The Festival of Reason, the art of Common Sense

Graphic by Paul McLean

[NOTE: The following supporting text is the second part of a two-part essay by Chris Moylan for the OwA collab "CO-OP|occuburbs," slated for 2012 in Huntington, NY]; in this project we will be envisioning alternate art economies, inspired by the co-operative food and farm networks. Our point of origination as locus is the suburban (American) community, although we hope the applications can extend beyond that start-point.]

The Festival of Reason, the art of Common Sense

By Christopher Moylan

Plans are underway for an Occupy arts festival in the suburbs: Occufest in the Occuburbs. The initial contacts with different cultural organizations have been promising. People are enthusiastic; there are promises of space and other resources. Over and again, however, certain questions arise; what is this—the festival and Occupy Wall street-- about? What is the connection between Occupy Wall Street and the arts? What point would a festival make? What would it do?

One response is to turn such questions back on the person asking them; what does the Occupy movement mean to you? What kind of connection would you like to see between the arts and the Occupy movement? What point would you want such a festival to make? That kind of exchange tends to go only so far. People are asking for information and background, not for a daily dose of empowerment. To be fair, however, the Occupy movement has received a good deal of publicity and news attention; one would expect that most people would be familiar with the movement and what it is attempting to do. The discussion, then, probably has more to do with expectations based on personal history rather than with social policy or aesthetics.

 The subtext of such questions seems to be something like this; my experience with politics has been disillusioning, will this be any different? And, my experience with art --as in paintings, sculpture, installations, art in galleries--has been disappointing, and puzzling so will this be any better?

By way of attempting a constructive answer, one consistent with an inclusive Occupy spirit, the questions can be reframed to emphasize the central position of the .99 in everything that the movement does and attempts to do.

So, preliminary to discussing what an Occufest might be like, one might ask what does cultural democracy look like? Under what conditions might art for the .99 emerge, and how would we recognize such work if we saw it?

The questions are daunting and carry with them suppositions that would be difficult to defend: that art can be reliably associated with one social category or another, these days largely with the one per cent and that such art carries the markers somehow of this exclusivity so that most people walking into a gallery would know that this work is for the one per cent, that work for the .99.

There might be something to this idea, but who would want to take on the headache of assigning a Gurski large-scale photograph or a Murakami erotic drawing, to take a couple of examples, as belonging to the one per cent or the ninety-nine? A panoramic photograph of a department store addresses ordinary experience, and the Takashi Murakimi riffs on manga and traditional Japanese forms asks is this ordinary or not? What does one make of all this kink and eye candy? The art world generates endless plays and variations on reception, cultural ownership, identity, and art world politics. Try to drop a conceptual box of social and political critique over art practice and one will simply end up supplying artists with something new to embellish, distort, invert, or take apart.

But look at the price list for Gurski photographs and Murakimi cartoon images, and one thing becomes clear; you can’t afford one, not even a little one. Even the catalogue is expensive. Visit another gallery and it’s the same story, and another gallery. Abandon Chelsea and go to Williamsburg and things are not much better.

It takes just a little knowledge of art world geography to locate the art spaces that attract wealthy and extremely wealthy collectors, others that are slightly more middle market though aspiring to sales in the five and six figure range. It is a lot more difficult to find galleries, legitimate galleries, which sell in the range of hundreds rather than thousands of dollars. Even at this low range it is unlikely that most ordinary people, people who put in lots of overtime or work a couple of jobs to pay the bills would want to spend that much money on a painting or drawing, or on any art object.

Money, however, doesn’t seem to be the central  issue, or the only issue, in this reluctance to buy. Many middle and lower middle class Americans, fewer than was the case five years ago but still, many, have some disposable income, some money to spend. A lot of this so-called disposable income goes toward the endless cycle of consumer culture; if you get the cool shoes you want the jeans, if you get the jeans you want the coat, and once you have the coat the shoes seem a little boring and so on. But all that doesn’t quite get at it; if you’ll buy a lamp (not that you absolutely need it…), why won’t you buy a drawing? True, there are all kinds of reasons to buy the lamp, but nonetheless, why not buy the drawing? Part of the answer is that most people wouldn’t know where to begin with art. They don’t see the connections between themselves and…that. The threads, if they exist, that one might follow to get to that place where art matters for the .99, matters intimately and directly, aren’t visible.

What is it like when ordinary people can trace such threads? To get at a more constructive vision of art for the .99, it might be useful to change the frame of reference and consider different kinds of visual objects, putting aside for a moment whether they are works of art or not. These would be publicly displayed works, not family photos or other personal objects. The point is to consider what seeing, experiencing the threads feels like. Start with a personal example from outside the art world, one that even Tea Party people might find acceptable, at least politically.

Paul Revere

For generations most kids growing up in Boston took the Freedom Trail at some point, usually on a grammar school field trip. Paul Revere was a central figure in this tour of historical sites; kids took in Paul Revere’s house, the statue of Paul Revere in the North End, his grave in the Granary Burial Ground, and the Old North Church where the lanterns were hung to signal British troop movements. When they are older, the same kids will be taken to the Museum of Fine Arts and will see Revere’s silver, the Glibert Stuart portrait of a pensive Revere, and other paintings and examples of material culture from the Revolutionary War period. This was one traditional pathway into culture in the city. One was never expected to consider such questions as whether Revere the silversmith was an artist, or whether the public memorials to him had aesthetic value, or the paintings from the Federalist period register as illustration or as formal arrangements of tone, color and line. The Revere gestalt, including the Longfellow poem, became part of the cultural citizenship of the people of Boston. The paintings, drawings, silver work, public monuments traced back, in the experience of these public school, working class kids to the churches, gravestones, bullets and guns in glass cases, and brick sidewalks they experience on the Freedom Trail….

 The point is not to suggest that such a particular arrangement or gestalt can be reproduced, or that it should or can replace anything—Gurski, Cristo, anyone--but to look at the interrelationship of painting, material or artisanal culture, public art, preservationist work in building and to see how all this folds and turns and layers over time into the foundational mythos of a city, and to some degree of a nation… To the extent that an analogy to Occupy Wall Street holds, one would hope that any further loss of archival material from the movement be opposed at all costs, that some curatorial process be applied to the creative things that the movement produces—signs, posters, clothes, photos and so on--, that the movement look to its occupied and formerly occupied spaces as sites of origin or narrative beginning and to each as a creative nexus for the community in which the occupation takes place.

It didn’t take long for the sites of conflict and decisive action to be taken up into the reflexive process that accompanied the shooting and speechifying in the American Revolution, for paintings, prints and placards to reconstitute those sites as sites of creative discourse. In France, choreographed rites of cultural and political transformation—David’s orchestration of the march accompanying the internment of the remains of Voltaire, the public viewing or remnants of the Bastille around the nation after the prison was destroyed, the Festival of Reason David had a hand in designing and realizing—memorialized and democratized revolutionary change. Everyone who took part in the rite was, in theory anyway, changed by it; everyone who came to see a relic of the storming of the Bastille was taken up, emotionally and spiritually, for want of a better word, in that revolutionary moment.

 Likewise, at some point the Occupy movement will have demonstrated its coherence and stability often enough for the people within and outside the movement to recognize that this is real, that it won’t go away. As of now the hold on the movement on its participants and followers, the threads, are largely emotional. But that is a lot. That is important.

There are no monuments to the Occupy encampments except in the mass grief that followed the police assaults in New York, Oakland, Boston, and around the country.  No one who felt that grief has entirely recovered from it; the violence to our sense of fairness and justice was too great, the sense of inevitability too sad, for anyone to experience it unchanged. Art will and must respond to that grief in formal terms, restoring what was lost and the experience of loss to the status of a collective possession, something we the .99 have that they can’t take away.

The Festival and the Desert

To turn to another extreme, that has nothing to do with patriots and history: Burning Man. This Dadaist, vaguely Situationist mirage in the Nevada desert is in some ways a precursor of the occupation movement and in others the apparent antithesis of it. The event certainly has its counterculture and political aspects but the general atmosphere is ludic, sexy, and fun. The threads in this example go back to Woodstock, Haight Ashbury, Paris ’68, and occasional creative, anarchic outbursts back to the early years of Modernism; one could argue that the cultural precursors go back thousands of years.

The connection to Occupy has to do with Burning Man has to do with just that: occupation, situating a large group in a place and making that place a demonstration of a certain ethos. Of course, the burners aren’t occupying the commons or sites of power. They’re constructing an alternate reality.  Then they take it all down, and burn that statue. .. Taking it down can be seen as a new age gesture acknowledging the illusory nature of the material world, as well as an evocation of pagan ritualized burning of devil figures, and all that this implies of a New Age identification with the earth, the environment, the cycles of life and death. But it is important to note that Burning Man has its defiant side; the artists and architects involved build a city for thirty thousand people, just as they want to, and without any clothes on some of the time, then remove it. They, a varying but consistently like-minded they, have done so for twenty years or so and they will continue to do so. This is an exercise in power: the power of organization, intelligence, and defiance. It is impressive, in its own way.

Imagine if they were to build a city, in the most inhospitable environment, and stay.

And consider how powerful Burning Man would be if the festival were to acknowledge just what the desert is. If you aren’t going to acknowledge suffering in the desert then you might as well go to the beach. If you aren’t going to confront temptation and decadence in its many forms, then you might as well go to an amusement park.

The desert, for the Occupy movement, is the site of oppression:  Wall Street, most notably.  It is the site, moreover, of the seduction of power and greed. Buy in to the terms the investment banker offers, for it has been given to me and I shall give it to anyone I choose at attractive rates and for a limited time…Now the parallels between Zuccotti and Burning Man diverge. There is a gap in the annual narrative of the gathering of burner tribes in the desert, their construction of a new age fantasia, and the culminating rite of Burning Man. The Real of an arbitrary, cruel Law is missing here, and it is all too present in the narrative of the Occupy Movement. Thus the whimsy and eroticism of Burning Man are just that; for better or worse the enterprise seems more pre-Raphaelite than post-modern.   There are no images of police applying pepper spray or handcuffs to burners, nor is it likely that there ever will be. Yet the images of police brutality in downtown Manhattan or in Oakland were embedded in the narrative of the movement before they even occurred; this pattern of protest and violent over-response has played out over and over, through history. The process would be almost mythic in its ritual aspects were it not, among the occupiers, so reflexive and thought out; the movement watched itself on Youtube and live feeds, adapted the images of oppression to its ends, and grew. This is a political process of self-creation, material and spiritual, encampment site, and terms of social and economic identity. As in, we are the .99, and this is what democracy looks like.

The ludic aspects of the Occupy movement—zombies, street theater, anarchist masks, drum circles, tribal invocations, costumes of all sorts, and, of course, the encampments—are strategic, deliberate, and utterly serious. They map out public space in terms of conflict and assign social values to different positions: lots of us, few of them; we in the streets, they in the office towers; we speaking out, they quietly controlling from within. The Occupy Movement is not a repetition of impromptu outbursts, anarchic venting, or self-indulgent marching-in-place-of-working as the movement has sometimes been described. Occupy is a tactical, methodical deployment of reason and social practice, of argument and occupation… To use an old fashioned American term, it is a mass mobilization of common sense.

Anyone could see that it was not the noise or the alleged unruliness of the crowds that brought out the pepper spray and plastic bullets, it was the affront of the message the crowds conveyed. The message made too much sense for the powers that be to tolerate it. Clarity is anathema to authority.

Art in the obvious, the plain as day

When Republican Congressional leaders and right wing radio talk show hosts attacked the occupy encampments as sites of drug use, dirt and “outdoor sex,” the surface aspects of the fantasy were interesting—the projection of an anarchic sexual impulse on the .99, the association of shame with protest, sexual guilt with political engagement, sexual exposure with encampment. The right wing phantasm of protest, this smutty hallucination with its dated tropes from the sixties, gives a keyhole image of where the Right is coming from. But we don’t want to open that door. One can assert with full confidence that the .99 is not interested in all that.

The nightmare of the right wing, the fear too powerful for them to express publicly or ‘outdoors,’ is  that the other (the .99) is not similarly warped by shame, impulse, and self-loathing (who is more explicitly bizarre, in this respect: Donald Trump or Newt Gingrich?) but is, in fact, responsible, articulate, and self-possessed. The right-wing nightmare is that the other  (the .99) is quite willingly penetrated by reason and not by the instruments of oppression. It is excited by the power of information not by the seduction of dismissive slogans—get a job, take a bath, occupy a desk… The passion of the Occupy movement is not sexual.  It is moral, and this is moral outrage propelled by information, research, and logic—anyone marching in an Occupy demonstration can discuss global warming, income disparities, concentration of power, and mortgage backed securities. 

The primacy of reason over (and yet, within) the particulars of person, place, and identity in the Occupy movement changes everything in American political discourse. This country has seen different groups claim their dignity and power: African Americans, women, union workers, the LGBT communities, and so on; the consequences in each case have been momentous, and these struggles continue and are embraced by the Occupy movement. But here comes something different, an over-arching, worldwide social and economic cry of enough is enough. Enough of rightwing crazy-making inversions; guns make you safe, evolution is a lie, global warming is a myth, poverty is the fault of the lazy poor.

Occupy Wall Street is, if nothing else, a movement to reclaim the obvious. Look at the concentration of wealth in the one per cent. Can’t you see it? Look at the corporate stranglehold over Congress. It’s there, plain as day.  Check out what BP did to the Gulf. Look at it!  Yet another family values, homophobic  politician has been outed on the social network or caught in a public restroom soliciting men. Hasn’t that agenda been discredited by now…?  On and on it goes.  What is the opposite of this empowering critique of the apparent, crazy-making abuse of fairness and truth, one in which those who ruin the economy and lay off millions give themselves huge bonuses, because how could we do without these highly trained experts?  

Of course, the obvious was obvious before Sept. 2011, and arguments for resisting abuse of privilege and power have been made for decades. It took the Bush recession, a right wing assault on truth (relentless propaganda that Obama is a Muslim, a Marxist, a ‘foreigner’) and an attendant coup in the House of Representatives (paralyze the federal government, damage the economy, stop federal appointments, block all legislation, even when it originated from the right wing) to provoke a mass response.

Now the aggregate, the .99, is claiming its dignity and power, its claim to what is verifiable and real in public life, and how else can one describe this but as revolutionary?

The art that emerges within such an environment will be nurtured by and will nurture this transformative claim on self-respect, dignity and empowerment. The art needn’t be obvious, far from it. It needn’t be anything in particular: not David or Lissitzky, the WPA or the Leningrad School. Art does what it does.  One can imagine that, on occasion, art may have a certain illustrative or programmatic quality: things to accompany or be part of a protest, a direct action, and so on. But there will be many, many other approaches and contexts. The important thing is to encourage art congenial to or simply congruent to the concerns and goals of the movement. No need for a drawing to have an Occupy label…

The Occupy arts festival, as a nascent institution, is one way to accomplish this. I have written previously about the idea of a new approach to cooperative ‘Occupy’ galleries, modeled on food coops. Collaborations are underway even now between Occupy artists and more conventional galleries.

Whether inside or outside such contexts, art that dwells in what is the case, in the socially and politically apparent (or obvious), for want of a more precise term, occupies a place of strength. The artist who declares himself, perhaps only to himself or herself, for the .99, occupies a position of strength. Making art that raises awareness, which reinforces and deepens the common sense approach to what is right there, is a good thing to do to people. And people who have been treated well in this way will be good to the art and artist. That is the hope.

Socially inventive and vital art is going on all around us, anyway, it should be said. To take a couple of random examples: New York artist Jonathan Calm’s “Scratching Chance Grids,” and the videos from which they derive, consist of nothing more, or less, than shots of hands scratching at lotto cards. We don’t see the faces, just the hands held at midsection as they scratch at the surface of loss and disappointment. On the videos we hear voices, but, again, with no connection to the rest of the figure. Over and again we hear a moment from a biography of loss and no luck, delivered usually with a laugh. In Northern Ireland, Willie Doherty photographs a bridge and we see a geography of division and hatred. In South Africa, William Kentridge layers drawings, erasures, marks of one kind or another and we see social and racial struggle anew. There is no dearth of work or of vision. What has been lacking for some time has been a collective, self-aware environment in which to gather such work: a movement.

The Festival of Reason

Each direct action by the Occupy movement is a festival of reason in all but name. Were the Occupy movement to convene in Woodstock, gathering in the hundreds of thousands, the event would inevitably be different from the original festival, music or no music; the movement has too much to say and too much to do to return to the garden. The .99 is pragmatic rather than utopian. 

With that said, it remains true that the rituals and forms of festival in this movement have yet to coalesce. Occupy is a powerful verb, the .99 a pithy abstraction, but no rituals and symbols have emerged to accompany this grammar of protest.

It may seem too soon to attempt anything so audacious, so celebratory as an Occupy festival.  The movement has yet to achieve a concrete political or structural victory; no one has gained or lost office as a result of the protests, no fundamental change to the economic or political process has been achieved. Yet the festival as an institution can celebrate something more fundamental: a movement of the spirit. This is a movement toward social justice, respect for the common woman and man, true enfranchisement, true civil rights for all. This kind of festival, however it takes shape, would probably involve teaching, information sharing, and identifying of people resources.

Above all, and this is probably something the artist must address, such a festival might envision in a positive way what the new person to emerge from such a program would look like. That is a large task. Most of us have been trained and indoctrinated to look down on ourselves and to look up, at the risk of neck strain, at the one per cent. The Occufest will urge us to look squarely at ourselves and at the situation in which we find ourselves: what is wrong, what we want, what we will do to fix it. This is Ben Franklin time; he invented the everything and so can we. This is Tom Paine time; he discovered common sense and so can we.