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WORK TITLE: Culture as a Weapon
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/9/1972
WEBSITE:
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NATIONALITY:
http://creativetime.org/about/staff/nato-thompson/ * https://news.artnet.com/art-world/nato-thompson-new-book-culture-weapon-820151
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LC control no.: no2004092533
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rda
Personal name heading:
Thompson, Nato
Birth date: 19720309
Affiliation: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Found in: Interventionists, c2004: t.p. (Nato Thompson)
MIT Press web site, Sept. 14, 2004 (Nato Thompson is
Assistant Curator at MASS MoCA)
Becoming animal: contemporary art in the animal kingdom,
c2005: t. p. (Nato Thompson)
Email communication with Thompson, June 21, 2005 (Nato
Christian Thompson; curator Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art, No. Adams, Mass.; b. Mar. 9, 1972)
Invalid LCCN: nr2005014481
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PERSONAL
Born March 9, 1972.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Creative Time, New York, NY, artistic director, 2007–. Former curator, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, MA.
AWARDS:Art Journal Award for distinguished writing, 2005.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including On Procession: Art on Parade, edited by Rebecca Uchill, Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN), 2009; Mark Tribe, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches, Charta (Milan, Italy), 2010; Nick Cave: Epitome, edited by Ryan Newbanks, Prestel (New York, NY), 2014. Contributor to periodicals, including Artforum, BookForum, Frieze, Huffington Post, and Third Text.
SIDELIGHTS
Nato Thompson was a curator at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art before becoming artistic director of New York-based Creative Time. He has become a noted critic of modern aesthetics and art theory. In that area, he has served as the coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, the sole editor of Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, and the author of Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom, Experimental Geography, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century, and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life.
The Interventionists
In The Interventionists, Thompson traces the ways in which modern art has, more and more often, evoked political messages. The work “catalogs work by some contemporary artists who have answered the call for politically engaged art,” explained Julie Cole in the NWSA Journal. “Designed `to offer the reader a modest intervention that was similar in spirit to the work it was charged to represent’ … it functions as a handbook or toolkit of tactics that can be used by anyone searching for an artistic strategy for com-batting social and economic injustice.” “Postmodern identity politics have recently supplanted more singular movements surrounding issues of race, gender, and sexuality as sources of inspiration,” Cole stated, “and the artists of The Interventionists usually address specific social ills like homelessness, and the capitalist takeover of public spaces for private gain.”
Critics saw The Interventionists as significantly increasing the understanding of the relationship between modern art and popular protest. “Art as political activism,” said Cole, “… has been the subject of many scholarly writings, and political artwork frequently intersects or explicitly engages scholarly writing.” “The Interventionists illustrates the possibility that artists of any gender can contribute to the creation of art about gender and power relationships,” the NWSA Journal reviewer declared. “Like the colorful artist biographies and vividly illustrated project descriptions of the catalog, this notion will hopefully serve to inspire additional research into the ongoing manifestations of feminist thought in contemporary, activist-oriented art.” “This,” stated J. Decker in Choice, “is an excellent primer and overview of how art and activism have taken shape over the past two decades.”
Living as Form
In Living as Form, Thompson further catalogs the ways in which artistic forms have evolved from the middle of the twentieth century to the beginnings of the twenty-first. “Living as Form stands as a thoughtful and motivated survey of recent social practice,” asserted Wendy Vogel in the Brooklyn Rail. “The project rightfully positions newer collectives like Public Movement, Chto Delat?, Voina, and Long March Project alongside legendary (yet still under-recognized) artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst). That it ultimately juxtaposes relatively market-friendly projects with those far outside typical structures of both living and funding only mirrors contemporary art’s increasing commodification and hybrid economies, leaving the field open for contestation, elaboration, and artistic response.”
Critics appreciated the critic’s insight. “Thompson’s work “is a by no means exhaustive list of socially engaged projects gathered together in a gorgeously printed book,” opined Amber Landgraff in C: International Contemporary Art. “The short blurbs, combined with colour images, offer readers new to socially engaged art multiple entry points into a practice that remains contentious in the way that it is discussed by and among academics. While it would be easy to dismiss social practice as a whole, there are many individual projects that offer interesting and imaginative ways of bringing communities together around shared goals.” “Living as Form is a compelling and ambitious effort, and a much-needed contribution to the study and understanding of art concerned with engaging social life a–vital, broad, and diverse field ever-expanding with new experiments,” declared Daniel Tucker in Afterimage. “It asks important questions about what is gained by making our categories of art bigger, and similarly, what may be lost if we abandon `smaller,’ more focused ways of looking at art.” As new ways of pursuing art continue to emerge, Tucker continued, “it would be wise to consider which projects constitute strategic turns and which may simply represent more of the same.”
Seeing Power and Culture as Weapon
Seeing Power shows how modern culture has imposed capitalist values on art. “From the start, Thompson tells us that Seeing Power is not a typical book about art and politics, but rather a combination of philosophy and practice, with observations based on twenty years of immersion in the activist milieu and the art world,” wrote Marc James Leger in Afterimage. “The productive tension between contemporary art and Thompson’s approach to a distinctly American grassroots version of anarchist politics is the distinguishing feature of this undertaking. It is clear from the outset that the purpose of conjoining activism with art is to bring about radical social and subjective change.” “Thompson … situates his thinking as a post-politics for which, in terms of today’s common sense, there is no `outside’ to capitalism,” said Leger. “As he notes, the replacement of the term `culture industry’ with the more positive `creative industries’ only serves to indicate the extent to which culture and capital are increasingly intertwined. When Thompson closes his first chapter with the assertion that the artists he discusses operate self-consciously at the intersection of art and politics, the question of how it is possible to think politics has already in some way been steered in an ultimately pragmatic direction.”
Thompson’s Culture as Weapon looks at the manipulation of art in order to influences its audience. “Culture as Weapon provides a broad overview on how individuals, corporations and governments employ design, storytelling, imagery and art to stir emotion and mold sentiment,” wrote Carolina A. Miranda in the Los Angeles Times. “The prominence of the Internet and social media, naturally, makes this all the more profound and far-reaching than in the past.” Culture as Weapon, wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “succeeds in raising awareness of the cultural forces that shape brand preferences and political allegiance.” “The author moves effortlessly between subtopics and tautly addresses particular oppressive social mechanisms, yet his focus on the pervasiveness of persuasion feels unsurprising,” declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The volume is “a precisely written critique of cultural manipulation in our daily lives.” “How the rational brain might counter the barrage of cultural string-pulling that we experience on a daily basis, and how the world of culture might save itself from becoming a mere tool, Thompson doesn’t say,” Miranda concluded. “But Culture as Weapon provides a compelling manual for determining how the manipulation begins.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Afterimage, January-February, 2005, review of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, p. 15; July-August, 2012, Daniel Tucker, “Getting Art and Life Together,” p. 37; January-February, 2016, Marc James Leger, review of Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century, p. 40.
Atlantic, January 28, 2017, Sophie Gilbert, “How Culture Became a Powerful Political Weapon.”
Booklist, December 1, 2016, Raymond Pun, review of Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life, p. 5.
Brooklyn Rail, May, 2012, Wendy Vogel, review of Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, p. 42.
C: International Contemporary Art, autumn, 2012, Amber Landgraff, review of Living as Form, p. 61.
Choice, September, 2012, J. Decker, review of Living as Form, p. 66.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of Culture as Weapon.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, Rebecca Brody, review of Culture as Weapon, p. 110.
Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2017, Carolina A. Miranda, review of Culture as Weapon.
NWSA Journal, spring, 2007, Julie Cole, “Art, Activism, and Feminisms: Sites of Confrontation and Change,” p. 175.
Publishers Weekly, November 18, 2016, review of Culture as Weapon, p. 62.
ONLINE
Artnet, https://news.artnet.com/ (January 18, 2017), Brian Boucher, “Nato Thompson Asks Whether We Can Weaponize Art and Culture for Good in a Post-Fact Era”; (February 10, 2017), Maximilíano Durón, “Creative Time Names Nato Thompson Artistic Director, Announces New Senior Curator.”
Creative Time, http://creativetime.org/ (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Melville House, https://www.mhpbooks.com/ (August 30, 2017), review of Culture as Weapon.
Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, http://www.pcah.us/ (November 30, 2016), author profile.*
Nato Thompson
Artistic Director
Nato Thompson joined Creative Time in January 2007. Since then, Thompson has organized such major Creative Time projects as The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions, including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, BookForum, Frieze, Artforum, Third Text, and Huffington Post among them. In 2005, he received the Art Journal Award for distinguished writing. For Independent Curators International, Thompson curated the exhibition Experimental Geography with a book available from Melville House Publishing. He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life to be published in January 2017.
Nato Thompson Asks Whether We Can Weaponize Art and Culture for Good in a Post-Fact Era
What do public art and Starbucks have in common?
Brian Boucher, January 18, 2017
Nato Thompson. Photo Derek Schultz, courtesy Melville House.
Nato Thompson. Photo Derek Schultz, courtesy Melville House.
In his new book Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life, curator-author Nato Thompson outlines the ways that all forms of culture can be deployed to appeal to our emotional selves—more often than not appealing to our fears.
Gliding, in one example, from Mother Teresa’s use of soup as charity to Andy Warhol’s appropriation of the red-and-white Campbell’s Soup logo, Thompson then pivots to cause-related marketing; for example the soup company’s own boosting of its profits by turning its label pink to raise funds for breast cancer while also improving its bottom line.
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In an even more troubling instance of the co-optation of cultural knowledge, Thompson describes the employment of anthropologists in the counter-insurgency effort in Iraq, and then turns to comparing both community organizing and socially-engaged art to a nonviolent insurgency.
Throughout the book, he seeks to bring visual-art phenomena, ranging from the protest art of Gran Fury to the boosterish “Cows on Parade,” into a dialogue with other kinds of image-makers and experience-crafters, such as Starbucks and IKEA, in hopes of illuminating what they have in common in terms of the call to action they issue to various publics.
CultureWeapon_fin.indd
Also the artistic director at New York-based public arts organization Creative Time, the prolific Thompson has published four other volumes, including Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century and Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. Both were published by Melville House, as is the new book, which is out this week.
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In a phone interview with artnet News, Thompson talked about whether hope is the opposite of fear, what we gain from putting art in the broader contexts he argues for, and the differences between writing and curating.
Rather than restricting yourself to visual or even performing arts, you take more of a kitchen-sink approach to culture, pulling in highly disparate phenomena, tying art, for example, to advertising, anthropology as a weapon of war, and activism. Make the argument for the reader: what do we gain by that approach?
For those in the arts, I think the gain, and it’s something I’ve been invested in for a long time, is to frame the arts in broader cultural forms, rather than fetishize the conversation of art in conversation only with art. It’s simply accepting the landscape as it is, since the use of culture is not restricted to art in any sense. In order to have a relevant conversation about what art is doing, it needs to be put in conversation with broader forces.
The growing ability to tug on the way people feel or use images to cajole them into doing something, to use the irrational side of people as a tool, is a very profound shift over the last century, one with profound consequences, and coming to terms with it is complex.
Andy Warhol, Large Campbell’s Soup Can (1964). Courtesy Sotheby's London.
Andy Warhol, Large Campbell’s Soup Can (1964). Courtesy Sotheby’s London.
Speaking of activism, you discuss the visual identity or even branding of movements like Occupy Wall Street and more strictly visual-art forms of resistance such as the historic anti-gentrification “Real Estate Show.” Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president the same week the book comes out, and many in the arts are asking, “What can we do now?” What lessons can those people draw from this book?
The Trump situation is obviously a black hole that sucks all conversation into it. The giant, galvanizing force against Trump obscures the situation we’re in. “How can we stop Trump?” is a reasonable and obvious conversation to have, but it glosses over the idea that the right-wing megalomaniac is the problem and that we are not the problem.
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The irrational cultural forces that are epitomized by Trump are not exclusive to Rust Belt Republicans. Those cultural forces are at work across political lines, Democrat and Republican.
You discuss the ways that culture is weaponized to exploit fear. Can culture be weaponized against fear?
First, one should never underestimate fear, but rather have a healthy respect for it. I don’t think our emotional registers are such that there’s an opposite of fear that’s just as effective. Hope is not its opposite. It has no opposite. It’s a dominant emotional form, and it’s effective for triggering—you get an immediate reaction.
How to combat that? That conversation is very complicated, and my suggestion, although it’s not an immediate answer, is that people working together to think through things on a personal, long-term basis is very effective. For example, places like union halls, which don’t exist so much anymore but where people came together to not only talk about class interests but also spend time together, were very effective. Producing space and time to think more complexly about things is a counterbalance to being instrumentalized by emotions.
The radical decentralization of information that is social networking today is unleashing forces in us that are very profound. Who we are as individuals cannot help but change. You see people on the streets looking at their phones, but you can’t see what’s going on inside their heads. That isolation from each other makes us more vulnerable to emotional reaction, so we need to produce social mechanisms whereby we think through things together.
kara-walker-creative-time-02
Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014. Photography by Jason Wyche, courtesy Creative Time.
In your day job, you select and support various kinds of public art projects, from Kara Walker’s Domino sugar factory installation A Subtlety (2014) to Duke Riley’s LED-lighted pigeon performance, Fly By Night (2016). What’s the relationship between staging these projects as a curator and writing about them in the pages of a book? How do the two kinds of work complement one another?
A book is a very different form, which allows you to make argumentation and to go into facts and history. As for public art projects, in the role of our big commissions, it’s about supporting an artist’s dream. The artist is not only the author but the visionary.
In terms of experiencing artworks, I have profound respect for what art can do, but with that respect comes fear of what art can do. It’s a powerful force. Affecting people on a deep, emotional level and reimagining what the world can be is a very profound responsibility. That is the great glory of putting together public art projects.
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That said, I want art to be in conversation with IKEA and with Starbucks, because I have profound respect and fear of what those places can do to us, too. We’re always changing and we’re affected by what we come in contact with. What happens if we buy all our coffee at Starbucks and we buy all our furniture at IKEA? And as much as I love public art, one only experiences so much of that.
How Culture Became a Powerful Political Weapon
Nato Thompson’s new book explores the history of how music, TV, games, and advertising have been used to influence consumers.
Melville House
Sophie Gilbert Jan 28, 2017 Culture
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When it comes to living in a democracy, Nato Thompson argues, nothing affects us more directly and more powerfully than culture. Culture suffuses the world we live in, from TV to music to advertising to sports. And all these things, Thompson writes in his new book, Culture as Weapon, “influence our emotions, our actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens.”
But comprehending how dominant culture has become also means thinking about the ways it can be, and has been, employed to manipulate consumers, by politicians, brands, and other powerful institutions. In Culture as Weapon, Thompson delves into the culture wars of the 1980s, the early origins of public relations and advertising in the early 20th century, how culture became a powerful vehicle for reinventing cities, and how brands associate themselves with causes to shape their own reputations. He looks at how artists have responded to these impulses, and how the emergence of the internet contributed to a new kind of immersion in culture, in which we’re more deeply absorbed in it than ever.
Thompson is the artistic director of the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time, which commissions and supports socially engaged works of art. He spoke to me by phone. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Sophie Gilbert: Your book explores how arts, entertainment, and culture in the larger sense color our view, as citizens, of how we interpret current events. Do you think this played out particularly in the last election?
Nato Thompson: I feel like it plays out in every election. And to put a cautionary note around it, I’m game on for talking about the urgency of what Trump presents, but the misleading part of that is that it makes us think that those who didn’t vote for Trump are somehow outside of the bubble, which I totally do not believe. It falls too conveniently into the idea that the masses are somehow hypnotized by the media-culture machine but the progressive rationalists escape it, which just isn’t true. Our ideological terrain is much murkier than that.
Gilbert: That’s interesting, because my next question was going to be about how you explore in the book how people and companies use culture to expand and maintain their influence. And one thing about the last president was that he was really a master of this, and in using cultural soft power. Can you talk a little bit about how he used culture within his administration?
Thompson: Just the way Obama ran was interesting. He ran on a “change” platform, which is also what Trump ran on, obviously. Certainly this was the post-Bush era, and change was welcome to a country totally exhausted by the Iraq War and the War on Terror, and so the “brand” of Obama, to put it in those terms, was, “Yes we can,” and, “Change you can believe in.” Which certainly appeals to the heart, but could also easily be an ad for Pepsi-Cola. That said, he was extraordinarily personable, and probably the coolest president we will ever have. He was extremely deft on a talk show, he was the first president who could do a mic drop, he was the first president up there shooting hoops where you actually thought he was good. He was cool, but certainly not without a brand image.
Gilbert: The first chapter is largely about the culture wars that emerged during the Reagan presidency, and it feels in some ways very familiar, especially with the current threats to NEA funding. Do you feel like history is repeating itself?
Thompson: Yes, although at a very different speed. One of the lessons that we’re all learning that Reagan knew, very well in fact, is that controversies are on your side. When it comes to the culture wars, paradox is your friend. So when Trump says he’s going to build a wall—which I think is going to be the most iconic artwork of this era—it’s meant to make people angry. Some people think Trump is a master media strategist, but whether he is or not doesn’t matter. His personality happens to coincide with the needs of the media itself, and his behavior is such that the camera can’t get off him, and that’s something that the Christian right learned with the culture wars. When Jesse Helms went after “sodomites,” not only was he able to galvanize what he called the silent majority, but simultaneously he was able to gay-bash, to talk viscerally about sex, while pretending to hate it. He could have his cake and eat it. Trump does that too, I think. He enjoys condemning things because the things he’s condemning obsess the media.
Gilbert: There’s a quote in the book from Hitler, who describes citizens as “a vascillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another,” and how the art of propaganda consists of finding ways to capture their attention. Do you think culture wars are about uniting people or dividing them?
Thompson: Well, I don’t want to generalize because it’s a complex media landscape, and certain actions do in fact bring people together. But to say something kind of weird, I know a lot of people say love trumps hate—they use that phraseology—but I would say fear of the other is a more historically powerful force. Fear is one of these things in our emotional toolkits that gets a reaction out of us as people very fast. In our psychology, fear doesn’t have an opposite: It is the dominant emotional register. I say that because it’s useful to understand that fear is something we’re very vulnerable to, and because of that it will continue to be used. It’s a weapon we use on all fronts, because it’s how we function. This is the way things tend to have played out historically, and are playing out now.
Gilbert: What did you make of the inauguration? What kind of message did it project?
Thompson: It was interesting—there was so much footage of anarchists breaking windows, and I thought, this is the same media impulse that couldn’t take its eyes off Trump. An alternative title for the book certainly could have been, “If It Bleeds, It Leads,” and you see that same addiction to hyperbole, addiction to sensationalism, ratings, clickbait. I watched that and was so infuriated by it, because it just felt like nothing was changing in terms of the way we’re reading the world.
Gilbert: I wanted to ask, too, about the concert the day before, with Toby Keith and The Piano Guys. Eight years previously we saw this huge cultural event with Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé, and the recent concert was also touted as a big inaugural event but the talent was markedly different. Do you have any thoughts on the message of that?
Thompson: There’s been such a different range in this election with cultural strategies, and here I’m talking capital-C culture, like arts and entertainment. Because, of course, we all know Trump had a difficult time getting acts to agree to come, and certainly had he had his druthers, he would have had the Rolling Stones or someone big-name and mainstream, but it didn’t go that way. Quite frankly, I don’t think Trump thinks of himself as appealing to the demographic that actually ended up playing the inaugural concert.
Gilbert: I thought about the protests, too, when I was reading the section on Campbell’s soup, and the power of branding for charitable causes, like pink soup cans for breast cancer. It seems there’s immense power in this instant visual iconography, like a sea of pink hats everywhere.
Thompson: As far as I’m concerned, that march could have been led by a myriad of different issues, but thank goodness it was a women’s march. It was great for that, it had a different tone and a different feel, and the pink hats led a lot of that, a feeling of literal texture. The Campbell’s thing is a little different because that chapter is about how companies like to brand themselves as social-good companies, like how Google’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil.” I think that under Trump we’re going to be in for a lot more of brands for social justice, because, I suspect, a lot of people are going to be unhappy with him, even if they supported him. A lot of the energy with him was against something—against Hillary—and now she’s out of the picture that’ll have to shift to another target. And a lot of companies will be able to position themselves as being against the current system, when really in fact they’re not against it at all.
Gilbert: The idea in the book too about the massive psychogenic illness of social media, and our self-perpetuating bubbles was fascinating. Because right now, every time I go on Twitter, I get a feedback loop of doom.
Thompson: I think we’re all in a national and international learning curve with that. It’s almost like there’s an emotional logic to social networking that we’re all learning together, collectively. We’re learning the emotional responses that happen to us online, we’re learning that we’re all kind of trolls when it comes to the internet. We’re watching everyone freak out but also learning that freaking out emotionally wears us down. We’re all on this strange emotional rollercoaster ride together. This is such a new way to receive news, it’s such a new way to relate to people close to us. Who knows where it’s all going? But that, certainly, is very different from the culture wars of the ’80s.
Gilbert: How can we, as consumers of culture, be aware of the ways in which our emotions might be being manipulated by it? While also not being afraid of it?
Thompson: Well, it’s a good question. I think mindfulness, certainly, and I’m no therapist, but I’m a big fan of talking things out in groups and getting some distance from how things affect you before you react to them. There’s an early analysis in the book of Walter Lippmann [his thoughts on democracy, and how he believed that people acted emotionally rather than rationally]. I would say the same analysis applies to media. I don’t want to dismiss democracy as a concept, but certainly key pillars of it—that citizens vote rationally—are inaccurate when it comes to who we are as people. Part of that, then, is really getting a handle on how people know what they know. A lot of what drives culture is branding, and a lot of the driving engine of our society knows already exactly who we are and how to get us to do things. The logic of most industries actually works very coercively. So, I’m not answering your question, but I think it’s good to be aware of how intimate and deeply fearful we are.
Gilbert: What I took from your last answer is that since we’re begin targeted so effectively by brands based on our identity, maybe we should start mixing things up? I should start consuming culture that isn’t typically my kind of thing?
Thompson: Quite honestly, on a more strategic level, it’s good to just get outside of your bubbles. Looking at the red state/blue state thing, it’s not really about states. If you throw a rock 40 minutes outside of a city, you’ll probably hit a Trump area. But what that demonstrates, too, is that geographical proximity also has a huge power over who we think we are. The people around you inform you more than the internet does. This says to me that what we need is for people from the country to come to the city, and people from the city to come to the country, and we need to have honest and open conversations about what we’re thinking about.
Nato Thompson
Updated
30 Nov 2016
nato-thompson-01.jpg
Nato Thompson. Photo by Derek Schultz.
"Working in the public sphere can allow projects to escape the bracket of art and often they can simply exist as unexplained phenomena in the world. The more unexplained an art project can be the more it can hum in that special zone relegated to art. It is all rather paradoxical but tangibly real."
Nato Thompson is chief curator at Creative Time, which has commissioned and presented ambitious public art projects with thousands of artists throughout New York City, across the country, around the world. Since 2007, he has organized notable projects such as Living As Form (2011), Paul Ramirez Jonas's Key to the City (2010), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), Paul Chan's acclaimed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), and Mike Nelson's A Psychic Vacuum. Prior to Creative Time, Thompson worked as curator at MASS MoCA, completing numerous large-scale exhibitions such as The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. His writings on art, politics and alternative cultural production have appeared in BookForum, Frieze, Art Journal, Artforum, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and other publications, and he received the College Art Association Art Journal Award for Distinguished Writing in 2005. His book Seeing Power: Socially Engaged Art in the Age of Cultural Production was published by Melville House in 2012. Thompson served as a Center panelist in 2008 and an evaluator in 2010. In 2012, he contributed to the Center's Pigeons on the Grass, Alas series, in which contemporary visual arts curators discussed their changing field.
Nato Thompson
Nato Thompson is a curator at the New York–based public arts institution Creative Time. Since January 2007 he has organized major projects such as Paul Chan’s acclaimed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), which included free public performances of Samuel Beckett’s play, theater workshops, educational seminars, and more. Thompson is currently working on a multi-phase national exhibition entitled Democracy in America: The National Campaign, a program investigating artists’ relationship with and reactions to the historic roots and practical manifestations of the American democratic tradition.
Previous to Creative Time, Thompson worked as a curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions such as The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), a survey of political art of the 1990s. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including Art Journal, tema celeste, Parkett, Cabinet, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The College Art Association awarded him for distinguished writing in Art Journal in 2004. He holds a BA in Political Theory from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
News The Talent
Creative Time Names Nato Thompson Artistic Director, Announces New Senior Curator
By Maximilíano Durón Posted 02/10/17 12:45 pm
Nato Thompson, left; Elvira Dyangani Ose. HENDRIK ZEITLER (2)
Nato Thompson, left; Elvira Dyangani Ose.
HENDRIK ZEITLER (2)
Creative Time, the New York–based nonprofit focused on public art, has promoted former chief curator Nato Thompson to artistic director and appointed Elvira Dyangani Ose as a new senior curator.
Thompson, who was been with Creative Time since 2007, has presented some of the organization’s most-lauded projects, including Kara Walker’s massive sugar-coated installation A Subtlety (2014), featuring a sphinx-like woman in the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, as well as the annual Creative Time Summit and commissioned projects by Trevor Paglen, Paul Chan, and Pedro Reyes. He also recently published a new book, Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. Before Creative Time, he was a curator at MASS MoCA, the large-scale installation-focused art space in western Massachusetts.
“The possibilities, and the need, for engaged public art have never been so great and so urgent,” Thompson said in a statement. “Creative Time has long engaged with social and political issues on a global scale, and I look forward to continuing those efforts.”
Ose is an independent curator who has most recently organized exhibitions of Theaster Gates and Betye Saar at the Fondazione Prada. She is also a lecturer in visual culture at Goldsmiths college in London, and served previously as a curator of international art at Tate Modern.
The work of Creative Time, she said in a statement, is “very much in line with my previous academic and curatorial passions.”
Culture as Weapon
The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
Nato Thompson
“Culture As Weapon is a brilliant and scathing take no prisoners critique of contemporary culture. Spanning military occupation, capitalism masquerading as charity, and personal computing, Nato Thompson shows us the dark side of how culture is deployed to fortify power.” —Laura Poitras, filmmaker, Citizenfour
The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising, and marketing transformed the way the powerful communicate with the rest of us. A century later, the tools are more sophisticated than ever, the onslaught more relentless.
In Culture as Weapon, acclaimed curator and critic Nato Thompson reveals how institutions use art and culture to ensure profits and constrain dissent — and shows us that there are alternatives. An eye-opening account of the way advertising, media, and politics work today, Culture as Weapon offers a radically new way of looking at our world.
NATO THOMPSON is Artistic Director at Creative Time, one of New York’s most prestigious and exciting art organizations. He is the editor of Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House), The Interventionists: A Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, and Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011. His most recent book is Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Melville House).
Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
Raymond Pun
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. By Nato Thompson. Jan. 2017.288p. Melville, $26.99 (9781612195735). 306.
Thompson, chief curator at the public-art organization Creative Time, author of Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Age of Cultural Production (2015), and editor of several other books, here explores the intersections of art, culture, and manipulation in society. He offers compelling historical examples of how government, corporations, and individuals, including artists and activists, have utilized and harnessed the powers of art and culture to shift and influence perceptions and images in public dialogue. Thompson writes confidently that governments and big businesses have employed marketing techniques in order to influence consumers to drive up profits or support specific agendas. He describes the role of artists who have resisted and challenged the influences of various institutions through their creative and political activities. This is a swift read for those who enjoy cultural and social politics and the history of marketing and advertising in America. Readers will find Thompson's book to be informative, profound, and alarming, as he traces the ongoing developments of those who are manipulating culture and art through technology and social media today. --Raymond Pun
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pun, Raymond. "Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 5. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474715677&it=r&asid=59b9168e1e5853e780a2a7ca99ba431a. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474715677
Thompson, Nato. Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
Rebecca Brody
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p110.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Thompson, Nato. Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. Melville House. Jan. 2017. 288p. ISBN 9781612195735. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781612195742. SOC SCI
In a sprawling and ambitious exploration, curator and critic Thompson (Seeing Power) outlines the ways that culture has been used and abused by governments, politicians, and corporations to manipulate behavior, earn money, and influence the outcome of armed conflict. Thompson's politics and passion for social activism are never far from the surface. He attempts to draw together diverse threads such as Nazi propaganda, the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan, social justice initiatives in Philadelphia, the artwork of Andy Warhol, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the social engineering of retail spaces in order to show how those in power seek to manipulate and modify the behavior of consumers to maximize both political and economic gain. Thompson's writing shines when discussing the arts and the "charity industrial complex"; his forays into military analysis are less successful. VERDICT This dense and wide-ranging read will appeal to those interested in critiques of capitalism and the philosophical questions raised by the corporate manipulation of culture.--Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA
Brody, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brody, Rebecca. "Thompson, Nato. Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 110. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371271&it=r&asid=f21998b1d1b95a1f430b10c8fcff5c26. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371271
Culture as a Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
263.48 (Nov. 28, 2016): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Culture as a Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
Nato Thompson. Melville House, $26.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-61219-573-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The latest from art critic Thompson (Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century) chronicles the ever-increasing complexity and ubiquity of ads and artworks that manipulate people into purchasing an item or accepting an ideology. Beginning with an anecdote-heavy history of the golden age of advertising, Thompson reveals that companies increasingly stopped trying to market a product and turned toward marketing a social experience, a trend exemplified by Apple, Ikea, and Starbucks. Thompson compellingly suggests that selling a product and selling an ideology have historically applied disconcertingly similar tactics; indeed, the advertising firm behind the wildly successful Volkswagen Beetle ad campaign of the late 1950s later produced the famous "Daisy" campaign ad for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Thompson's approach emphatically hews to the left, recalling the politics of Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein, and he treats the term "culture" very broadly. The book is an energetic, briskly paced, and well-researched polemic that avoids cliche and succeeds in raising awareness of the cultural forces that shape brand preferences and political allegiance. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Culture as a Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life." Publishers Weekly, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473149955&it=r&asid=7cee7fb3b9d10bab40904ea79a74bb8a. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473149955
Thompson, Nato: CULTURE AS WEAPON
(Nov. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Thompson, Nato CULTURE AS WEAPON Melville House (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 1, 17 ISBN: 978-1-61219-573-5
How persuasive cultural mechanisms are encoded in broader social structures, from high art to war-planning.Thompson (Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century, 2015, etc.) confidently casts a wide net in his discussion, seeing hidden hands of artifice and marketing that have long manipulated the citizenry. "I want to explain the ways in which those in power have to use culture to maintain and expand their influence," he writes, "and the role that we all play in that process." The author supports this ominous claim with a historical timeline and various categories of real-world occurrences, first focusing on the early "persuaders" of advertising and public relations and then looking at diverse examples, from lifestyle corporations like Apple and IKEA to the Pentagon's counterinsurgency theorists. Thompson first argues that the 1980s "culture wars" over art and funding provide a lens for understanding cultural manipulation within politics: "A number of forces were learning to utilize the power of culture to push forward their own agendas." He then looks further back to 1914, arguing that the Ludlow massacre of striking miners led John D. Rockefeller to develop innovations in public opinion-shaping that became widespread during World War I. During the 1920s, wartime propaganda morphed into the modern advertising and polling industries, embodied by George Gallup, who founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935. As Thompson notes regarding Gallup's prescience, "if he could predict elections, what else could he do?" Yet simultaneously, artistic collectives and radical groups were recognizing the power of the same techniques, and the author explores topics from Dada and Andy Warhol to Saul Alinsky and the Black Lives Matter movement. Thompson characterizes our own time as deeply fearful, tying the racist politics of Lee Atwater's "Southern Strategy" to current controversies around mass imprisonment and police overreach. The author moves effortlessly between subtopics and tautly addresses particular oppressive social mechanisms, yet his focus on the pervasiveness of persuasion feels unsurprising.A precisely written critique of cultural manipulation in our daily lives.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Thompson, Nato: CULTURE AS WEAPON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865818&it=r&asid=581d31530fc0027961ecaa0c5bed628f. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865818
Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century
Marc James Leger
43.4 (January-February 2016): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Visual Studies Workshop
http://www.vsw.org/ai/
Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century
By Nato Thompson
Melville House, 2015
165 pp./$20.00 (hb)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Anyone who has been involved in or has researched activist art in the past two decades is likely to be familiar with the work of Nato Thompson. As assistant curator at MASS MoCA, he co-edited, with Gregory Sholette, the catalog for the groundbreaking exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004-05), and as the chief curator of Creative Time, he edited the massive anthology Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 (2012). Whereas these previous books presented short essays by Thompson, this new book-length text provides readers with a better appreciation of the thoughts of one of the best-known and most whimsical activist curators. Seeing Power is a finely woven and detailed argument on the issues defining activist art today. With no endnotes, no bibliography, and no image captions, the book is a pleasant, user-friendly experience that discusses the work of leading socially engaged artists, including REPOhistory, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Growing Economy), Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, WochenKlausur, Yomango, William Pope.L, Rick Lowe, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Trevor Paglen.
From the start, Thompson tells us that Seeing Power is not a typical book about art and politics, but rather a combination of philosophy and practice, with observations based on twenty years of immersion in the activist milieu and the art world (vii). The productive tension between contemporary art and Thompson's approach to a distinctly American grassroots version of anarchist politics is the distinguishing feature of this undertaking. It is clear from the outset that the purpose of conjoining activism with art is to bring about radical social and subjective change. The capitalist system is throughout the text an ominous presence affecting all social institutions and in particular that of cultural production. Whereas from the title of the book one might have expected a Foucauldian lens through which to "see power," it is Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemonic contestation that is first evoked as a way to define the practices of everyday life and the alternative spaces that animate the text.
One of the main points of Peter Burger's 1984 text, Theory of the Avant-Garde, is that the postwar neo-avant-gardes failed to sublate art into life in a revolutionary manner and that, instead, this overcoming of the contradiction was effected by what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno defined as the "culture industry." Seeing Power makes a similar sort of assessment of the difficulties that have confronted the kinds of activist art that emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s. Referred to variously as tactical media, socially engaged art, and Thompson's own "social aesthetics," such practices have had to confront the problems of commodification that have affected avant-garde movements since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Thompson is therefore consistent throughout the book in understanding artistic labor and consumption in terms of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. This, for him, is a condition that cannot be escaped. What concerns him instead is capitalism's "ecstatic devotion" (9) to cultural production, its endless diversification of needs and its overwhelming ability to absorb anything that reacts against it.
One gets a glimpse of how the ideas of Michel Foucault might, in fact, have seeped into Thomspon's thinking as he fails to reflect on the fact that revolutionary impulses were abandoned in the postwar period along with class politics. What replaces these in Thompson's description of events are countercultural movements, cultural trends, and people organized around new identities and lifestyles. All of these intermingle with the culture industries in such a way that resistance becomes more difficult. The silver lining for Thompson is that this total cooptation allows us to see power with greater clarity (12). The packaging and reselling of signifiers of resistance indicates a paradoxical embrace and recognition of alternatives. Thompson therefore situates his thinking as a post-politics for which, in terms of today's common sense, there is no "outside" to capitalism. As he notes, the replacement of the term "culture industry" with the more positive "creative industries" only serves to indicate the extent to which culture and capital are increasingly intertwined. When Thompson closes his first chapter with the assertion that the artists he discusses operate self-consciously at the intersection of art and politics, the question of how it is possible to think politics has already in some way been steered in an ultimately pragmatic direction. Seeing Power is less concerned with a productivist and revolutionary art, and more with art that reacts to the excesses of capitalism. Within these parameters, Thompson's thinking flows effortlessly between, for example, radical art collectives like the Situationists, Superflex, and Critical Art Ensemble, and that of social movements around alterglobalization such as the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.
Whereas the critical task for activist artists, Thompson says, is to create more effective and affective forms of activism (27), one is left with the difficulty that arises when critical cultural theory has abandoned mediation and the concept of totality in favor of a more "realistic" capitulation to economic determinism, attempting to transform the system from within--through spatial occupations, nonhierarchical organizing, and anti-branding--rather than from without, through cultural revolution, radical political parties, and ideology critique. One of the key intellectual reference points for this book is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. One gets a sense of Bourdieu's influence in the second chapter, where Thompson addresses the suspicion that activists tend to show toward socially engaged artworks that are ambiguous and elusive rather than straightforward and didactic. It so happens that the dichotomy that is used to structure Thompson's argument corresponds in Bourdieu's analysis to the class habitus (dispositions) of the middle and working classes. Of course, as a result of more widespread cultural education, the traditional markers of class distinction are no longer useful. Nevertheless, the outer shell remains, and so this dynamic between artists' preference for the ambiguous and activists' preference for the didactic has to be accounted for. Giving the example of Jeremy Deller's Iraq war project, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq (2008), Thompson emphasizes artistic intention and the use of didactic means to reach a more complex level of ambiguity where viewers must decide for themselves the meaning of a work. When the intentions of an artist are not legible, the gap between the artist and the audience may widen, but this at least allows the work to escape singular interpretations. Thompson's insight Is that in an unambiguous world of exchange relations and media manipulation, an atmosphere of "visual suspicion" is created in which people become paranoid and mistrustful (46).
While he could have made productive use of Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the weakening of symbolic efficiency and the interpassivity of belief, Thompson opts for a somewhat more naive theory of paranoia regarding the ambiguous gesture. This comes into play in another chapter where Bourdieu's influence is present through the use of concepts like cultural and social capital. Unlike Bourdieu, however, who developed these ideas as a means to go beyond vulgar materialism, Thompson is once again more deterministic in his emphasis on how the quantitative increase in exchange relations and the fact of cooptation make social capital the object of paranoia. Here too, however, there is a saving grace for living as capitalist form. When one's authentic street cred and radical merits are offered up to bigger institutions and subsumed by capitalism, when social networking and the accumulation of social capital become necessary for survival in a world with more demands and fewer job opportunities, we might, he suggests, ease up on denunciations of careerism and selling out. Since the logic of neoliberalism is to set people against one another, Thompson argues that politically minded people should work to build trust and social cohesion rather than satisfy themselves with outings and purges (88,164). The activist artist who can build social capital and better navigate more fields and infrastructures has a better chance of effecting change.
The notion of infrastructure is the central concept of Seeing Power. The organizational capacity of activists to develop sustainable alternative spaces, or "infrastructures of resonance," marks what Thompson refers to as a shift from temporary tactical actions to long-term strategic structures that can also act as "transversal" sites of becoming (131). In this sense, new groups like Gulf Labor Artist Coalition are picking up where people organized around Art Workers' Coalition left off in the late 1960s. If the world is full of complicated bureaucracies and interconnected infrastructures that shape our lives, then these spaces can be occupied, reclaimed, or created from the ground up in such a way that their impact can accommodate new forms of collective intersubjectivity. New infrastructures like the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest or 16 Beaver Group give themselves the power to legitimate practices and lend activist artists the kind of recognition they may not otherwise receive in the mainstream media and major art institutions. Thompson's personal experiences living in a student co-op in Berkeley and working with Temporary Services in Chicago offer some insights into the fact that art institutions need not be run like businesses but could instead be far more integrated with everyday life, and with the need for communion with others through mutual networks. He writes: "This ability to read a phenomenon based on the infrastructures of resonance around it is what I refer to as seeing power" (72). Such infrastructures benefit the ambiguous artistic gesture by couching it in a world of discovery and connection rather than the underlying neoliberal economy. Thompson's experience as a high-level curator here allows for some understanding of the failings of what he refers to as the "nonprofit industrial complex," with its increasingly conservative values and financial pressures (77). New infrastructures might therefore legitimate activist practices while at the same time provide added social capital for its users.
Although we all need to make money to survive, there is no need, Thompson says, to abandon our radical ambitions (104). However, it is never altogether clear in Seeing Power to what extent cultural capital per se is ever anything more than a cipher for social relations under capitalism. Such is the influence of the theoretical immanentism than defines radical thinking under the influence of people like Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri. Because of this limitation on the subject of ideological reflection one cannot consider Seeing Power to be a work with much bearing on art theory. As Thompson says humorously: "If the art world were a car, we have handed over the transmission, engine, body, and tires so we can work on the windshield wipers" (80). So much for the art world as far as many social movement activists are concerned.
But what about the other side of this equation--the one that makes an activist supposedly anti-capitalist? Thompson's book avoids the opportunity to more rigorously critique capitalism. This might seem an unfair assessment given the fact that capitalist cooptation is mentioned at every turn. However, instead of a radical ideology critique, Thompson's default Intellectual horizon is a social constructionist discourse theory. Of course he can hardly be blamed for the current academic intellectual hegemony, and no one to my knowledge has found an adequate solution to capitalism. Thompson nevertheless broaches the issue when he writes: "This contradiction of [cultural] content and capital is part and parcel of the very fiber of contemporary art" (49). In this sentence he is very close to identifying capital as form. Had he followed up on this insight he might have further considered ways to escape the perverse loop of power and resistance. But then, had he done so, his book would have been about revolution and dialectics rather than today's forms of biocapitalist activism. The strength of Seeing Power lies in its discussion of practices of cultural resistance. Despite my criticisms here, I consider the book a welcome addition to the ongoing debates within social practice art.
MARC JAMES LEGER is an independent scholar living in Montreal. He is author of Brave New Avant Carde (2012) and Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics (2015).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leger, Marc James. "Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century." Afterimage, Jan.-Feb. 2016, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443131178&it=r&asid=5c876e699e4a5d1570441267d79dbf20. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443131178
Art, activism, and feminisms: sites of confrontation and change
Julie Cole
19.1 (Spring 2007): p175.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Johns Hopkins University Press
http://www.press.jhu.edu
Art and Feminism by Peggy Phelan and Helena Reckitt. London: Phaidon Press limited, 2001, 304 pp., $75.00 hardcover.
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 by Martha Rosler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, 390 pp., $34.95 hardcover, $19.95 cloth.
Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000 by Hilary Robinson. London: Blackwell Publishers ltd., 2001, 706 pp., $100.95 hardcover, $44.95 cloth.
The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life by Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette. North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA Publications, 2004, 154 pp., $30.00 hardcover.
Much has been written over the last four decades on feminism, art, and the critical relationship between the two. Art as political activism also has been the subject of many scholarly writings, and political artwork frequently intersects or explicitly engages scholarly writing. Much has been written, but much also has been left out, and readers seeking information regarding art informed by feminist concerns and intended as an intervention might be frustrated by current offerings. Texts that are simultaneously engaging, informative, and critically self-conscious of their place in a hotly contested, ideologically loaded--and potentially revolutionary--field, are rare. While content should be the primary focus when evaluating a book, an appealing book can be an important tool or ally, particularly in a course devoted to exploring how art can create, change, or jam culture; aesthetics become content within books on feminism, art, and activism. Even issues of cost, a perennial concern for college students, take on new significance in this context, for accessibility, the power to reach as large and varied an audience as possible, is an important component of art concerned with social and economic justice. Grounded in these thoughts, I began to look at each of the following four books for useful and inspiring discussions of feminists, who make art in order to intervene in, act upon, or change existing modes of culture.
I turned first to Art and Feminism by Peggy Phelan and Helena Reckitt. Published in 2001, the book is out of print but still readily available. With the majority of its pages devoted to images of work by dozens of feminist artists (all women), the book's structure is designed to support the claim Reckitt makes in her "Preface," that "Art and Feminism suggests a relationship between the demands of feminist politics, the debates of feminist theory and the explorations of artists informed by these concerns" while "identify[ing] struggles and differences between feminist artists of different generations" (11). Given this focus on difference, it is not surprising that the editors' analysis is rooted in psychoanalytic theory, a point I will return to.
Phelan's "Survey" is a chronological exploration of the relationship between the terms "art" and "feminism," and the art produced by women interested in the rich space between theory and practice where culture is confronted, commented upon, and hopefully changed for the better. in the section "Works," which is subdivided into the categories including "Personalizing the Political," "Differences," and "Corporeality," the authors forge thematic relationships between works spanning the last four decades and between art and the critical and cultural frameworks it emerged from and against. This look at forces outside the usual cultural and critical frameworks is augmented in the section on "Documents," which includes a collection of artists' statements and other theoretical and critical documents, grouped under the same headings as the artwork. Both the headings and the essays that frame the groups of work situate the art within a specifically activist context, pointing out the pre-existing conditions in need of redress, the various strategies adopted by feminist artists to dismantle a patriarchal culture harmful to women, and celebrating the positive changes wrought by artists working from a set of feminist ideals. As readers learn on the very first page of the book,
[S]ome of feminism's most important political achievements have
been indebted to artists, who have inspired new ways to think
about the public and the private, the art object and the art
subject ... assumptions about gender ... the implications of the
marks of race, age, class, and sexuality on art production and
reception. Both critical of the art world and central to it,
feminist artists have revised the possibilities of art as a
political and aesthetic practice. (frontispiece)
Although the variety of works illustrated reminds one that feminist art, like feminism itself, is not homogenous, and didactic paragraphs accompanying each image draw connections between formal elements in each piece and the over-arching theme of each section, the book's layout prevents drawing visual connections between more than a few works at a time, and the short captions often seem theoretically superficial. (1) The abundance of photographs (many in color) and large, colorful, multi-textured pages are indeed attractive, even seductive, as the cover image of a woman's parted lips (a detail of Genevieve Cadieux's Hear Me with Your Eyes) is certainly intended to be, but it is precisely this emphasis on seduction and desire that creates a potentially unresolvable tension between the authors' feminism and their analysis of effectively activist-feminist art. Phelan defines "feminism" as "the conviction that gender has been, and continues to be, a fundamental category for the organization of culture [that] usually favours men over women," (18) but in describing the relationship between art and feminism as "[a]lluringly open, deceptively simple ... seductive" (16) she casts her subject squarely within the role many women and artists have been fighting to free themselves from for decades--the object of physical, sexual desire. This tendency is problematic in a work exploring the power of feminist art to intervene in, and potentially alter, prevailing notions about the roles of women and art in a patriarchal culture.
Martha Rosler's essay collection Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays, 1975-2001 records the artist's observations on the purposes (ideal and actual) and potential power of art, artists' ethical obligations to audiences, and society's obligations to art. For students of art, art history, and activism, it offers insight into a working artist's struggles to make culturally relevant art and to give her beliefs visual and verbal form. Rosler, known for her work in photography, performance, and video, spent the last three decades exploring the nature of truth in photographic imagery, the power of pictures to bring about social change, the role of technology in art, and the changing relationship between patrons, artists, and viewers. Some of her essays, such as "The Figure of the Artist, The Figure of the Woman," reveal explicitly feminist or gender-based views, while others, including "lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience," offer analyses of power in a more general sense. All raise important questions about what art for social change should look like and offer strategies for producing such work.
Many of the thirteen essays in Rosler's book were written during the 1980s, at a time when conservative politics changed the economic and cultural climates of the world's strongest nations, and the fervor surrounding the feminist movement and its artistic manifestations waned. As the so-called "culture wars" escalated, conservative forces marshaled against controversial art, cutting funding and other support for artists, thereby limiting the types of art that could be produced. At the same time, as Rosler explains in "image Simulations, Computer Manipulations," advances in image-making technology transformed media and journalism, allowing those in power to manipulate information and its dissemination in ways previously unheard of, that were likely unethical. For Rosler, however, her faith in the ability of artists and citizens to communicate through art and imagery remained, as did her belief in its necessity:
These are the contexts for the manipulation of [photographic
information]. Concerns about manipulation center on political,
ethical, judicial, and other legal issues, ... as well as the
broader ideological ramifications of how a culture deploys
"evidence" it has invested with the ability to bear ("objective")
witness irrespective of the vicissitudes of history and
personality. Complications posed by questions of reception, such
as those raised by post-structuralist critics and philosophers,
have themselves fueled a pessimism about the ability to
communicate meaning (let alone "truth"). Nevertheless, ... it
seems unreasonable to conclude that meaning cannot be
communicated. (296)
Reading Rosler in 2006, many of the examples discussed seem dated, even when the issues at stake (power, censorship, and gender, to name a few) are timeless. But given the circumstances surrounding her production, her urgent call for artistic strategies designed to counter developing trends was necessary and prescient. We have seen where these trends have taken us, and many of Rosler's premonitions about politics, art, and culture, sadly, have proved accurate. While she had no way of predicting precisely how artists today would react to the scenarios she foresaw, it is interesting to see how the interventions being created by contemporary artists relate to and reflect the predictions she made and the call for action she raised.
Published by Mass MoCA to accompany the 2004-2005 exhibition, The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life catalogs work by some contemporary artists who have answered the call for politically engaged art. Designed "to offer the reader a modest intervention that was similar in spirit to the work it was charged to represent" (Thompson and Sholette 2004, 6), it functions as a handbook or toolkit of tactics that can be used by anyone searching for an artistic strategy for com-batting social and economic injustice. Chapters on "Nomads," "Reclaim the Streets," "Ready to Wear," and "The experimental university" describe work by Western artists who:
produce work that encourages individual mobility and
freedom, ... actions that occur within the public, ... tools
and clothing to augment the wearer's sense of personal autonomy,
and deploy aesthetic strategies in other discourses including
anthropology, biotechnology, and urban geography." (n.p.)
As each of the books reviewed here makes clear, feminist thought has played a large role in shaping artistic interventions. However, as Rosler points out, postmodern identity politics have recently supplanted more singular movements surrounding issues of race, gender, and sexuality as sources of inspiration, and the artists of The Interventionists usually address specific social ills like homelessness, and the capitalist takeover of public spaces for private gain (Rosler 2004, 367). Significantly, many artists function as part of a group, using collaborative techniques pioneered by feminist artists in the 1970s, but only a handful produce art that could be called intentionally feminist (although a case could be made, depending on one's definition of "feminism," for including many environmentalists and social-justice crusaders under a broadly feminist program). Artists who have been inspired by or engage feminist concerns but produce work in more traditional media or for more traditional spaces rather than for public, non-art spaces (I am thinking here of Jenny Saville, for example) are largely absent from the survey.
Two self-consciously feminist coalitions represented are The Biotic Baking Brigade, whose pie-throwing membership includes "seasoned activists in ecology, social justice, feminist, and animal rights movements" (Thompson and Sholette 2004, 69), and whose tactics, based in the traditionally female sphere of the kitchen, transform cooking from a nurturing act into one of disruptive socio-economic commentary and the cyberfeminist collective subRosa. Comprised of five women artists, subRosa honors famous female activists of the past with its moniker and perpetuates the legacy of earlier feminist artists like Martha Rosler through performances and videos "center[ed] on the uses and implications of biotechnology as it applies to sexual difference, race, and trans-national labor conditions" (Thompson and Sholette 2004, 121).
The Interventionists also presents the work of William Pope. L, whose video Member (a.k.a. "Schlong Journey") is described by the artist as "about trying to own whiteness, male whiteness, through the phallus" (Thompson and Sholette 2004, 93). While Art and Feminism defines feminism as being about the power operations of gender (not just about women), and Decoys and Disruptions features essays about male and female artists, The Interventionists illustrates the possibility that artists of any gender can contribute to the creation of art about gender and power relationships. Like the colorful artist biographies and vividly illustrated project descriptions of the catalog, this notion will hopefully serve to inspire additional research into the ongoing manifestations of feminist thought in contemporary, activist-oriented art.
Although it is sadly devoid of illustrations and lacking in visual appeal, especially in comparison to Phelan and Reckitt's lushly illustrated volume and the splashy, graphic aesthetic of The Interventionists, Hilary Robinson's anthology Feminism-Art-Theory is an otherwise stunning collection of writings dated 1968-2000. Given the availability of images online and in other books, including Art and Feminism, which features many of the artists and works covered in this anthology, the lack of illustrations is frustrating but not unforgivable, especially in such a thorough book of documents.
Like Phelan's "and" in Art and Feminism, the hyphens in Robinson's title allude to the existence and allow for the development of complex relationships between the terms feminism, art, and theory, defined respectively as "a set of politics, ... a set of cultural practices, ... and a set of ideas and knowledge that can be used in analysis" (Robinson 2001, 1). The 99 texts by artists, critics, and theorists are meant "to disrupt the orthodoxy of a canon of feminist writings [and to demonstrate] the eclectic, polyphonic publishing that feminism has developed or in which it has intervened" (1). In this way, and in the implied corollary goal of revealing the various ways in which feminist artists and authors have used their work as tools of political and cultural change, the diverse (though still Western) anthology, framed by Valerie Solanas's Scum Manifesto and bell hooks's comments on "Women Artists: The Creative Process," is remarkably successful.
Organized around nine thematic sections, each fronted by an introductory essay and list of essential reading, the book allows for focused study on topics such as "Activism and institutions" and "Politics in Practice: Material Strategies," as well as analysis across and between the frequently overlapping categories. Robinson's own contributions, including her summaries of included texts, are clear and insightful and raise important issues surrounding the term "feminism," its constituent (and sometimes problematically monolithic or binary) "identities," and its changing role within academia, the art world, and Western society as a whole. As Robinson writes in the section on "Activism and institutions":
[t]he relationship between activism and theory has always been a
vital one for feminism. Without the space for reflection, analysis
and development of strategy, activism would be random and
counter-productive; without active intervention in patriarchal
social and cultural structures, feminist thought would remain an
academic, apolitical endeavour. (49)
The statement sums up the relationship between feminist thought and activist art explored, in various ways and to differing degrees, in each of the books discussed above. It also crystallizes the calls to awareness and action articulated by each of the authors, who all recognize the importance of exploiting feminist art's ability to interrogate and alter the patriarchal, capitalist world we inhabit. Finally, Robinson's book, along with the others, best serves students of contemporary activist-feminist art as a tool to raise awareness and encourage production of interventionist culture.
Note
(1.) Although, as Reckitt explains, "[t]he focus of this volume is primarily on artworks and texts that have made a critical impact in Britain and the U.S." (2001, 14).
Julie Cole has taught Art History and Women's Studies courses at Colorado College and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Smokebrush Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing innovative exhibitions, public art, and arts programming to the Pikes Peak Region.
Cole, Julie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cole, Julie. "Art, activism, and feminisms: sites of confrontation and change." NWSA Journal, vol. 19, no. 1, 2007, p. 175+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA161981499&it=r&asid=0649159acfe4cedee4ddb22d3bcdf33e. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A161981499
Living as form: socially engaged art from 1991-2011
J. Decker
50.1 (Sept. 2012): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
50-0074
N8243
CIP
Living as form: socially engaged art from 1991-2011, ed. by Nato Thompson. Creative Time Books/MIT, 2012. 259p ISBN 9780262017343, $39.95
In this book/exhibition catalogue, curator Thompson frames a discussion of social practice. To begin, seven essays address participation, spectacle, civic imagination, micro utopias, and contemporary movements. The second section introduces 100-plus projects by artists and collectives engaged in this field, which extends beyond the studio and into everyday life (an arena that is also called relational aesthetics, social aesthetics, new genre public art, and dialogic art). The third portion signals the award of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, given by the organization Creative Time. This is an excellent primer and overview of how art and activism have taken shape over the past two decades. Though visually appealing, it has a few typographical errors and lacks critical framing. Photograph captions fail to provide full information consistently. The notes appended to each essay are not sufficient to engage discussion, particularly in the absence of an overall bibliography that might point to external source material. Despite these shortcomings, this book will inspire further scholarship in the field through its foregrounding of artists, collectives, and participants as agents of social change. It will appeal to museums, galleries, and libraries collecting in the areas of fine art, sociology, and cultural studies. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students.--J. Decker, Georgetown College
Decker, J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Decker, J. "Living as form: socially engaged art from 1991-2011." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Sept. 2012, p. 66+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA305083272&it=r&asid=8dadf1c073517a04d6dba978d2271830. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A305083272
The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life
32.4 (January-February 2005): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Visual Studies Workshop
http://www.vsw.org/ai/
The Interventionists
Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life
edited by Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette
Art that is exciting, politically provocative, unexpected, inspiring, and fun, by artists including William Pope. L. Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Biotic Baking Brigade, and others.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life." Afterimage, Jan.-Feb. 2005, p. 15. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA128170169&it=r&asid=c7cd834c1c287706cfd47ea48212c2f0. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A128170169
GETTING ART AND LIFE TOGETHER
Daniel Tucker
40.1 (July-August 2012): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Visual Studies Workshop
http://www.vsw.org/ai/
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011
Edited by Nato Thompson
The MIT Press/Creative Time Books, 2012 280 pp./$39.95 (hb)
In tin: summer of 2011, Manhattan public art commissioning organization Creative Time launched a new initiative to document and present "socially engaged art" made since the 1990s. The project, dubbed "Living as Form," was curated by Nato Thompson, best known for his 2004 exhibition "The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere" at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and more recently, as chief curator at Creative Time. "Living as Form" includes an online archive, lecture series, exhibition, traveling exhibition, and book. Including such a vast network of components has been a feature of many of Thompson's curatorial endeavors, from Paul Chan's staging of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the 2008 election season "Democracy In America: The. National Campaign" projects.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Thompson's book, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991 2011 is representative of the overall project and will have the most implications for our understanding of art history. The first text, by Creative Tune president and artistic director Anne Pasternak, contextualizes the project within the organization's long history of commissioning work like Gran Fury's series of AIDS activist advertisements "Kissing Doesn't. Kill: Greed and Indifference Do," which ran on public buses in the 1980s. In the following text, Thompson introduces his curatorial vision of focusing on "strategic" and deeply invested projects more than on the temporary disruptions of his past work on interventionist art. Next is a series of essays that complicate and complement this curatorial vision by Carol Becker, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Shannon Jackson, and Maria Lind--all significant contributors to recent discourse around public, social, and political art. The final 150 pages of this beautifully designed full-color book are dedicated to project profiles of groups, individuals, actions, campaigns, and events.
The featured 107 "projects" in the book were selected by Thompson and a curatorial advisory hoard made up of twenty-seven groups and individuals (several of whom are either catalog authors or participating artists). The projects are complemented by an online "Social Practice Archive" of over 350 projects, and the "nomadic version" of Living as Form--a self-contained hard drive of projects allows each host venue to show selections and add their own local projects to the archive. This open-ended archive of art, project descriptions, and documents signifies both a pragmatic: acknowledgement of the limitations of the conventional curatorial process to be inclusive and a reticence to commit to the exclusion that can make exhibits coherent.
Eschewing coherency, this effort attempts, in Thompson's words, to make the category of socially engaged art "bigger" (26). This includes curious additions such as WikiLeaks, Tahrir Square, the. United States Social Forum (an activist conference held in Atlanta and Detroit), and the spontaneous joyful street parties of election night in Harlem on November 4, 2008. Undoubtedly, these make the genre of socially engaged art "bigger" and connect relatively small art projects to events much larger in scope yet the inclusion of these complex organizations, events, and social movements under the auspices of "projects" flattens their enormous significance far beyond the bounds of art. What do we gain by this inclusiveness?
In her essay "living 'lakes Many Forms," Jackson, a performance scholar, argues that "HI we then bring work that derives from theatrical, visual, architectural, textual, and filmic art forms under the umbrella of 'socially engaged art,' it seems important to register their different barometers for gauging skill, goal, style, and innovation. We might call this the 'medium specificity' of social engagement" (91). She goes on to argue that it is necessary to lw clear Si) that I he forms grouped together can gain something from their proximity, and develop a "tolerance for different litmus" rather than seeming like an awkward social mixer.
Throughout the leat red essays, the authors rattle off a massive list of artistic sub-genres and historical movements, revealing that the impulse of bringing "art into life" is not new, and is also remarkably prevalent and diverse.. Jackson references WPA Federal Theater in the 1930s and the implicitly political work of choreographer Bill T. Jones. while Lind discusses European artistic practices developed since the 1990s. Holmes mentions the laving Theater and discusses a parallel development in Argentina in the late l960s he calls "eventwork." Bishop take; on the influence of French sitnationist rhetoric and forms From that same time period that continue to be the dominant paradigms in curatorial and art-historical discussions of socially engaged art today.
Living as Form is a compelling and ambitious effort, and a much-needed contribution to the study and understanding of art concerned with engaging social life a--vital, broad, and diverse held ever-expanding with new experiments. It asks important questions about what is gained by making our categories of art bigger, and similarly, what may be lost if we abandon "smaller," more focused ways of looking at art. It is exciting to consider what new artistic families will emerge as Living as Form sub-genres (including video activism, social-realistic theater, and event-art) continue to associate with the likes of ecological art and experimental economic arrangements. As those of us invested in this comingling take our investigations further, it would be wise to consider which projects constitute strategic turns and which may simply represent more of the same.
DANIEL TUCKER is a writer, artist, and organizer currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information see miscprojects.com
Tucker, Daniel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tucker, Daniel. "GETTING ART AND LIFE TOGETHER." Afterimage, July-Aug. 2012, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA297914968&it=r&asid=18b45659fb5b9ec54c68245d9a1f6ed4. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A297914968
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011
Amber Landgraff
115 (Autumn 2012): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 C The Visual Arts Foundation
http://www.cmagazine.com/issues.htm
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991-2011 Edited by Nato Thompson MIT Press, 2012
The Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 catalogue, published to coincide with the Creative Time exhibition of the same name, gathers together a collection of artists working in the slippery designation of socially engaged art practice. Editor Nato Thompson claims, "this book does not offer a singular critical language for evaluating socially engaged art, nor provide a list of best practices, nor offer a linear historic interpretation of a field of practice. Instead, we merely present the temperature in the water in order to raise compelling questions." However, this mea culpa seems to be presented more as a justification for a lack of criticality in terms of what was selected for inclusion. (Arguably, the mere inclusion of an artist, work or event in the catalogue confers authority and significance to that practice.) Also problematic is that the authors invited to write essays on the topic (Claire Bishop, Maria Lind, Teddy Cruz, Carol Becker, Brian Holmes and Shannon Jackson) all use certain terms interchangeably--participatory art, social practice, relational aesthetics, political engagement, community art--which results in a clumsy combination of ideas that presents socially engaged art as intended to erase distinctions between art and life, and/or to present a model for the betterment of the world. Asking the questions, "what is living?" and "what is form?" Thompson really pushes the idea that these practices are intended to bring art into life, which becomes clear when he points out that the exhibition presents a cattle call of projects that demonstrate "collaborative and participatory spirit, community activism, and deployment of cultural programming as part of their operations." Even more troubling here is the inclusion and subsequent claiming of projects and events that, while commendable, are not now--nor have they ever been--a part of the art world, such as Wikileaks, or the events that occurred at Tahrir Square in January 2011.
Many of the essayists included are theorists who have a lot invested in being frontrunners for determining the critical language that we use to discuss socially engaged art. The presence of Bishop, Holmes and Jackson in particular lends to a very specific way of discussing and contextualizing the included works, where antagonism, spectacle and modernist pursuits are forefront. By contrast, Cruz'essay, "Democratizing Urbanization and The Search for a New Civic Imagination," is most engaging, presenting a call to arms that focused on social practice's potential for enriching imagination in the face of social emergencies. This is in part due to the fact that his approach takes the works out of an academic context and attempts to justify social practice as an immediate and viable response to contemporary issues.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The problem with cataloguing such a broad and inclusive selection of projects is that some more clearly demonstrate Thompson's overall thesis better than others. While it is no stretch to see how Haha's Flood, a hydroponic community garden that grew therapeutic herbs and greens for local AIDS and HIV patients in the 90s, demonstrates a social engagement with clear intent for a "better" world, the motivations of other projects are not always so clear. When projects such as Fran Ilich's Spacebank, a functioning virtual community bank that invests in socially conscious projects involving art and activism are placed next to Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen's Complaints Choir, a project that invites communities to collect and sing their complaints in public and online, the lack of criticality with which Thompson approaches these projects becomes apparent. It is difficult to see how these projects are even remotely doing the same thing as either art or social activism. Of course, therein lies the problem of theorizing about social practice: theorists attempt to use one set of terms and conditions to discuss projects that are attempting to do radically different things.
I recently attended a talk by Pablo Helguera, author of Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (zoiz), and he pointed out that perhaps part of the reason that the critical language we have to evaluate socially engaged practices often falls short is because we are trying to theorize an art form that is still in the midst of being formed. In this way, we often fall back on a shorthand that can't really capture the complexities of practices that, while often lumped together, are often not intended to do the same thing. What's more, this shorthand's emphasis on socially engaged arts as paving the way towards a better world--without a clear acknowledgment of the political limitations of these kinds of practices--also allows for an easy instrumentalization of the artists by institutions, of communities by artists, and often a fetishizing of activist culture without any real commitment to the communities, politics, or social issues that these projects claim to support.
What Living as Form does accomplish, however, is a by no means exhaustive list of socially engaged projects gathered together in a gorgeously printed book. The short blurbs, combined with colour images, offer readers new to socially engaged art multiple entry points into a practice that remains contentious in the way that it is discussed by and among academics. While it would be easy to dismiss social practice as a whole, there are many individual projects that offer interesting and imaginative ways of bringing communities together around shared goals.
Landgraff, Amber
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Landgraff, Amber. "Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011." C: International Contemporary Art, Autumn 2012, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA306860797&it=r&asid=9c9452dacaef84e564c93c7550134592. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A306860797
Living As Form, Ed. Nato Thompson (Creative Time and MIT Press, 2012)
Wendy Vogel
(May 2012): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
http://www.brooklynrail.org
Some critics accuse contemporary art since the 1990s of producing no definable movements. If pressed, they might concede that relational aesthetics represents one trend. In his 1998 tract from which the genre takes its name, French curator Nicolas Bourriaud sketched the theoretical contours and historical precedents of the art of his contemporaries, riffing on institutional critique, happenings, and social movements of the 1960s and '70s. Notable relational aesthetics works, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija's pad thai feasts in galleries, Liam Gillick's discussion platforms, and Pierre Huyghe's dialoguing puppets, have been critiqued for retaining perhaps too much faith in the neutrality of the white cube. Despite their leftist political rhetoric, these artists' institutionally friendly, post-utopian works appeal to self-selecting, well-educated museum publics.
Living as Form, a multiplatform project undertaken by Creative Time curator Nato Thompson, suffers the opposite problem. This survey, which seeks to broaden the understanding and definition of "socially engaged art from 1991-2011," runs the risk of losing coherence in its "cattle call" enthusiasm to blur the lines between politics, community organizing, and art. It draws its title from the 1969 landmark conceptual art exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, yet has an even more ambitious curatorial agenda, spanning an exhibition, conferences, and an online archive of over 350 projects. While the accompanying book is by no means exhaustive, it provides a broad mapping of the stakes involved in the production of this type of work. Brief essays by six leading intellectuals accompany a handsomely illustrated index of over 100 artist projects selected by the curator.
To his credit, Thompson overlooks most of Bourriaud's subjects for less familiar, geographically diverse instances of social practice: works that, per his definition, engage media manipulation, structural alternatives, gatherings, presentation of research, and pedagogical tactics to address topics of public import. Accordingly, many of these works are sited outside the white cube--for example, Houston's community-building organization and art residency Project Row Houses, the Yes Men's counterinformational media stunts, and Tiravanija's ecologically responsible Land Foundation in Thailand. Other "projects"--such as the Tahrir Square protests--were not conceived expressly as visual art.
The book's willingness to embrace contradiction is commendable, though many of the essayists' opinions mostly fall into one of two polarizing categories: artists must abandon their sense of aesthetic autonomy in this climate of urgency, or art must retain its distance from direct politics in order to be effective. Thompson's sympathies seem to lie with the former camp, as he anchors his introduction with a quote from Cuban-born artist Tania Bruguera about the limitations of appropriation as a radical gesture: "It is time to put Duchamp's urinal back in the restroom." Ironically, this project attempts to appropriate alternative "forms of living" into the very same aesthetic realm. Reviving Debord's condemnation of capitalist spectacle to support various projects' anti-visual orientation and alternative political aims, Thompson concludes that examples of social practice can include community gardens, institutionally sanctioned workshops, and performances--even pure activism, like the international abortion-on-demand project Women on Waves.
On one end of the contributors' spectrum, art historian Claire Bishop--legendary for her attack on Relational Aesthetics in a 2004 October journal article--warns against abandoning aesthetic criteria for ethics when evaluating these works. She argues that much of social practice "focus[es] on micropolitical gestures at the expense of sensuous immediacy," and favors projects such as Christoph Schlingensief's "Please Love Austria" (2000), a gimmicky reality-show-style contest in which illegal immigrants, held in a shipping container in a public square, competed for a visa via an online vote. The project sparked national debate across classes and political divides about entrenched racism. Bishop maintains that "models of democracy in art do not have an intrinsic relationship with models of democracy in society," and that artists should deploy the visual strategies of the societal provocateur in favor of vague progressive ideals.
Other writers take a more context-specific, illustrative tact. Maria Lind, a leading curator of the relational aesthetics generation and current director of Tensta Konsthall in Sweden, privileges institutionally supported projects occurring "slightly off-center." From Elin Wikstrom's poetic creation of bicycles traveling in reverse ("Returnity," 1997) to Apolonija Sustersic's "Suggestion for the Day" (2000) that brought various professionals together to discuss topics in Stockholm's urban development, Lind attests that art can provide a context for civic protagonists working in diverse fields to start a dialogue. Likewise, Carol Becker's meditation on micro-utopias, Paul Ramirez Jonas's "Key to the City," and Marina Abramovic's marathon staring contest "The Artist is Present" promote an inclusive, participatory model of practice. Shannon Jackson's tantalizing but brief essay revises the topic of spectacle and theatricality, teasing out affinities between social practice and experimental theater. She highlights initiatives such as the WPA-funded Federal Theatre Project and the Mobile Academy, a series of one-on-one sessions with experts that seeks to create an economy of "black market knowledge."
Brian Holmes and Teddy Cruz, the two best-known activists among the contributors, write powerful manifesto-like essays that also leave the reader wanting more. Cruz concisely frames his notion of "radical proximity" (as opposed to critical distance) in Latin American pedagogical projects against the shrinking public sphere in the age of neoliberalism. Holmes grounds his notion of a socially conscious "eventwork" in historical precedents such as the 1968 Tucuman Arde exhibition in Rosario, Argentina that analyzed local labor struggles, AIDS activism of the '80s and '90s, and contemporary antiglobalization movements. Given the production schedule of Living as Form, however, he only had space to add a short afterward on the events of Occupy Wall Street.
Unfortunately, OWS doesn't make it to the project index, either, though many other initiatives of dubious aesthetic value do. In addition to Tahrir Square, the index includes non-artist initiatives like WikiLeaks and the United Indian Health Services--a Native American community nonprofit. Some of the choices concerning visual artists are also surprising. For instance, rather than featuring Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's blog--arguably his most political work--Living as Form includes "Fairytale" (2007), a project where Ai brought 1,000 Chinese citizens to the international art exhibition Documenta. This loose methodology of conferring symbolic status on a non-artistic project, under the wrong practitioner, could be construed as empty "radical chic."
Despite this questionable tactic, Living as Form stands as a thoughtful and motivated survey of recent social practice. The project rightfully positions newer collectives like Public Movement, Chto Delat?, Voina, and Long March Project alongside legendary (yet still under-recognized) artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst). That it ultimately juxtaposes relatively market-friendly projects with those far outside typical structures of both living and funding only mirrors contemporary art's increasing commodification and hybrid economies, leaving the field open for contestation, elaboration, and artistic response.
WENDY VOGEL is a critic, editor, and independent curator based in New York. She has contributed to Artforum.com, ART LIES, and Flash Art International, among other publications. She was a Critical Fellow in the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Vogel, Wendy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vogel, Wendy. "Living As Form, Ed. Nato Thompson (Creative Time and MIT Press, 2012)." The Brooklyn Rail, May 2012, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA350678976&it=r&asid=8b455444e6577fe96bcd51904508c65d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A350678976
Curator Nato Thompson shines a light on art and the culture wars in 'Culture as Weapon'
Nato Thompson, author of 'Culture as Weapon'
Nato Thompson reveals the way in which our society employs the tools of culture to promote consumerism and conduct politics. (Derek Schultz / Melville House)
Carolina A. MirandaCarolina A. MirandaContact Reporter
We live in an era in which image memes are lobbed as political salvos. In which security is “theater” and defining who controls the “narrative” in a world of facts and alternative facts is the daily bread of the hot-take class. In which words are bombs, delivered in 140-character installments in the “new culture war” — a phrase that can and has referred to all manner of cultural conflicts: The face-off between elite versus populists, urban versus rural, Hollywood versus the heartland.
Culture is a weapon — a pretty effective one at that. And it’s a topic that New York-based curator Nato Thompson takes on in his latest book, “Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life,” which explores the ways in which the tools of culture are deployed to do everything from sell iPhones to wage war.
As far as timing goes, the book’s landing during the early days of the Trump administration couldn’t have been more impeccable. “Culture as Weapon” provides a broad overview on how individuals, corporations and governments employ design, storytelling, imagery and art to stir emotion and mold sentiment. The prominence of the Internet and social media, naturally, makes this all the more profound and far-reaching than in the past.
Thompson’s book kicks off with an extensive historical primer. Over the course of the 20th century, the fields of public relations and advertising have created visually resonant cultural icons — such as the Marlboro Man — to move merchandise. Thompson shows how political figures have employed those same techniques to sway elections and stoke fear. For example: the 1988 presidential campaign ad for George H.W. Bush about Willie Horton, the Massachusetts convict who raped a woman while on furlough — an ad that ignited anxiety about crime (and African American men) and likely cost Michael Dukakis the election.
Thompson also provides a backgrounder on how visual symbols have been historically wielded socially and politically. The Nazis, for example, were famously meticulous about their aesthetics. Adolf Hitler himself devoted great care and attention to the design and look of the Nazi flag.
“The Nazis loved culture,” notes Thompson. “They used culture. They distributed culture. Cinema, music, flags, banners, book burnings, rallies, and holidays were all deployed in a phantasmagoria of stark blood red, swastikas, and blinding white.”
Interestingly, political groups, such as the Nazis, have also been perfectly happy to co-opt the symbols of those they impugn. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decried so-called degenerate art — anything Modernist or made by Jews — even as he put that art on view in an extraordinarily well-attended touring exhibition titled, naturally, “Degenerate Art.”
A similar phenomenon occurred during the U.S. culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when Congress attacked some of the artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. “The NEA hubbub,” writes Thompson, “was an opportunity to condemn luridness and bask in it in equal measure.” An artist’s own work weaponized against him. (The Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts are part of a long-running conservative animosity toward the NEA.)
Sen. Jesse Helms, a figure renowned for his role in the culture wars of the '80s and '90s, shakes a fist at reporters in Raleigh, N.C., in 1990.
Sen. Jesse Helms, a figure renowned for his role in the culture wars of the '80s and '90s, shakes a fist at reporters in Raleigh, N.C., in 1990. (Chris Seward / Raleigh News & Observer / MCT via Getty Images)
The look back is interesting, and in the process Thompson delivers priceless instances of cultural manipulation, such as when the American Tobacco Co. used the trappings of women’s liberation to encourage women to smoke in the late 1920s.
But far more vital are the chapters that the author devotes to the recent past and the present — to the ways in which big business and government have liberally borrowed from culture for their purposes. (These are topics he comes at from the left, with a healthy skepticism of capitalism and its habit of turning everything into sellable merch.)
Thompson examines how art and architecture have been used as an implement of urban development, via so-called starchitectural development projects and family-friendly public art installations such as “Cows on Parade.” “The commodification of bohemia,” as he calls it, has led to art being viewed as an “engine” rather than the cultural mirror of a nation. The NEA’s motto, for example, has gone from “Because a great nation deserves great art” to “Art works” — a model that “would no longer be focused on excellence based on taste,” writes Thompson, “but rather on the way that culture could make things happen.”
This, interestingly, has led to “an increasing mistrust toward the idea of culture itself.” Los Angeles certainly offers a vivid case in point: The anti-gentrification efforts in Boyle Heights have specifically targeted art galleries (though, curiously, Thompson doesn’t mention them).
“Culture as Weapon” covers myriad other topics: How the U.S. military employed cultural anthropologists during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how staged social relationships are as intriguing to artists as they are to corporations, and how culture informs our everyday retail experiences. (The maze-like layout of Ikea is inspired, in part, by the disorienting ramps of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York.)
In taking on so much disparate material, “Culture as Weapon” can feel scattered and often delves into topics that the reader is likely already familiar with. (Do we really need another overview that covers the improbable rise of the personal computer from Steve Jobs’ garage to our back pocket?)
Instead Thompson is at his most effective when he is dissecting what it is about culture that makes it such a potent social tool.
Art, in its appeal to emotion, can override rationality, he notes. “Fear,” he writes, “motivates faster than hope” and “appeals to emotion do not rely on the truth.”
How the rational brain might counter the barrage of cultural string-pulling that we experience on a daily basis, and how the world of culture might save itself from becoming a mere tool, Thompson doesn’t say. But “Culture as Weapon” provides a compelling manual for determining how the manipulation begins.
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“Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life”
by Nato Thompson
Melville House: 288 pp., $27