, and situating it at the heart
of social and technical communications networks.
There are many cultural, political and aesthetic arguments for creative practice 
that engage in cultural shifts and transformations for a political project. In part these
practices keep a window of activity in the encroaching private control of public space,
but at their best they equip practitioners with skills, confidence, networks and working
methodologies for direct action wherever it might be needed.
1. Parker, R. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the Feminine. London: Women’s Press Ltd, 1984.
2. Cast off <http://www.castoff.info>.
3. Campbell, J. “It’s a knit-in”. The Independent 23 Mar. 2004.
4. Pink M.24 Chaffee, Marianna Jørgensen, 2006. Exhibited in Time, Kunstallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen, 2006.
5. Fisher, M. Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? UK: Zero Books, 2009.
6. Penny, S. Knitted Cakes. Kent: Search Press Ltd., 2008.
7. Power, N. One Dimensional Woman. UK: Zero Books, 2009.
8. Raven, C. “How the ‘new feminism’ went wrong: From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do
it all.” The Guardian 6 Mar. 2010 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/06/charlotte-raven-feminism-madonna-price>.
9. Moore, M and Prain, L. Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009.
10. Ibid. 11.
11. Kidron, B. and Poulton, L. Your Greenham. 2006 <http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/#fabric>.
12. McDonald, D. “Nuclear Information Service (NIS) Annual Report, 2007.” Nuclear Information Service. 2007 <http://nuclearinfo.
org/view/publications_%2526_media/NIS_annual_reports>.
13. Fairhall, D. Common Ground: The Story of Greenham. London: IB Tauris, 2006.
14. Raven, C. “How the ‘new feminism’ went wrong: From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do
it all.” The Guardian 6 Mar. 2010 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/06/charlotte-raven-feminism-madonna-price>.
15. Rackham, M. “Coders, Crafters and Cooks: Melinda Rackham, Craftivism, Arnolfini, Bristol.” RealTime Feb–Mar. 2010: 51 <
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/95/9771>.
16. Maker Faire <http://www.makerfaire.com/newcastle/2010>.
17. Moore, M and Prain, L. Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009.
18. Cockburn, C. From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007.
19. Derieg, A. “Things Can Break: Tech Women Crashing Computer and Preconceptions.” eipcp. 2007 <http://eipcp.net/

Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp,

transversal/0707/derieg/en>.
20. Heath, J and Potter, A. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed. Mankato: Capstone, 2004.

international blockade, July 1993

Ele Carpenter is an independent curator and researcher. She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship at HUMlab in affiliation
with the BildMuseet at the University of Umeå, Sweden.

Courtesy Lesley McIntyre

90 91
Analysis of Three Events I would not be able to ever say, to investors or buyers or the general public,
that I had any property rights or reputation, any ability to do business, in
what I had proposed to do.
The forcible denial of my right to proceed with my ideas, whether by Exxonmobil
in 2000, or by Emschergenossenschaft at the behest of Fraunhofer Institute 
A relation of trust, essential to conducting any project, was systematically
for Applied Information Technology in 2009, or by the BND regarding our violated. Even at the end, I was expected to have zero stake in any ‘Technik’
Chernobyl investigation in 1986, results from a misunderstanding of the new that would be conducted, but then asked to spend hours in discussion, hence
concepts with which I have worked. Such is normal with the ‘new’ that is art. consultation, with one of the suppliers of equipment for the ‘Technik’. In
The misunderstanding has led, in each case, to a denial of, or revocation of, effect, I was asked to give away all that I know and am, assuming photo and
the property rights of me and my colleagues. video documentation, to a third party.

In the Exxonmobil case, the right was to pursue a research project with In the Emschergenossenschaft case, I was repeatedly and systematically denied
a grant from The Lilly Foundation, for $2 million. The research was for any chance to continue with the work I had started to do in preparation for
sustainable removal of hydraulic and biological vigour within catchments. the EmscherKunst show. The Emschergenossenschaft caved in to demands by
Exxonmobil thought I was trying to find a new source of energy, and they the Fraunhofer Institute to let them, not the artist, be the main researcher,
acted pre-emptively, not unlike a Mafia hit squad. The action was devastating developer and author, together with a few local staff scientists, of what the
(not just to me and my colleagues, but also to the offeror – he had a heart artist had proposed.
attack). Exxonmobil did not notice that I was actually trying to find a
sustainable way of working with an entire ecosystem. Exxonmobil cannot grasp 
Damage to the artist has probably already been done, in that now, all that
this idea. We can see this with their current algae-to-energy schemes, which he had pioneered and risked his reputation to develop is being researched
are commodity oriented and monocultural, not ecosystemic. Thus, a ‘good idea’ and developed, with deep pockets of State funding, in a way the artist can
was thwarted. never access.

In the BND case, wherein the agents said I was “not qualified” to make analyses 
The German Constitution may have also been violated. The Constitution,
of satellite data which my company had purchased, they think that the issue in Article 5, declares that art, like literature, journalism, scholarship,
is one of scientific credentials as mandated by politically-approved entities, science, is ‘free’. That is, it is not subject to State control. But what
like universities or the State. But for me, the issue was one of my right, and is the handing over of an artist’s initiative to a State-funded entity
even duty, to exercise the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights: namely, to act in by another state funded organisation for the benefit and authorship
a well-organised civilian organisation to ‘bear arms’, or military technology, rights solely of that State-funded entity and related state assignees,
as appropriate to public defence (Second Amendment), and to publish what but a subordination of the artist’s work to State control?
I know, letting the public decide (First Amendment). My rights were fortified
by a technical fact: any scientist or institute, or rival entity, could In the Exxonmobil case, the artist lost a possible $2 million, and the
purchase the same satellite data and conduct similar or different algorithmic initiative for a project in New Zealand, as in Indiana, was lost – for
analyses, to confirm or contradict my published conclusions; whatever I did was about a decade.
fully open to public review and correction. This indeed occurred: the London
Times article about the findings of my company was prompted by disclosures In the BND case, the government managed to appropriate all the data tapes left
to the Times from another scientist, who purchased the same data and proved in Munich, such that regaining the property purchased by the company, and then
my findings to be correct. The BND did not understand my commercial and reprocessing that property to yield similar-quality images, could cost around
citizen’s rights, being fixated on the notion that such satellite data must 40,000 Euro.
be handled only by ‘professionals’.
In the Emschergenossenschaft case, the danger was that two decades of work,
In the Emschergenossenschaft case, the issue was how to efficiently harvest built on three decades of publication, always featuring the ‘sehr gute Idee’
a wide range of biomass sources for seasonal production of biogas, with of harvesting waterplants, not land plants, to yield biofuels, would be
challenges including where and how to cut, what boats to use, what wagons to permanently lost. All the public credit for such an idea would be taken from
use, what silage to set up, where and when to collect, and with what people, the artist, if the project went ahead as the Emschergenossenschaft planned,
and at what level of expertise. This cluster of challenges was interpreted never to be regained.
by Fraunhofer as chiefly a question of adapting a ‘mini-fermenter’ designed
for a very different digestion task. I had an ecosystem-wide query, involving It is commonly thought that in the 21st Century we people of the civilized world
a river basin and its dammed or stilled waters, and the scientists had – as would behave better than we had in previous centuries. But humanity doesn’t
their own report declares – a commodity query. change. The battles of the 20th Century over access to petroleum will be replaced
by battles in the 21st, with the same brutalities, over access to renewables.

But with the Emschergenossenschaft case, a much-more serious violation of
rights occurred than in the other two cases. Whereas Exxonmobil and the BND
had intervened from the outside, the Emschergenossenschaft intervened from Peter Fend
within. I was invited to enter into a close consultation with them, and I
was encouraged to give them ‘my best’. I did. I gave them the best ideas and
proposals I could muster. I poured months of time, energy, goodwill, contacts
and money into the submission. I did so with the understanding that if the
project were ‘machtbar’, or do-able, then I could proceed with it. But the
Emschergenossenschaft, probably most due to an administrator there, decided
that any project I proposed could only be do-able by third parties, other
than me, and could only be done if I had no property rights, research and
development role, or other practical relation to what I proposed. From
within the confidentiality of a full disclosure by me to a trusted entity,
the Emschergenossenschaft, I was to be stripped of any future role with
my own ideas. If I were to proceed with the EmscherKunst show as they planned,

92 93
 In August of 2007, at the high point of the British summer holiday season, flights out 
of Heathrow were delayed and disrupted by environmental campaigners demonstrating
against the environmental impact of our ever increasing love of cheap flight.
The television news images were revealing. The television news images were
illustrative: on the one hand environmental anti-flight protestors camping out near 
the airport predicting environmental destruction, and holding wanton flight as an
unnecessary and guilty activity which is destroying the world we live in, for now and 
the future. On the other hand: families in their shorts and flip-flops with their screaming
toddlers, queued up like cattle to pass through airport security, desperately hoping to 
get their two weeks of sunshine before they have to come home to work for the rest 
of the year.
The latter looked mostly despondent and annoyed – at flights delayed and hold-ups
which were coming at the end of long months spent looking forward to two weeks of
(almost) guaranteed sun and relaxation. But they also looked a little sheepish: guilty,
perhaps uncomfortable, at the thought that their holiday could have become the focus 
of such national media attention. The former looked inspired and utopian: ready to party
to save the world from the needless, selfish, destructive hubris of those who would seek
relaxation and sunshine without a care for their environmental footprint.
For me, these combined images – of sheepish, uncomfortable holiday-makers 
who had never considered their holiday as anything other than a right; and anti-flight
campaigners, optimistic, themselves in holiday-mood, cheered by the attention they 
were receiving, and chastened by the over-determining importance of their cause –
revealed a number of aspects of the contemporary narrative on environmentalism.

 he first and clearest aspect of the anti-flight campaign was its demand that
T
holiday-makers should be made to feel guilty: guilty for their carefree abandon 
of daily responsibility, guilty for the damage they would bring to the environment,
and guilty that they had not even considered any of this before booking their 
flights online. The anti-Heathrow protestors had arrived to offer moral salvation.

 he second, and somewhat ironic, aspect was the seriousness with which the
T
campaign of these would-be radicals – purposefully taking up a position as
outsiders (outside the airport, outside the mainstream, outside the guilty 
masses) – was discussed by news reporters and media commentators. Despite
their outsider image, the anti-flight, anti-Heathrow, anti-holiday protestors were 
a major mainstream force in political discussion.

 he third, and rather disillusioning, aspect was the depressing message that was
T
being expressed behind the appearance of revolutionary utopianism: that the
onward march of human development, technology and leisure is unnecessary and
destructive. For all their apparent optimism about the possibility of a better world,
the world they seemed to propose would involve none of the ease, abundance and
guiltless consumption that was once the very essence of utopia.

In response to these contradictory elements of the environmentalist narrative, the

Manifesto Club, an organisation of which I am the co-founder, launched a campaign 
to Celebrate the Freedom of Flight. We argued that the vast expansion of flight over
the past few years – particularly cheap flight – has been experienced as liberation 
for millions of people. The achievement of flight, dreamed of for millennia, is a great

94 95
96 97
human achievement, and its effects over the past 50 years have been hugely positive:  has been so easily adopted by the mainstream. Politicians of every shade of gray, church
to bring the world closer together, to allow people to visit and experience new cultures leaders, money-making capitalists and business interests, as well as local councils and
and see the wonders of the world up close, to allow people to form relationships across daily workplaces, have all been easily able to adopt a language and ritualistic practice
borders, to have lovers in far-flung places, and to move, to work, to earn money, to demanded by the environmental narrative.
support their families in the developing world. We further argued that the more recent The current public discussion about flying fails to recognise the role that flight
vast expansion of low-cost air travel was a profoundly democratising moment: because  plays in our daily lives. Up to 1.5 million of us pass through Heathrow every week in the
it meant that the kind of travel that was once reserved for the über-rich was now summer months, but we are being asked to limit our travel or atone for our emissions
something that we could all benefit from. And we said that we shouldn’t feel guilty  with carbon offsets.
about that – on the contrary, we should celebrate it. However many environmentalists ask us to feel guilty for every flight we take, the
Flight, in my view, and the moralised discussion around it, is one of the most reality is that we continue to fly – more often, for longer, and further. The possibility of 
illustrative examples of the profoundly anti-humanistic underpinnings of the a cleaner, faster and more efficient system of air travel is well within our grasp. The truly
environmentalist narrative. Flight is often viewed as an ‘addiction’ pursued for  radical counter-cultural, anti-establishment, humanist act, might be to recognise and
wanton, selfish ends. Mark Ellington, founder of Rough Guide, argued that we suffer  then to celebrate that fact.
from Binge Flying; and the think-tank the IPPR recently proposed the introduction 
J ames Panton is a politics tutor at St John’s College, University of Oxford, and co-founder of the radical civil liberties campaigning
of health warnings at airports, much like those now put on cigarette packets, to help  group the Manifesto Club.
cure people of their addiction to cheap flights.
The environmental campaigner Geroge Monbiot explains this logic thus:
Many of the things we have until now understood to be good – even morally necessary
– must now be seen as bad. Perhaps the most intractable cause of Global Warming
is ‘love miles’: the distance you must travel to visit your friends and partners and
relatives on the other side of the world. The world could be destroyed by love.
What I think we see here is that a broad-based concern about modernity: its productive,
consumptive, perhaps meaningless, industrial, polluting activity comes to be located 
at the level of individual morality and individual action: so it is by changes at the level 
of individual action that pollution can be tackled and consciences can be cleared.
Leo Hickman, the Guardian’s Eco-Man, expressed the underlying sentiment well 
in his Life Stripped Bare: “Everything we do (from the mangetout we eat that is flown
from Kenya, the TV we watch, the cosmetics we use, the newly painted nursery for the
children we are expecting to be born) has a negative knock-on effect – we should try 
to reduce our impact on the world wherever we can.”
The underlying logic of this environmental narrative is that of recognising that
human action in the world causes harm, human activity has an impact, and the less 
our actions, the less our impact, the better the world will be. Ultimately, we have 

Photograph Alex Krajewsky, 1895. On “Mount Flight” (artificial hill erected by Lilienthal at Lichterfelde,
a moral script and ethical code of conduct, which starts from the assumption that  Previous page: Otto Lilienthal with Normalsegelapparat (Normal soaring apparatus)

human actions are bad, and moves to the conclusion that therefore the less we act, 
the better the world will be.
The problem, I think, is not just the anti-humanist nature of this structure of
thinking; it’s not just the symbolic and gestural nature of this underlying logic, but 
it’s that it ultimately leads to a celebration of inaction – and I suspect, therefore, 
Courtesy archives Otto-Lilienthal-Museum (lilienthal-museum.de)

a decreased capacity to resolve the problems the environment throws at us, as well 
as a diminished aspiration for the kinds of social organisation and action that we will
have to pursue if we actually want a world of greater equality, of greater well being, 
and of greater social justice.
As the environmental narrative demands that we should feel guilty for the ever
greater ease by which we live our lives, it seems perfectly fitted to fill the vacuum 
left by our broad-based disaffection from organised religion – it provides a moral 
script for virtuous living, a clear contrast between good and evil, and a step by step 
near Berlin)

guide to individual salvation. It is perhaps for this reason that the environmentalist
narrative, for all its radical outsider self-image, and all its dreams of a better tomorrow,

98 99
 There are few things more topical than war, and the art-world loves to reflect
on the topical. The proliferation of biennials – global platforms very often
themed around ‘globalism’ and other global issues – around the world is 
one of the main structures perpetuating this trend, which subsequently
filters down to museums and galleries. For me, the question is not about 
the legitimacy of conflict as a thematic for art, but more about the nature
and legitimacy of the intention in presenting work about such subject
matter, the specific strategies employed by artists and institutions to
engage with the issues, and the relationship to audiences. The UK, like 
any other nation (but perhaps as we’ve been more implicated in it over
recent years), has had a fair amount of exhibitions and discussion events 
on this subject.
An exhibition that I’ve often found to be a good example for discussion
is the ICA’s Memorial to the Iraq War, 2007. This group show presented
a number of proposals by an international selection of artists invited to
produce a memorial (as opposed to a monument) for the war in Iraq. Some 
of the proposals were incredibly interesting and thoughtful in terms of their
political engagement and response to 
such an invitation. Yet there were two
things that struck me as being truly
limiting. Firstly, looking around at all 
the other visitors, I was reminded that 

Memorial to Iraq War, ICA, 2007

a very specific kind of demographic 
visits the ICA and because of this, the
exhibition felt like it was ultimately only

Photograph Steve White

Courtesy of the ICA
preaching to the converted. And secondly,
the exhibition really was about its own
potential – for the possibility of some 
of the proposed memorials being realised
and sited within the public realm, thus offering a whole different type 
of encounter with the work and the issues. To date this hasn’t happened,
though I understand it has been investigated. Somehow, the subject 
matter of the exhibition made the relationship with its audience seem
absolutely essential.
Memorial to the Iraq War was very much a straight-to-the-point kind
of exhibition. It looked head-on at a major geo-political issue that still
continues to unfold, situated within the capital of a nation implicated in 
the offensive. But is this kind of direct critical-engagement always the most
affective way of producing political art and exhibitions? Curator Maria Lind’s
essay from 2004 entitled ‘This Is Going To Be Really Funny: Notes on Art, 
Its Institutions And Their Presumed Criticality ‘ discusses the issues 
involved with ‘political’ or so-called ‘critical’ art, and the intentions behind
its production.1 She eloquently creates an analogy between the act of telling
a joke and the declarations inherent in much political art. It basically goes: 
if when you’re about to tell a joke, and before you tell the joke you make 
the declaration: “This is going to be really funny”, then in all likelihood the
listener is probably not going to find the joke funny. There’s just something
about the initial declaration that diffuses the humour – the surprise factor 
is removed, and you can prepare in advance for something coming up that

100 101
 might be funny. A similar thing could be said for critical art. If you initially

Left: For Queen and Country, Lance

Corporal Benjamin Hyde, Adjutant

Police), Died 24 June 2003, aged

General’s Corps (Royal Military
make the declaration that your work is going to be highly critical, it is 

23, Steve McQueen, 2007

likely to lose its criticality straightaway. You pre-empt the impact of your
own practice. I tend to agree with Lind’s thoughts, and wonder whether 
a certain ambiguity with your intentions can lead in the end to a more 
potent criticality.
Take for example, artist Steve McQueen’s project For Queen and
Country (2007), which the artist produced as a result of his position as
the UK’s official war artist. The work is a proposal for a series of 98 
postage stamps each depicting a different member of the armed forces 
killed in Iraq. There was, and still is, much resistance to the stamps from 
the Ministry of Defence, and the Royal Mail have turned down the proposal.
Curiously, the public response to the work – exhibited at the Great Hall at
Manchester’s Central Library – was overwhelmingly positive, whether or not
individuals were for or against the war. But McQueen’s stated intention for
the work is decidedly ambiguous, neither pro nor anti-war. The absence of
such a declaration of clear opinion has left a space for interpretation that
allows for a much more discursive response, as well as a more direct level 
of engagement with the issues.2
Video art is a ubiquitous medium in relation to this discussion. Video
appears a lot in biennials because it is considered a kind of ‘lingua franca’ –
an international intermediary language, and is often used by artists to (re-)
present crisis and conflict. Ursula Biemann
is an example of a practitioner who yields
the camera in pursuit of an array of 
issues of geo-political concern, everything
from trans-Mediterranean migration to 
the oil industry’s path of destruction. 
In works such as Sahara Chronicles (2007)

Ursula Biemann, 2005

and Black Sea Files (2005), Biemann
documents the plight of individuals

Black Sea Files,

Courtesy the artist

affected directly by imposed hardship 
and injustice. In contrast, Renzo Martens’
mildly controversial video Episode 3: Enjoy
Poverty (2009) critiques both the neutrality

Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty, Renzo Martens, 2009

and reality captured by the camera lens, 
as well as suggesting that a lot of art
merely postures as an agent of social

Courtesy the Artist, Wilkinson Gallery,

change purely for cultural capital. The 
work documents the poverty journalism
industry in the Congo, where Western

Galerie Fons Welters.

journalists sell their images of extreme
hardship resultant from the apathy of
corporations or ineffective aid to the
Western media. Proposing to the affected
Congolese that they capitalise through self-exploitation, by cutting out the
intermediary and taking images of themselves, Martens’ interventionist
approach sets up a situation that brings to light the futility in reversing 
the hegemonic space between the subject and the gaze. This futility also 

102 103
 Next Page: Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty,
in turn creates a provocative comparison between the lens of the poverty learned through Kosova’s talk was actually an artistic project, was

Courtesy the Artist, Wilkinson Gallery,

journalist and the lens of the pseudo-documentary video artist. It’s very  particularly memorable. This was the abundance of small, round table-
rare that either form genuinely helps the individuals they are portraying,  tennis-bat-sized placards that numerous people seemed to be holding that

Renzo Martens, 2009

and in real terms they only help those in control of representation, whether read simply “We are all Armenians”. They could only have been produced 

Galerie Fons Welters.

for financial or cultural progress. Don’t they both exploit the exploited? at very short notice, but they had been distributed widely. The message 
The spontaneity in responding to conflict or impending crisis, has also was clear, and it was an example of how a simple insertion in the public
become a polemic in itself. A few years ago I was invited to participate in  realm that countless people participated in collectively, could give 
a workshop in Amman organised by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). a quiet yet clear message to the Turkish authorities. Here, Kosova provided 
It brought together a number of practitioners from around Europe and the an example of a specific political situation that created an opportunity 
Middle East region, temporarily forming a ‘Mediterranean Reflection Group’ for an artist to respond in a way that would have been impossible under
for discussion of a range of issues intended to inform policy decisions by  ‘normal’ circumstances.
the ECF. The most memorable discussion was about the artist’s role in times The two issues here – the dichotomy between the traditional spaces
of crisis, and included presentations by the Beirut-based musician and artist for art and the wider public realm, and the specific strategies employed 
Tarek Atoui, and the Istanbul-based writer, curator and self-confessed in declaring such critical engagement – seem to me to be the essential
‘neo-anarchist’ Erden Kosova. Between the two of them they managed to considerations in the presentation of such politically engaged art. Imagine
form an extremely insightful and useful polemic on crisis and conflict, and the scale of the discussion that might ensue if Steve McQueen’s proposed
their affects on artistic practice. Atoui discussed the impulse he and other stamps were ever produced and issued. Politically engaged art is always
Lebanese artists experienced to produce work during and immediately after somehow a responsive act, and the level of engagement and control in 
the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The work, generally speaking, was this response also seems to have a major affect, artistically speaking, 
highly politically orientated – mostly reflecting on the trauma of the crisis – on the art produced. It’s clearly not easy to negotiate all these factors, 
and in hindsight, many of the artists considered these particular works to  the conditions of which are often determined by the nature of violence, 
be among the worst of their careers. They were embarrassed that they had crisis and conflict. The fog of war indeed.
reacted in such strange, irrational and ‘expressive’ ways and suffice to say,
1. Lind, M. “This Is Going To Be Really Funny: Notes on Art, Its Institutions And Their Presumed Criticality.”
most of these works will never see the light of day. Spin Cycle. Bristol: Spike Island and Systemisch, 2004: 33–4.
Kosova on the other hand, discussed 2. The campaign to have the stamps produced by the Royal Mail is ongoing with an online petition
<www.artfund.org/queenandcountry>.
some of the work produced around the
time of the assassination in early 2007  Nav Haq is Exhibitions Curator at Arnolfini.
of the high-profile Istanbul-based Armenian
 n earlier version of this text was originally commissioned and published by Axis in the Dialogue webzine:
A
intellectual Hrant Dink, in a politically www.axisweb.org/artandconflict
motivated attack. Some artists responded
to the specificity of this situation in ways
that were very public, and very sensitively
‘inserted’ into the aftermath of an event 
of such national significance. Before his
death, Dink asserted that in the event of
his assassination (which he could clearly
imagine happening), he would prefer the
public not to protest vocally or through
large banners, urging instead a silent,
more thoughtful response. His funeral was
also the largest public march in Istanbul
for nearly 20 years. (This was an occasion
Courtesy Onder Ozkalipci

by chance I happened to have witnessed,

Istanbul Protest

as it took place on the same day as the

opening of an exhibition I co-curated 
at Platform Garanti artspace was meant 
to happen. In the end we chose to cancel 
the opening and decided to go and join the procession, along with most 
of the Istanbul art community.) One image from this day, that I subsequently

104 105
106 107
 Everyone is an artist. This would seem a simple enough place to begin; with a statement
connecting directly to Joseph Beuys, and more generally to the historic avant-garde’s
aesthetic politics aiming to break down barriers between artistic production and
everyday life. It invokes an artistic politics that runs through Dada to the Situationists,
and meanders and dérives through various rivulets in the history of radical politics and
social movement organising. But let’s pause for a second. While seemingly simple, there
is much more to this one statement than presents itself. It is a statement that contains
within it two notions of time and the potentials of artistic and cultural production, albeit
notions that are often conflated, mixed, or confused. By teasing out these two notions
and creatively recombining them, perhaps there might be something to be gained in
rethinking the antagonistic and movement-building potential of cultural production: 
to reconsider its compositional potential.
The first notion alludes to a kind of potentiality present but unrealised
through artistic work; the creativity that everyone could exercise if they
realised and developed potentials that have been held back and stunted 
by capital and unrealistic conceptions of artistic production through mystified
notions of creative genius. Let’s call this the ‘not-yet’ potential of everyone
becoming an artist through the horizontal sublation of art into daily life. 
The second understanding of the phrase forms around the argument that
everyone already is an artist and embodies creative action and production
within their life and being. Duchamp’s notion of the readymade gestures
towards this, as he proclaims art as the recombination of previously 
existing forms. The painter creates by recombining the pre-given readymades 
of paints and canvas; the baker creates by recombining the readymade
elements of flour, yeast, etc. In other words, it is not that everyone will
become an artist, but that everyone already is immersed in myriad forms of
creative production, or artistic production, given a more general notion of art.
These two notions, how they collide and overlap, move towards an important focal point:
if there has been an end of the avant-garde, it is not its death but rather a monstrous
multiplication and expansion of artistic production in zombified forms. The avant-garde
has not died, the creativity contained within the future oriented potential of the
becoming-artistic has lapsed precisely because it has perversely been realised
in existing forms of diffuse cultural production. ‘Everyone is an artist’ as a utopian
possibility is realised, just as ‘everyone is a worker’. This condition has reached 
a new degree of concentration and intensity within the basins of cultural production; 
the post-Fordist participation-based economy where the multitudes are sent to work 
in the metropolitan factory, recombining ideas and images through social networks 
and technologically mediated forms of communication. We don’t often think of all these
activities as either work or art. Consequently it becomes difficult to think through the
politics of labour around them, whether as artistic labour or just labour itself.
The notion of the Art Strike, its reconsideration and socialisation within the
post-Fordist economy, becomes more interesting and productive (or perhaps
anti-productive) precisely as labour changes articulation in relation to the
current composition of artistic and cultural work. The Art Strike starts with
Gustav Metzger and the Art Worker Coalition and their call to withdraw their
labour for a minimum of three years from 1977–1980. Metzger’s formulation
of the Art Strike is directed against the problems of the gallery system.
Metzger’s conception was picked up by Stewart Home and various others
within the Neoist milieu who called upon artists to cease artistic work

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 entirely for the years 1990–1993. In this version, the strike moves beyond  be undone? That is precisely the problem, for as artistic and cultural production become
a focus on the gallery system to a more general consideration of artistic more ubiquitous and spread throughout the social field, they are rendered all the more
production and a questioning of the role of the artist. In the most recent apparently imperceptible. The avant-garde focus on shaping relationality (for instance 
iteration, Redas Dirzys and a Temporary Art Strike Committee called for  in Beuys’ notion of social sculpture), or in creative recombination and detournément,
an Art Strike as a response to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, becoming  exists all around us flowing through the net economy. Relational Aesthetics recapitulates
a European Capital of Culture for 2009. The designation of a city as a capital avant-garde ideas and practices into a capital-friendly, service economy aesthetics. 
of culture is part of a process of metropolitan branding and a strategy of This does not mean that they are useless or that they should be discarded. Rather, 
capitalist valorisation through the circulation of cultural and artistic heritage. by teasing out the compositional modes contained within them they can be considered
(In Vilnius this has played out through figures like Jonas Mekas, George and reworked. How can we struggle around or organise diffuse forms of cultural and
Maciunas, the legacy of Fluxus, and the Uzupis arts district.) In Vilnius  artistic labour? This is precisely the kind of question explored by groups such as the
we see the broadening of the Art Strike from a focus on the gallery system  Carrotworkers’ Collective, a group from London who are formulating ways to organise
to artistic production more generally, and finally to the ways in which artistic around labour involved in unpaid forms of cultural production, such as all the unpaid
and cultural production are infused throughout daily life and embedded within internships sustaining the workings of artistic and cultural institutions.
the production of the metropolis. In 1953, Guy Debord painted on the wall of the rue de Seine the slogan 
The Art Strike emerges as a nodal point for finding ways to work critically between  “Ne travaillez jamais”, or “Never Work”. The history of the avant-garde 
the two compositional modes contained within the statement “everyone is an artist.”  is filled with calls to “never artwork”, but the dissolution of the artistic 
An autonomist politics focuses on class composition, or the relation between the object and insurgent energies of labour refusal have become rendered into
technical arrangement of economic production and the political composition activated  the workings of semiocapitalism and the metropolitan factory. To renew 
by forms of social insurgency and resistance. Capital evolves by turning emerging and rebuild a politics and form of social movement adequate to the current
political compositions into technical compositions of surplus value production. Similarly, composition does not start from romanticising the potentiality of becoming
the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde find the political compositions they animate creative through artistic production or working from the creative production
turned into new forms of value production and circulation. The Art Strike becomes  that already is, but rather by working in the nexus between the two. In other
a tactic for working between the utopian not-yet promise of unleashed creativity and  words, to start from how the refusal of work is re-infused into work, and by
the always-already but compromised forms of artistic labour we’re enmeshed in. In the understanding that imposition and rendering, and struggling within, against
space between forms of creative recombination currently in motion, and the potential  and through it.
of what could be if they were not continually rendered into forms more palatable to
Art Strike Biennial. <http://www.alytusbiennial.com>.
capitalist production, something new emerges. To re-propose an Art Strike at this Carrotworkers’ Collective. <http://carrotworkers.wordpress.com>.
juncture, when artistic labour is both everywhere and nowhere, is to force that issue.  Home, S. The Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers. Stirling: AK Press, 1991.

It becomes not a concern of solely the one who identifies (or is identified) as the artist, Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex.
but a method to withdraw the labour of imagination and recombination involved in what Erika Biddle is a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture at York University, Toronto.
we’re already doing to hint towards the potential of what we could be doing.
Bob Black, in his critique of the Art Strike, argues that far from going on 
a strike by withdrawing forms of artistic labour, the Art Strike formed as 
the ultimate realisation of art, where even the act of not making art becomes
part of an artistic process. While Black might have meant to point out 
a hypocrisy or contradiction, if we recall the overlapping compositional
modes of everyone being an artist, this no longer appears as an antinomy 
but rather a shifting back and forth between different compositional modes.
While Stewart Home has argued repeatedly that the importance of the Art
Strike lies not in its feasibility but rather in the ability to expand the terrain
of class struggle, Black objects to this on the grounds that most artistic
workers operate as independent contractors and therefore strikes do not
make sense for them. While this is indeed a concern, it is also very much 
the condition encountered by forms of labour in a precarious post-Fordist
economy. The Art Strike moves from being a proposal for social action 
by artists to a form of social action potentially of use to all who find their
creativity and imagination exploited within existing productive networks.
But, ask the sceptics: how can we enact this form of strike? And, as comrades and allies
inquire, how can this subsumption of creativity and imagination and creativity by capital

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CONCEPT STORE #3: Art, Activism and Recuperation Artist/Activist Series
SPRING 2010 Divised by Tom Trevor

Concept Store is a biannual journal published by Arnolfini,

focusing on critical issues of contemporary art and their
relationship to wider cultural, social and political contexts.
While Concept Store reflects upon ideas explored within
Arnolfini’s artistic programme as well as future research Ursula Biemann
projects, it is intended to be a critical platform in its own Black Sea Files
right, operating as a discursive space for commissioned texts, 12 September–8 November 2009
artists’ contributions, interviews and other experimental forms.
It aims to challenge the conventions of the exhibition catalogue PLATFORM
and the inter-relations of artistic production, critical writing C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture
and cultural theory. The journal also continues Arnolfini’s 3 October–29 November 2009
engagement with contemporary design practice, with each African Writers Abroad, Ackroyd & Harvey, Institute for the Art
issue guest-designed by a different practitioner. & Practice of Dissent at Home, Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination, Hollington & Kyprianou with Tamasin Cave
Editors: Geoff Cox, Nav Haq and Tom Trevor & Spinwatch, Trapese Collective and Virtual Migrants
Advisory Group: Shumon Basar, Binna Choi, Neil Cummings, Curated by PLATFORM
Maria Lind, Carol Yinghua Lu www.platformlondon.org
Assistant Editor: Lucy Badrocke
Picture Research: Laura Beadell
#3 designed by Message and Meaning
(Message and Meaning nominated by Europa, designers of #2)
Typeset in Franklin Gothic, Prestige Elite and Courier
OCEAN EARTH
ISBN: 9780 907738 97 8 Situation Room: Technology Change/Climate Stability
21 November 2009–17 January 2010
Published under a copyleft licence
BARBARA STEVENI
Beyond the Acid Free: Artist Placement Group Revisited
21 November to 17 January
ARNOLFINI
16 Narrow Quay CRAFTIVISM
Bristol BS1 4QA, UK 12 December 2009–14 February 2010
[email protected] Kayle Brandon & Heath Bunting, Rhiannon Chaloner & Manuel
www.arnolfini.org.uk/journal Vason, glorious ninth, GOTO10, Rui Guerra, Household, Christine
& Irene Hohenbüchler, JODI, Mandy McIntosh, Gloria Ojulari Sule,
ARNOLFINI STAFF Trevor Pitt & Kate Pemberton, Janek Simon, Stephanie Syjuco
Lucy Badrocke, Jess Bartlett, Peter Begen, Fran Bossom, Sophie and Clare Thornton.
Bristol, Simon Buckley, Alastair Cameron, Jennifer Campbell, An Arnolfini/Relational project, curated by Zoë Sherman with
Rhiannon Chaloner, Susannah Claiden, Jane Connarty, Sara Geoff Cox and Anne Coxon
Dauncey, Helen Davies, Carmel Doohan, Fraisia Dunn, Tessa www.craftivism.net, www.relational.org.uk
Fitzjohn, Nav Haq, Mark Harris, Pauline Huck, Rose Jackson,
Rhian Jarman, Matt Jenkins, Kathryn Johns, Jamie Lewis, Cara
Lockley, Ewen Macleod, Gareth Mayer, Judy Mazillius, Chloe
Mills, Duncan Mountford, Christian Naylor, Carl Newland, Gill
Nicol, Phil Owen, Julia Pimenta, Becky Prior, Faisal Rahman, Ed
Sheppard, Jackie Tadman, Stella Thompson, Tom Trevor, Elaine
Tuke, Sharon Tuttle, Sarah Warden, Julian Warren, Rob Webster,
Lisa Whiting, Ellen Wilkinson, Vicki Woolley, Lynne Yockney.

Thanks to the Digital Urban Living research centre, partly funded

by the Danish Council for Strategic Research grant number Seminar:
2128-07-0011 Who’s Recuperating Who?
Gustav Metzger, Ursula Biemann, Peter Fend, Janna Graham/
Ultra-Red, Brian Holmes, Esther Leslie, PLATFORM and Tom
Trevor. Moderated by Geoff Cox and Nav Haq
26 November 2009

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