The Arts of Occupation
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 07:00PM By Yates McKee
The Arts of Occupation appeared in The Nation on December 11, 2011.
[EXCERPT]
A certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm is encoded into the DNA of OWS, partly reflecting the influence of the Situationist International (SI). A group of experimental writers, urbanists and filmmakers whose work played an important role in instigating the Parisian uprising of May 1968, the SI called for artists to abandon their vocations as individual creators of luxury objects in favor of collectivized praxis. Drawing on the legacies of Dada and Surrealist collage, the Situationist principle of detournement called for the hijacking of capitalist images, objects and spaces in order to turn them against their intended meaning or function.
THE NATION, YATES MCKEE in art and protest