WS2MS: Co-organizer's "End" Notes

Catskill Chocolate Shop

WS2MS Closing Weekend
A Note from OwA Co-organizer Paul McLean

...Can one ask questions about the strange fact that, after several revolutions and century or two of political apprenticeship, in spite of the newspapers, the trade unions, the parties, the intellectuals and all the energy put into educating and mobilising the people, there are still (and it will be exactly the same in ten or twenty years) a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain "passive" - and not only passive, but who, in all good faith and with glee and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama? It is curious that this proven fact has never succeeded in making political analysis shift ground, but on the contrary reinforces it in its vision of an omnipotent, manipulatory power, and a mass prostrate in an unintelligible coma. Now none of this is true, and both the above are a deception: power manipulates nothing, the masses are neither mislead nor mystified. Power is only too happy to make football bear a facile responsibility for stupefying the masses. This comforts it in its illusion of being power, and leads away from the much more dangerous fact that this indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice, that there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened.

- Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

Berlin, Germany ["We the People" at Brik Gallery]

Dear friends,

On March 17, 2012, Wall Street to Main Street launched in Catskill, NY. Since then, Occupy with Art's partnership with Greene Arts/Masters on Main Street has offered the community a diverse program of exhibits, installations, performances, readings, demonstrations, workshops, seminars, and more. We even had our own single edition newspaper! Participants have ranged from celebrated (or controversial) artists with art-world-recognizable names like Andres Serrano, to locally- (and internationally-) recognizable artists like Matt Bua, to collectives like Bread & Puppet Theater and abcdefgCORPS, to poet/writers, like Sparrow, who spans the spheres of Occupy and the Hudson River region, to those folks who brought pieces for the absolutely inclusive "People's Collection," whose participation required no artistic self-definition at all. From the beginning our objectives included generating a rich sample of Occupy arts, commingled with works originating from the region's impressive artist base. In some fair measure, that goal was attained, although to what extent the potential interchange was tapped is an open question. Estimating the populations of possible collaborators versus actual ones won't permit us to congratulate ourselves too much.

Jim Krewson, "Timeline"

As arts organizers, if not curators, we have tried to make space for as broad a spectrum of medium and craft-prowess as we could. Our focus has not been critical, as such. The result, if you scan the already impressive archive of achievements in Wall Street to Main Street, is not unlike a Google search results page. We created an invitation to those so inclined to explore further, past the headlines, to discover unknowns, to be surprised, and, hopefully, engaged. I have many favorites in our exhibit array, including Mark Skwarek's augmented reality project, Susan Wides photos and Claudia McNulty's installation. I think "We the People" is an excellent show, as strong as anything yet assembled on Occupy Wall Street.

Susan Wides, Zucotti Park September [Group Exhibit at Sarah Barker Studio, 462 Main Street]

It has been a pleasure to see what clicks in Catskill. Many have commented on the fabulous Occuprints, which are incredibly popular. Maraya Lopez and Arthur Polendo's installation really blew some minds. Over the two-and-a-half month project, it seems safe to say we presented something for most every taste and sensibility. However, we've invited everyone to assess the elements in Wall Street to Main Street, without attempting to limit the critique or, on the other hand, extract affirmation of the work on display, and we have invited viewers to make suggestions and comment on what they like or don't. Some have.

The Illuminator (Mark Read) by Boo Lynn

Which is great. Much of Wall Street to Main Street has been devoted to conversation-starting. But we have also sought to facilitate collective and individual imagining, not just through art or politics, but through science, as with the Buckminster Fuller Challenge presentation. Those facets of Wall Street to Main Street have been substantive, which isn't to say doctrinaire. In fact, from the outset it was determined by consensus that WS2MS (our Twitterish abbreviation) was not going to be an occupation of Catskill. Instead, the convergence of OWS with the town's Main Street would be equitable. In that spirit, we tried to make space for having fun, for family activities and for just hanging out - e.g., at Occupy Books, or the Illuminator's evening projection show. The dissipation of animus, prejudice, pre-conceptions and outright contempt among our hosts was an imperative. When it comes to Occupy, temperatures can run hot. We have given over a good portion of our programming to art erupting from OWS protests, but we also took care to consider positive and sustainable solutions, emphasizing those as much as the problems we face in our families, towns, cities, and nation, and even as planetary inhabitants. Yes, for the people of Catskill and its environs, Wall Street to Main Street has provided an opportunity to meet artists and activists from Occupy Wall Street and around the world - or down the street, and to confront the difference between a mediated version of OWS and the real people who comprise the movement. But it has also functioned, more or less effectively, depending on whom one asks, to salve polarized perceptions, if not in every case. In the end, any art show can only do so much.

Maraya Lopez and Arthur Polendo, "2012 Space Transparency"

The cultural exchanges, as a subset of our programming, have not always been smooth, but, thanks to efforts by the individuals and organizations involved, where conflicts have appeared, so too has the desire for and enabling of their open, constructive resolution. To the credit of all, an atmosphere of comity, more often than not by far, has prevailed. That's a testament not just to the artists and administrators who helped manifest WS2MS, but to Catskill.

Bread and Puppet Theater, Upriser Calesthenics with local musicians Barabara Lubell and Brian Dewan

Wall Street to Main Street received much sustained support from the Catskill community. Fawn Potash made tremendous contributions of time and energy, coordinating logistical efforts to install art in the spaces on Main Street, responding to local feedback and getting the word out about events. It was a "we" thing. Many individuals and teams volunteered resources over the course of the Wall Street to Main Street production, far too many to list here. In coming weeks we will devote ourselves to assembling as comprehensive a record as possible of all that went into the making of project, which in the final analysis, was as much a labor of love, in an atmosphere of hospitality, as anything else.

WS2MS newspaper, The Message

When renowned curator Geno Rodriquez and I first broached the concept of Wall Street to Main Street last fall, I don't think either of us could have envisioned or anticipated the actual outcome, or the context. May Day has come and gone, and WS2MS has provided Occupy with an alternative model over the course of its evolution, realization and now completion, for what is possible, in terms of cultural outreach and effect. Without aggressively seeking notice, we have accomplished much in shifting narratives, mainly by tenaciously adhering to our mission and persevering. While the art- and mainstream media (and even the OWS media) ignored our undertaking, we have managed to perform the sort of constructive function for Occupy that Noam Chomsky described in his recent essay in the Guardian, "What next for Occupy?" in which he writes:

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Or maybe it's to try to develop community-based enterprises, which are not at all inconceivable – enterprises owned and managed by the workforce and the community which can then overcome the choice of some remote multinational and board of directors made out of banks to shift production somewhere else. These are real, very live issues happening all the time. And it can be done. Actually, a lot of it is being done in scattered ways.
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This is exactly what we've done. By focusing on arts and culture, we have demonstrated what the Soul of Occupy is, and what we are up against (see Baudrillard quote above).

OWS painter and area native James Frederick Rose in front of Joel Richardson's suitman at BRIK

It's important to remember that what actually manifested in Wall Street to Main Street emerged out of a very difficult proposition. We had to figure out how to apply what are essentially the protocols of an anarchist protest society to the building of a cultural platform for arts presentation. Our venue has been an American small town, one that has been subject to endemic economic blight, although there's certainly much more to Catskill than that. Sometimes mashing up the OWS way of doing things with established arts organizational praxis created situations and dynamics that required us all to expand or otherwise modify our standard operating procedures. Expectations frequently yielded to compromise, but at times the tensions among those who volunteered to help produce Wall Street to Main Street was palpable. Internal organizational critique was embedded throughout our project architecture, for better or worse. For anyone familiar with the structures of working groups at Occupy can attest, getting past differences to some kind of consensus is a messy process. Often the practical had to yield to the ideal, and vice versa. It didn't help matters that our deadlines were so tight, for the scope and scale of the production we were undertaking. Nor did it help that Wall Street to Main Street, with some notable (and much appreciated) exceptions, received very little material support and  coverage. Most of that was generated locally. Why that phenomenon existed for us is a question we hope to delve into when we get to the project evaluation.  

Organizers and exhibitors' luncheon at neighbor's house

Occupy with Art has changed significantly, since March 17, but even more significantly, since the first emails flew between Geno and me in late November, 2011. Back then, the park had just been cleared, and most of us at OWS were reeling, just trying to sort out what the post-Liberty Square circumstances would mean for working groups like Arts & Culture, which OWS is an affinity group of. Then, we would still meet (both groups) at 60 Wall Street, and those meetings would regularly consist of between six and thirty occupiers. The organizational network, as it existed then in proximity to Zuccotti, is gone. Occupy with Art, which stopped convening our weekly meetings at the beginning of March, 2012, has dwindled to a couple of committed co-organizers (myself and Christopher Moylan). The remarkable thing, though, is that in the meantime, our actual network of collaborators, our partnerships and our group has done a major org-flip-flop. Now, we no longer operate as a meeting-based satellite node for a site-specific occupation. We exist online, and through the networks we've established and projects we've developed and realized. What the future holds for OwA, we don't know. What we can do, nonetheless, is point to Wall Street to Main Street, and our other completed productions, and to our upcoming ones, like CO-OP/Occuburbs, slated for the summer in Huntington, Long Island, and remind the skeptics, the hedgers and the nay-sayers, that art has its own power, and artists are not powerless in the shadow of injustice. Further, we possess unique gifts, which allow us to do things that protesters and our common nemeses (the banksters, corrupt politicos, et al.) cannot. In the end, it has less to do with rage against the machine or dirty money and politics than it has to do with the expressive Spirit. We are finding, and illustrating, what the soul of Occupy looks like, and how it works to transform, one piece of art, one person, one Main Street, at a time.

WS2MS co-organizer Boo Lynn Walsh with Catskill's finest

Anyway, this is getting a little long and the closing weekend is upon us. It is fairly clear that the completion of our Wall Street to Main Street program at the end of May is not necessarily the end of it. We have endeavored to open space for new exchanges, and in that I believe we can view our enterprise a success. If you agree or disagree, we'd love to hear what you think, either way. You can use the Suggestion Box, or contact us directly. I hope to see you this weekend in Catskill!

In gratitude,
Paul McLean
Co-Organizer, Occupy with Art

Geno Rodriguez, curator "We the People" at BRIK Gallery, 473 Main Street