Toroidal [Occupy] Effect

By Paul McLean

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Occupy is not an object. 

[Time is the only object. 

Everything else is a subject. 

True time is 4 dimensional, 

Heidegger deduced.] 

An object is not recursive. 

A machine can be reverse engineered. 

A system can be monkeywrenched. 

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[To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility...But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.] - Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Occupy is an idea that cannot be evicted, whose time has come. To paraphrase, more or less. What do you think? Did you Occupy Wall Street, or any of the 1500 towns & cities across the USA where an occupation popped up? To do so was to participate in collective and direct action. So occupation is a verb thing. Doing the Occupy, a strange circular pantomime, a version of dance, if not exactly dance, as such, called also a General Assembly by anarchists and/or direct democracy practitioners. The sound circle formation, or sphere, as old as humankind. Until we don't occupy anymore, for whatever reason, and there have been many given, by many authoritative and even some supportive voices, and it's not, which is to say, we incessantly self-evaluate, critique, deconstruct, parse, negate. A redress of grievances. A gathering of souls. The only way to catalog Occupy is for Jez to invent the Anarchives. It has been done, or did itself. Occupy is play, then, let's say. A revolutionary game. Players are called Novads. We have a literature that is time-based, aspiring joyously to timelessness, dimensionally operating in all time zones we know of & don't, with rules that aren't, LULZ. We are legion. Nobody is Occupy. Everyone can. What isn't Occupy, really? Occupiers discovered much is unoccupied, and many otherwise occupied, and an occupation isn't forever, even if in one aspect it might be, at least in its metaphysics. Occupy is a dream. A network. 

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Is Occupy Art?

Carl Scrase, "Fractal 090812," bull-clips, 2009. Courtesy John Buckley Gallery.

[An interview by WE Magazine with Carl Scrase]

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

WE_MAGAZINE
I assume Carl, you’d argue #occupy is art. Why?

CARL SCRASE: To be honest, I’m not sure if ‘argue’ is the correct verb. I may ‘propose’, ‘put forward’ or ‘ponder whether’. But no, no, I would not fervently argue such potentially slippery logic.

If I were to be pressured into giving an answer – which I suppose I am by virtue of being interviewed – I would offer the following.

I would suggest that in attempting to link ‘occupy’ and ‘art’ one could begin with a paper written in 2008 by Malcolm Miles, entitled Society As a Work of Art and then go on to watch the You Tube clip of him giving a lecture on the same theme. Malcolm gives a fantastic overview of the writing of Herbert Marcuse, talks about Joseph Beuys and touches on the topics of utopia, revolution, the history of occupations and how they all relate to art. This is a really interesting and informative summation of the historical underpinnings of ‘art’ and revolutionary social movements.

In the question and answer session at the end of the lecture Malcolm talks about Joseph Beuys’ claim that “Everyone is an artist”. To paraphrase Malcolm’s take on this famous phrase: Joseph Beuys means by this that everyone has a creative imagination and can envisage new social as well as artistic forms. The definition of art dissolves here into free living.

Joseph Beuys called himself a ‘social sculpture’, expanding and adding to the ambitions of the artist. This following quote from Beuys sums up his stance, and I believe is very interesting when linking ‘art’ + ‘occupy’. His words seem very prescient now, considering they were spoken in 1987, some 25 years ago: “In the future all truly political intentions will have to be artistic ones. … they will have to stem from human creativity and individual liberty. … this cultural sector … would be a free press, free TV, and so on … free from all state intervention. I am trying to develop a revolutionary model that formulates the basic democratic order in accordance with the people’s wishes … that changes the basic democratic order and then restructures the economic sector in a way that will serve the people’s needs and not the needs of a minority that wants to make its profits. That is the connection, and this I define as Art.”