“Alternative thinking is the creation of mental space sufficient for imagining the expansion

apexart
of the realm of the humane.” - Robert Atkins (San Francisco, CA)

“It’s no secret that the art industry collectively suffers from a cultivated form of Attention
Playing by the Rules:
Deficit Disorder. … The notion of the time-out—time to analyze, to think, to inquire and
reflect—is essential to any dynamic enterprise.” - Julie Ault (New York, NY)
Alternative Thinking/
“Everything that exists and everything that emerges is almost automatically seen by us under Alternative Spaces
the perspective of its impending decline and disappearance.” - Boris Groys (New York, NY)

Playing by the Rules

“Never stop believing in the power of new thinking, in the power of art, since this is the only Robert Atkins Boris Groys
way the young have to protect the critical thought, that is, by sharing it with the world, by
nurturing its being.” - Sofija Grandakovska (Skopje, Macedonia) Julie Ault Marina Grzinic
“Critical thinking, including unfettered creative expression, are vital cultural values; artists René Block Pablo Helguera
and contemporary art play essential roles in both testing and strengthening these values.”
- Irene Tsatsos (Los Angeles, CA) Winslow Burleson Naeem Mohaiemen
“The only way to stop the normalized amnesia of neoliberal global capitalism is actually Biljana Ciric Raphael Rubinstein
to interrupt the logic of the norm. This interruption is what characterizes the alternative
radical practice.” - Marina Grzinic (Ljubljana, Slovenia) Renaud Ego Irene Tsatsos
Sofija Grandakovska

Rand / Kouris

edited with a preface by Steven Rand

Curatorial Studies/Art History and an introduction by Heather Kouris

published by apexart
ISBN: 978-1-933347-43-1 apexart
apexart
 Playing by the Rules:
Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces
Copyright ©2010 by apexart
Published by apexart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by

any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces

Edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris
ISBN: 978-1-933347-43-1
1-933347-43-0
1. Curatorial Studies 2. Cultural Studies 3. Art History

Printed in U.S.A.

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
t: 212 431 5270
f: 646 827 2487
www.apexart.org
info@apexart.org
Contents

Preface 7 Steven Rand

Introduction 18 Heather Kouris

Alternative Time and Instant

Audience (The Public Program
as an Alternative Space) 22 Pablo Helguera

Alternatives & Aphorisms,

Salon & Spectacle 33 Robert Atkins

Searching for Tomorrow’s

Alternative China, Vietnam
and Cambodia 47 Biljana Ciric

TANAS–the alternative
“alternative space” 60 René Block

What Now? 64 Irene Tsatsos

Tributary or Source? 71 Raphael Rubinstein

Art, Activism and Theory 80 Marina Grzinic

Of Several Minds Over Time 94 Julie Ault

The Forest in the Clearing 106 Renaud Ego

The Weak Universalism 117 Boris Groys

Asterix & the Big Fight: Proxy

Wars, Temporary Coalitions 131 Naeem Mohaiemen

Flying Solo: Rules to Live By 143 Winslow Burleson

Lightness of the Dissident,

Brightness of the Critical Mind 154 Sofija Grandakovska

Cover Image Credits 172

5
 apexart is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit visual arts organization founded in 1994
by artist Steven Rand. Originally an exhibition venue it’s activities now also
include an international residency program, book publishing, an active
public program and occasional conferences.

Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces is the third

in the series which consider issues in the visual arts. The first book, On
Cultural Influence, published in 2006, is a collection of essays from past
conferences in Poland, Brazil, and Hawaii. Cautionary Tales: Critical Curat-
ing, published in 2007, addressed the changing role of the contemporary
curator. Special thanks to NLW.
6
Steven Rand

Preface

Actually this is not a book about playing by the rules. It’s a collection of
essays intended to suggest that playing by the rules may not be the best
way, the most interesting way, or your way.
The art world is surprisingly unchallenging and moribund. It is
conservative, political, exclusive, and not very interesting or inspiring. While
there’s a lot of interesting creative work being done, we’re looking in the
wrong places, encouraging the wrong people and elevating questionable
goals. The current structure of the gallery and collector actually discourages
creativity by narrow definition and the pursuit of familiarity. Not everything
can be art and just because it’s in a gallery doesn’t make it so. Who is in the
art world and where did the artists go?
Art is small business but big money. Getting by, much less
prospering, for an artist, writer, or curator is difficult; compromise may be
necessary at times, and we all have to decide where that line is. An artist
or curator having a “straight” job is not the sign of being unsuccessful,
especially with success defined by income and name recognition. We have
to work fast (production) and slow (concept) at the same time. It’s not
easy and slow often loses out. It’s hard to be creative and follow through
when we’ve learned that opportunity is more a result of personality than
ability.
Consider the immortal words of Groucho Marx who cautioned,
“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
7
 Whether you’re in the art club or applying for membership, consider your
idea of what an artist is and what is important to you. The most valuable
part of being an artist is freedom to do what you want. That freedom is
the currency you have to spend. Joining the club can be expensive. And
confusing.
Many creative disciplines feel particularly vital such as filmmaking,
media, design, architecture, advertising, medicine, technology, science, and
sociology, while the art world feels like a fashion show. Industrial fabrication
creates magic that sculptors can’t compete with. We will always have painters
and sculptors, but a child growing up today will never look at a painting or
sculpture the way someone did 100, 50, or even 20 years ago. We’re in an
increasingly non-contemplative time, flooded with exceedingly competent
images. Fewer and fewer artists maintain a traditional “studio” and,
increasingly, art making involves recognizing and capitalizing on that which
is art as well as inventing it. It is referential and appropriated, not utopist,
and often related to sociology. Many smart creative people who would have
gone into art in the last ten years are now in technology or design related
fields after assessing the inward directed collector/dealer structure and their
future in it. We are reveling in digital ether while the art world is composing
in analog.
New art, touted by curators, a hungry media, galleries and “market
making collectors” moves quickly from the gallery, to the collector, and
then to a museum, sometimes owned by the collector who employs the
curator. We’ve become very sophisticated in promoting and marketing
our work and there are artists working with these issues that are very
interesting, but new art isn’t known by roaming curators and hasn’t landed
in museums. Meanwhile, contemporary art museums are full of things
that aren’t really art. Museum and gallery attendance is up as a result of
programming aimed at doing just that with many merely trying to survive
after mostly unnecessary capital drives for new buildings. The ubiquitous
new museum building has left a great deal of lost romance, debt, and
8
dubious design in its path. Creatively repurposed buildings around the
world that were used to show art are being returned to the municipalities
or demolished to allow for the capital campaigns so important to trustees
and the museum. For most visitors, it is entertainment rather than a
“driven interest” in the art.
Business is compelling and fun at first. There is immediacy and
a quid pro quo that is easily understood—appointments, international
travel, residencies, and promotion. Many artists and curators are playing
business with a lot of interest and energy. Being wanted and involved
feels good. Offering opportunity is a powerful opiate. Being creative and
self-critical is hard. It can be very difficult doing work that doesn’t get
positive response.
Many artists have moved from the art world to the creative
commercial world where the public is the audience and creativity and
marketing combine with clear purpose. It is immediate and immediately
gratifying, the way business can be, and often feels more creative than
the art world. Reality shows and reality “game” shows (my favorite was
“The Moment of Truth”) are sometimes incredibly sophisticated in their
development and production, and can be compelling mirrors of societal
values. Too often dismissed as not even close to art, this manipulation
of contrived situations with the viewer as voyeur is like paint pushed
around a canvas, sometimes done consummately and other times not
worth the effort. Stephen Colbert, the Cartoon Network, and Comedy
Central are social canvases that are often far more compelling and
reflective than a gallery visit while reaching a far greater and more
involved audience.
Creating opportunity shouldn’t be more satisfying then fulfilling
the obligation, even if we understand that putting it on our resume
reaches more people than the exhibition or book will. You may even have
the wrong job. Whether your interest is beauty, subversion, or somewhere
in between, it’s the depth of the response by the artist or writer to the
9
 problem (the work) that will transcend its physicality. Art is not confined to
or confined by the art world.
Samuel Butler wrote, “The truest characters of ignorance are
vanity, pride, and annoyance.” Angry artists act out, angry business people
burn out. Doing good work that is unfamiliar may take longer to develop
an audience but will have greater endurance and potential than derivative
or copied work.
Self-actualization. Defined in Wikipedia as a term used in various
psychology theories, often in slightly different ways (e.g., Goldstein, Maslow,
Rogers). The term was originally introduced by the organismic theorist Kurt
Goldstein for the motive to realize all of one’s potentialities. In his view, it
is the master motive—indeed, the only real motive a person has, all others
being merely manifestations of it. However, the concept was brought to
prominence in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory as the final
level of psychological development that can be achieved when all basic
and mental needs are fulfilled and the “actualization” of the full personal
potential takes place.
I started apexart in 1994 much like someone would open a bar
or pub with the idea that they were making the place they would like to
go to. The idea was to put artists, writers, philosophers, and otherwise
interesting folks in the role of curator and at that time there were not
many independent curators. Curatorial studies programs began around
that time, so there was clearly a larger desire to mediate between artists
and the public. Most programs are well meaning, but as I’ve written
in the past, many have helped nurture a corporate atmosphere of
promotion and opportunism. Previously eschewed professional terms
such as “networking” and “practice” heretofore used by doctors and
lawyers have become accepted terms to describe one’s art activities.
These programs often have great faculty, however the offerings are
rarely integrated or contextualized and the job market extremely limited.
Many express criticism today that the art world is about business.
10
Business is compelling in its immediacy, pace, and ego gratification,
and it’s reasonable that these concerns be reflected in the art world.
We’ve learned what business always knew—that smart promotion and
networking are more remunerative than working outside of the public
view. The art world is playing business even more than collectors and
institutions are playing art.
We’ve done great shows at apexart and some “less great” shows
but our greatest ability has been to create compelling juxtaposition. The
more vexing the better. Some of our more confusing shows have made
people ask questions about the structure, the essay, the installation, and
the choice of artists. Getting people annoyed, offended, or generally
pissed off creates a greater change in their tolerance and perspective than
offering something easy and agreeable. A recent study of cognition noted
that staying mentally agile was more the result of arguing with others than
agreeing. Google and directed content sends you more of what they think
you want, we send you what we hope is worth thinking about. We’re
agonists.
apexart does about six exhibitions a year in New York City and two
“franchised exhibitions” elsewhere. We bring eight residents from around
the world to NYC and send up to four folks, who have not traveled outside
the art world, to distant locations where no significant contemporary art
market exists. They are prohibited from “doing their work,” encouraged to
immerse themselves in a foreign culture as well as being open to new ideas
and approaches.
apexart’s residency program is not about trying to give people what
they want. Or what they expect. It is not about creating career opportunity.
We don’t provide a studio or become their career advocate. NYC has so
many interesting people and educational and cultural opportunities that
putting people in a studio doing the same work they’ve been doing makes
little sense. We create a schedule and make appointments with people that
would be impossible for a “non-affiliated” visitor to arrange.
11
 There are three “requirements” to be invited for a residency. You
must be over 30 years old, this must be your first visit to NYC, and you have
to be recommended by someone who knows you well. It is not unusual
for the recommenders to be people we don’t know as we may contact an
institution and ask an assistant curator or professor to be a recommender.
We try to avoid the “cultural” gatekeepers who tend to give the same
people opportunities. Our challenge is to explain the ideas and reasons
behind the program well enough so that they understand and select the
right person. To avoid diluting the process we ask each recommender for
only one recommendation. Residents may not have had such experiences
previously because of schedule, economics, complete immersion with their
work, or possibly because their personalities did not create such situations.
This process has been in effect for eleven years with a remarkable roster
of past residents, who have returned to their homes with new ideas,
perspectives, and opportunities.
The resident is provided with a studio apartment at 14th Street
and Union Square, the hyperactive middle of NYC. They are then given
a rigorous schedule of up to four appointments and activities each day,
which include auditing classes and lectures outside of their discipline,
touristic activities that explain the city, and visiting some of the smaller
idiosyncratic museums from the more than 200 that exist in New York.
The resident attends large and small performances of music, theater, and
readings, all the while meeting with people from different disciplines who
have been invited to be part of our “friends of apexart” list. They go to
Washington, D.C., for two days to meet with folks, to go to museums
and performances, and to get a sense of the image the U.S. has of itself
in a place they often hear about and sometimes have to respond to. It is
generally one of the compelling adventures of their residency.
The main intention is to fill their mind with as many ideas and
experiences as we can and then let them sort it out on their own when they
return home. We have no agenda other than making a creative place not
12
confined to the self-referential, often hermetic art world that discourages
“outsider” activity. They have the chance to spend time in a way that can
only be done somewhere else, displaced, with no sense of obligation, and
alone. Mates or visitors are not allowed and many really do return home
with a new sense of independence and energy. Our residents have come
from every continent and from every socioeconomic level. The residency
is only one month long and time passes quickly. We emphasize making
friends rather than social networking, and we think one’s opportunities will
increase if one’s work is more interesting. Do people rebel at the schedule?
On occasion, but it makes for another good discussion opportunity. Most
residents are too busy.
In addition to bringing residents to NYC, we have a mirror program
that reverses the process with the same philosophy and sends local artists,
writers, and curators who have become too entrenched in the hermetic and
incestuous art world, to remote locations around the world. Past residents,
familiar with the program, have assisted us in places outside of the art circuit
that offer new experiences and personal reassessment. Residents have gone
to locations such as Kellerberrin in the Australian outback and Addis Ababa,
the capital of Ethiopia. A vacation for a businessperson can be research for an
artist or writer that should be fun, exciting, new, and without guilt. Success
for an artist is staying challenged by your work, and figuring out a way to
do it for life. If the reality of artist as romantic bohemian has given way
to artist as entrepreneur, provocateur, and entertainer, then let’s encourage
thought, art, reaction, and commentary about it. Values change, let’s let the
art change.
For everyone involved we want apexart to be an educational
organization rather than a promotional one. We don’t do one person
shows and consider ourselves in service to our audience first, and then
the artists and curators who work with us. The white box of the gallery
space continues to confound and perplex. We are idea centric, and
place a great deal of emphasis on the essay that accompanies each
13
 exhibition. Our documentation for each exhibition takes the form of a
color brochure with an essay by the organizer. Each season there are two
open calls for exhibitions: Unsolicited Proposals and The Franchise. Both
programs are set up to allow anyone to compete on a level playing field
with well-known curators, writers, and artists, by first anonymizing the
proposal. No resumes, catalogues, or recommendations are accepted.
Ideas for exhibitions are entered online and limited to 600 words for the
UP and 400 for the Franchise (up from 250). In each of these evaluation
procedures, a large number of jurors are invited to weigh in. We wrote
a PHP script that allows people to submit online and then substitutes a
number for their name. On the jury side, the script constantly randomizes
the order of the submissions so no one proposal is always first or second.
It is not unusual for us to invite more than 200 jurors and to have each
proposal receive more than 25 votes. Relying on the idea of “crowd
sourcing,” the jurors are given unique usernames and passwords and
asked to read at least a certain number of proposals, sometimes only 25
and other times up to 100, with the idea that fresh eyes and the overlap
of readers will produce a more objective result. Additionally it means
that we involve twice the number of people who would otherwise
have been involved and eliminates the influence exerted by the most
vociferous and powerful jury member on the others when done in a
small group in person. This often amounts to undue influence rather
than discussion, whereas our process gives each juror equal input. An
art historian who prevailed in last year’s Unsolicited Proposal process had
submitted a proposal three times before his was selected; he continued
to do so because he was comfortable that the process was a fair one.
This process is very effective and we have offered the script to others.
It makes the process fair, easy, and very efficient to conduct. At the
conclusion of the process we provide a ranking by title of all proposals
received to help the author get a better sense of how his or her proposal
fared.
14
 In 2010 we invited 371 jurors and 110 juried for the Franchise. In
2009 we received 455 proposals and invited 296 jurors with more than 150
actively involved. Each juror was asked to read at least 25 proposals with
the idea that a larger percentage of people will gravitate to the best idea
and that the relative jury process (crowd sourcing) is more effective than
the traditional process of having five people sit around a table during a
grueling multi-day process where keeping track of so many submissions is
all but impossible. It is not unusual for us to receive submissions from more
than 60 countries for each program with the jurors coming from as many
countries. We consider the submissions process a creative writing exercise
and submitters are advised: “We never know how our jurors will evaluate
different aspects. Be creative and make it interesting.” If you would like to
be a juror, send us a note and tell us why.
So while the UP is an opportunity for people to do a project in NYC,
the Franchise emphasizes that the center of the world is wherever you are.
Also based on a creative writing exercise, this process is about branding and
finance, as each year apexart leaves NYC for two exhibitions. It is about
branding, in that no one needs us to be there to organize an exhibition, and
about financing, in that we bring, well, financing. The first year we went to
Los Angeles and the last to Thailand. Learning as we go, we impose arbitrary
limitations to serve underserved places. Last year submissions were limited to
cities and towns with 500,000 people or less and resulted in the involvement
of people from the community, which would not have happened in a mega
city center.
For each exhibition we print an edition of 10,000 100-pound cover
stock, color brochures that are sent free of charge to individuals, institutions,
and galleries in more than 105 countries. They contain an essay of about
1,300 words written by the curator/organizer and reproductions of the works
in the exhibition in a way that clearly addresses the idea of the show and acts
as much like a surrogate of the show as possible. They are short, interesting,
and easy to carry, and easily recycled with no guilt if you choose not to keep
15
 them. Over the years more than 1,200,000 of these mini catalogs have been
sent. Being in service to our audience, we try to produce materials that they
will read. Too many catalogs are produced each year for shows that don’t
warrant them and no one reads.
We have restructured the jury procedure so as to be more fair
and objective than it often is, and have changed the form and concept
of the residency program to promote new ideas and experiences rather
than career opportunities. Our exhibitions are about asking questions
and exploring ideas rather than validating the participating artists,
curators, and writers. Everyone involved is encouraged to innovate his
or her approach, enlarge his or her horizon and help us assess if we are
doing what we say we are trying to do. We pursue creativity rather than
art. For the fortunate folks who know what art is and where to find it,
there is a massive structure in place. Stop reading this and go network or
something. For the rest of you, maybe the “art world” isn’t a club you
want to be part of.
Change is good, regardless of the outcome. It makes you
reconsider and helps suggest new directions. Too often art school becomes
a place to refine your ability rather than experiment and grow. Art schools,
universities, and curatorial programs really need to reassess how they are
preparing their students while leaving them deeply in debt. This book is not
about good and bad or right and wrong. It is about encouraging you to
consider and reconsider situations and ideas as unencumbered as possible
in an effort to understand better what you are doing and why you are doing
it. Unfortunately we rarely grow up and only get older.
It is very important to try new things, go new places, spend time
alone, and even cause a little trouble doing the unexpected. Acting out is
important. Learn new skills that are interesting, can show up in your work
and can help make you money. Poverty is not good for creativity and you

never know where inspiration and new ideas will come from.

16
Steven Rand (stevenrand@apexart.org) is an artist with a requisite level of anxiety,
hypersensitivity, paranoia, and an M.F.A. He started apexart instead of complaining about the
commercialization of the art world, but hasn’t stopped complaining. He doesn’t get along
well with others and is not a curator, a writer, or an architect, but is designing a house, and
tries to write. He has had one-person exhibitions in New York, California, Germany, Poland,
and China, been in quite a few group shows internationally and has traveled extensively.
He lectures and gives talks around the world, and considers apexart an act of creativity and
sincerely appreciates all the folks who have been part of the process, especially NLW.
17
 Heather Kouris

Introduction

Alternative art spaces emerged in the 1970s as a vivid reflection of the

openness to possibilities of that time. Seemingly anything was possible
with little money, as people worked together for the greater good. The
atmosphere was open to new ideas and fresh perspectives. Such a liber-
ating moment then moved into large money and greater acceptance,
which allowed even more alternative spaces to open and thrive into the
1980s. It has been argued that the decrease of federal funding initiated
the initial decline of the alternative space in the 1990s. But the need for
different ways of exhibiting art and the need for audiences to see some-
thing different, continuing the discourse on alternative practices, kept the
majority of already established alternative spaces active.
Every institution must re-evaluate its mission on an ongoing basis.
It is important to continually question the value of what a venue gives to
its visitors. With alternative spaces it is all the more important, because
the concept of what is normal is constantly changing, as such spaces
require not only alterative practice, but alternative thinking. It isn’t only
the type of artwork being shown, but more about the voice that is heard.
The programmatic approach becomes more important than what is on
display.
The perceived rules and where they came from are among the
questions answered by the authors of this publication. Some authors use
specific examples of alternative spaces around the world to demonstrate
18
the various thinking in alternative spaces; some show alternative practices
in other areas; while other authors present alternatives to the alternative
space.
A few of the essays provide some history of alternative spaces.
Robert Atkins (art historian, critic, and curator based in California) uses as
an example the salons of the 1920s, specifically Mabel Dodge’s, to show
how a true alternative functioned; even such an old model can still hold
relevance today. Questioning the value of history, Atkins calls alternatives in
general “the impetus for change.” René Block (gallerist and former director
of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany) gives a brief history of
how alternatives began and an introduction to TANAS, a private organiza-
tion in Berlin with funding from Turkey intended to provide opportunity to
Turkish artists in Germany. Using case studies of art venues in China,
Vietnam, and Cambodia over the last 20-30 years, Biljana Ciric (indepen-
dent curator based in Shanghai) explores the potentials of alternatives in
these locations, and the importance of connecting with the rest of the
world. Ciric outlines how these venues are developing the infrastructure
missing from these locations and working towards a more long-range view
necessary for progress as well as a place for intellectual exchange.
Not only art has alternatives. Irene Tsatsos (writer and curator and
former Executive Director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) uses
examples of permaculture housing as alternative living arrangement and
Matta-Clark’s restaurant Food as alternative venue in the 1970s to
demonstrate the importance of critical thinking and unrestrained creative
expression. Marina Grzinic (philosopher, artist and theoretician based in
Ljubljana) presents the construction of “normality” to help define alter-
native. She suggests that few alternative spaces and alternative radical
practices exist because they are not viewed as they once were. She uses
necropolitics as an example of alternative practice and gives specific
examples of “alternative radical practices” in the social/political realm.
Naeem Mohaiemen (writer, artist, and technologist working in Dhaka
19
 and New York) uses as main example the Paris exhibition of works from
Bangladesh to show how an alternative approach to standard procedure is
necessary. When the Bangladeshi people resisted a loan they saw as theft,
their actions ended up changing the way art is exchanged.
Other essays reaffirm the importance of thinking critically. Sofija
Grandakovska (academic, theorist, and poet in Skopje) uses the dissident,
one who is inherently full of conflicts, as an example to explore the
importance of critical thinking and searches for the alternative space for
the dissident. Julie Ault (artist, writer, and editor based in New York) reviews
her previous writing on alternative spaces and shares the importance of
“reflexivity” in continually asking what we are doing and why. Winslow
Burleson (Assistant Professor of Human Computer Interaction at Arizona
State University; received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab) shares his work
in the field of Human Computer Interaction to present a series of motiva-
tional tools and approaches for young people working in the arts today,
such as “define success personally” and “seize the opportunity to fail.”
Some texts reveal ways to achieve a “new” alternative space.
Renaud Ego (poet based in Paris) shows the alternative aspects in the
field of writing and mentions technology, specifically the Internet, as a
revolutionary method as it provides a place to be free to express oneself
to the masses. Boris Groys (philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist;
previously Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the
Center for Art and Media Technology; now professor at New York Univer-
sity) also explores the power of the Internet as he argues that the de-pro-
fessionalization of art is a “highly professional operation” and further that
weak images have the most power. With the accessibility of the Internet,
coupled with our lack of time, we don’t necessarily need to see a perfect
work or text; it is enough to know that it exists somewhere out there.
The future of alternative spaces may lie in a non-venue. Pablo
Helguera (artist and Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the
Education Department of MoMA, NY) suggests we ought to (re)consider
20
our audience and that perhaps the public program and a traveling venue is
a more appropriate approach to reaching current audiences. Raphael Rubin-
stein (New York-based poet and art critic and past editor at Art in America)
reviews some of the changes that have evolved since alternative spaces
began in the 1970s, including the market acceptance of “alternative” art,
creating a situation where commercial galleries began showing work that
was as “cutting edge” as the “true” alternative spaces. Rubinstein sug-
gests a changing location as a better way for alternative spaces to adapt
to change—especially considering the nomadic nature of our existence—
and outlines specific examples of this approach.
In order to remain relevant and un-institutionalized, alternative
venues must take chances and make changes, continually reconsidering
what they do and how they do it. They must constantly consider how their
audience is changing, and ask what more they can do to contribute to
their field. All the essays in Playing by the Rules underline the importance
of critical thinking as well as the need for alternative thinking. Art is not
the only field in which to explore the non-traditional and we see alternative
approaches in all areas: communes, vegetarianism, alternative medicine,
alternative spirituality practices, swinging, political activism, green living,
alternative schools, alternative music, working collectively, and so on. We
hope these essays will provide some inspiration in your own critical thinking
and give you some fresh perspectives.

Heather Felty Kouris began working at apexart in 1999 as Gallery Director and has served as
Special Projects Director since 2002. Her Special Projects include co-editing apexart’s series of
books, developing the growing apexart website/archive and other diverse activities. Currently
based in Athens, Greece, her writing has been included in numerous artist catalogs and
her curatorial projects have been held in Greece and New York. Her most recent exhibition,
Migrations, explored the life-changing aspects of cultural relocation and was featured at the
Municipal Art Gallery of Kalamata in June 2009.
21
 Pablo Helguera

Alternative Time and Instant Audience

(The Public Program as an Alternative Space)

Spaces hold objects; they also facilitate experiences. However, physical

location is only one of the factors that play a role in the production
an experience. Experience—whether it is an art-related experience or
not—emerges in the conjunction of a location, an event—a temporal
space—and a social context, or social space. The perhaps intuitive, and
appropriate, rationale for the creation of the alternative space model in the
1960s or 1970s was that it was necessary to have a physical location from
where to present and support emerging and alternative art practices, and
the same may be true today. Nonetheless, as art and the art world have
evolved and as alternative art spaces struggle to redefine their identity,
too much emphasis has been given to location and too little to other key
components that constitute their character. I believe that the clue to that
redefinition lies not in the reinvention of their physical space, but in paying
attention to those other two spaces that facilitate art spaces: temporal
and social context, or in other words, events and audiences. In its updated
configuration it is increasingly clear that if there were any component of
the alternative space that could be disposed of it would precisely be its
physical location, but not the social or temporal context in which it roots
itself. (The same is true, in fact, of more traditional spaces: The reason
why a vernissage is so central to an exhibition is because spaces have
become event-centered points of encounter where a particular community
interacts.)
22
 There appears to be an inherent contradiction in the original
concept of an alternative space: while at the same time promoting the
idea of an experimental, ever-evolving type of art making, their grounding
in physical locations is about permanence, and more about continuity or
longevity than about change. Furthermore, as much as a physical space can
be an asset, it can also be a liability. For most alternative spaces, financial
survival is a constant threat to their programming independence; real
estate, maintenance and overhead costs can become a deciding factor on
their existence and can limit its flexibility. This apparent contradiction is so
perhaps because over the years we have become too used to think of the
notion of alternative space as alternative location, instead of what I believe
was the original impulse of creating a location where to show and think
about art.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, alternative spaces in New York
were created by groups of artists to support experimental practices that
at the time did not have a home. This was long before artists, curators
and dealers had to worry too much about real estate, but also before a
number of events that transformed the art world, including the global
explosion of art fairs and biennials, the increasing youth of artists exhibiting
at major museums, the emergence of an art market thirsty for innovation,
and the aggressive and experimental nature of commercial but status-
seeking galleries. Today, partially as a result of the impact of those events,
a regular viewer would be hard-pressed to see the difference between an
exhibition or the artists showing at an alternative space and one at the New
Museum or a for-profit cutting edge exhibition space in the city. Ironically,
galleries, kunsthalles and contemporary art museums find themselves in
a race to become more alternative, constantly finding ways to emulate
the sound and smells of alternativity; they usually have better funding and
attract talented individuals who can help facilitate the institutionalization
of alternativity. Alternative art spaces are generally not-for-profit and lack
with vast resources, and if anything, in a city like New York, they appear
23
 to struggle in competing with less resources at games for which others are
better equipped.
So are alternative spaces today truly “alternative”? Contrary to
what its name may imply, an alternative space today rarely offers a real
“alternative” to the kind of art that is shown elsewhere. Instead, they are
inextricably connected to the critical and economic fabric of the art world.
By retaining their original name, alternative spaces today create a semblance
of mini-subcultures that actually function closer to clearinghouses of
emerging artistic talent, providing room to experiment in the early stages
of their careers, rather than representing counter-cultural or underground
movements. The phenomenon is not circumscribed to New York: alternative
spaces all over the world generally function in that in-between place of
experimenting at the fringes, but always in dialogue with the art world
at large. But while this is a valid function, we should ask if that is enough
to claim a role as a true conceptual and practical counterpoint in the art
system. I believe it is not.
So when we ask about the refunctioning of the alternative space
in order to retain its original purpose of free experimentation and infusion
of new blood into the art system, we need to look at the potential of the
use of temporality and social space. When Marcel Broodthaers invented his
itinerant Musée d’Art Moderne, Dèpartment des Aigles, he was creating
an alternative space, one that was both nomadic and temporal and which
existed only in the time and place where the appropriate conditions allowed
it. The project would not have made sense if it had been created to last
forever—it would have automatically erased its original critique of the
institution.
Temporality is always part of the equation of alternativity. It is not
just a space, but the conjunction of a particular place at a particular time
when meaningful moments occur in art-making. This is a concept that today
has been understood by many artists and curators, and more and more we
have observed projects that set themselves temporal limits, with an official
24
date of death, which provides closure and curiously makes these spaces
look more like large art projects. In New York, this was the case of Orchard,
a temporal gallery in the Lower East Side, and of the X Initiative, a year-long
temporal space. Similarly, many spaces nowadays operate in terms of public
programming and less in terms of two-month length exhibitions. Curators
like Hans Ulrich Obrist have now for some time explored the notion of
duration-based exhibitions, such as Il Tempo Del Postino, presented with
Philippe Parreno during Art Basel in 2009. Temporal limits provide artists,
curators and entrepreneurs with additional benefits, which include the
possibility to conceive the art space as a self-contained art project; to
explore the potential of aggressive and dynamic programming that could
not be sustained in a permanent way, and capturing the imagination and
expectation of an audience who would be able to witness the birth, climax,
and death of the project. Finally, it is a way to artificially, but effectively,
predetermine a historical arch for a project: alternative spaces, like every
other organization, movement or social group, often experience periods of
gestation, growth, climax and decay until their final dissolution or until they
evolve into becoming a different type of organization or structure.
While the public program cannot replace a physical space, the
fact that time is the modifier of the space and not the other way around
demands for a rethinking on how we produce an art experience for an
audience. In cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, event-based spaces have
become the natural response to the awareness that, as our world moves
faster and faster, alternativity is about instant communities, about the
spontaneous encounter between people. Time is today our real estate, and
learning how to use it productively is as important, and perhaps even more,
than how we use the four walls of a gallery.

If we are to accept then the premise that public programming is the realm
where alternativity can grow, it may also be evident that to simply offer
public programs does not necessarily reflect in itself an experimental
25
 approach. The question to answer would be: what sort of experimental
qualities should these public programs have in order to make them most
interesting or opening new doors of discussion and experiences? This is
similar to asking what kind of experimental art becomes successful, which
is ultimately impossible to answer in an intelligent way. Nonetheless, based
on my observations of many years of programming as an educator and as
an artist, I believe there are commonalities to experimental programming.
Content-based public programs generally fall within two distinctive
“genres”: art-centered events such as performances and education-
centered events such as discussions, lectures, courses, and workshops. In my
experience, the most recently innovative approaches to programming have
emerged from an informed conjunction of the two, along with non-content
components—such as food, drinks, a party atmosphere—that emphasize
the sense of communion.1 The reason for this has to do with the balance
between program function and audience expectations. An education public
program has the implicit function of providing a constructive experience
by means of a discussion, an instructional dynamic such as the one of a
workshop, or by simple exposition (a straight-forward lecture); and as such
this is more or less the kind of expectation that those who attend it may have
(“entertainment” is usually not the primary expectation amongst people
attending a lecture, but “personal advancement,” “learning,” are more
likely to be). An art-based public program, in contrast, rarely offers such a
structured delivery of information, growth or learning, however, it provides
a direct experience that can well result in all these, but is generally expected
to be unmediated and direct. An audience that attends an education lecture
delivered by a poor speaker, or a symposium where the speakers veer off a
tangent that has nothing to do with the announced topic, leave frustrated
because their expectation of having a particular topic addressed in a new or
informative or thoughtful way, were not met.
Experimental public programs function somewhere in between
the realm of delivering and upsetting expectations, that is, between
26
challenging and rewarding the viewer or the participant. Borrowing a page
from performance art, these programs can engage participants to enter
situations with a greater degree of ambiguity, which may include things like
role-playing, enacting certain social rituals (like singing in a church, wearing
a costume, etc.) and share personal aspects of themselves (this has been
often identified as the “carnivalesque” [Mikhail Bakhtin]). At the same
time, by using pedagogical structures such as the universally understood
constructs of “workshop” or “group retreat,” participants are given the
possibility to frame their experiences within a constructive model that will
allow for reflection and discussion in the future.
These experimental public programs cannot, and should not, aspire
to be art or education as outcomes, but rather, as their medium. More than
a balance between informal and formal education, this type of experimental
programming is closer to informal conceptual art and informal education
structure with a formal social agenda.
How to achieve that balance is a site-specific question, one that
directly relates to how one understands its own audiences.

For some, to try to ask what is the audience of a new and radical art or idea
would appear to be a contradiction: if the art or idea is radically new, isn’t it
true that the audience for it doesn’t exist yet? Under this logic, new ideas—or
new types of art—create their own audiences. I would argue that the truth,
however, is different. These ideas, and those new types of art, are built with
an implicit audience in them.
In the 1980s movie Field of Dreams, an Iowa farmer (played by
Kevin Costner) walking down a cornfield suddenly hears the voice of God
saying: “If you build it, he will come.” He envisions a baseball playing
field, and is strongly compelled to build it. The phrase (in the variation of
“if you build it, they will come”) has entered the English language as if
it had been an old adage of ancient wisdom and not from the pen of
a Hollywood screenwriter. The implied message of the phrase is: Building
27
 comes first, audiences second. Yet the opposite is true. We build because
audiences exist first. We build because we seek to reach out to others, and
those others will come because they initially recognize themselves in that
which we have built. After that initial interaction, spaces start a process of
self-identification, ownership, and evolution based on group interests and
ideas. They are not static spaces onto which static viewers arrive, but ever
evolving, growing or decaying communities that self-build, develop, and
eventually dismantle.
Various sociologists have argued—David Berreby most notably—
that in most of our actions as humans we are predisposed to express a
tribal mindset of “us and them,” and each statement we make reaches out
or against a set of pre-existing social codes that include or exclude sectors
of people. The contemporary art practice, of all human endeavors, is most
distinctively about exclusion, not about inclusion, because the structure of
social interactions within its confines are based on a repertory of cultural
codes or “passwords” that provide certain status and a role within a given
conversation. And in a radical, countercultural or alternative practice, these
exclusionary passwords are key to preserve in order to maintain a distance
with the mainstream.
Theoretically, alternative spaces are open to all kinds of public,
but in fact they tend to serve very specific types of audiences. Smaller and
more informal spaces have the flexibility to be more direct about their
constituency and generally it could be said that they operate within two
registers: one being its immediate circle of participants and supporters and
the second being the critical art world at large toward which they usually
look for validation. Larger alternative art spaces, because they usually are
nonprofit organizations, are officially open to all, but they instead serve
a niche market within the art world: up-and-coming art professionals,
individuals who are somewhat informed and interested in contemporary art,
and, with lesser emphasis, more established artists and curators. Random
visitors can walk into a space, but their presence or visitation is not crucial
28
to the survival of the organization—it merely counts as foot traffic. What is
key is the sustained supporter who may become a member or help raise the
reputation of the space in the social fabric of the art world. In some cases,
like Art in General, spaces have sought to diversify their audience base
more aggressively, by creating more neighborhood-oriented events and
focusing on the ethnic groups that live next to the space. In some cases,
even successfully, visual artists are commissioned residency projects to work
with these audiences. While these initiatives are valid and often result in
interesting art projects, they run the risk of limiting the support they can
provide to an artist by prescribing set parameters of audiences and spaces
and by trying to fulfill quotas previously set by grant-making bureaucracies.2
Spaces in this situation often find themselves between a rock and a hard
place, trying to sell a very hermetic product—very self-referential, cutting
edge art—to people at a working class neighborhood with very different
interests and concerns.
All this is to say that alternativity, when it comes to audiences,
is an unhelpful adjective. Audiences are never “others”—they are always
very concrete selves. In other words, it is impossible to create an alternative
experience and take steps to making it public without also making some type
of assumption about what kinds of people will eventually partake in them.
Do they read Artforum? Do they watch CNN? Are they English-speakers?
Do they live in Idaho? Did they vote for Obama? When we organize and
promote an exhibition or create a public program, we are already making
decisions regarding its hypothetical audience or audiences, even if it is an
intuitive way. Sociolinguist Allan Bell coined the term “audience design” in
1984, referring to the ways in which the media addresses different types
of audiences through “style shifts” in speech. Since that time the discipline
of sociolinguistics has defined structures by which we can recognize the
patterns in which speakers engage with audiences in multiple social and
linguistic environments through register and social dialect variations. This
is to say that if an arts organization is to be thought of as a “speaker,” it is
29
 possible to conceive it operating—through its programs and activities—in
multiple social registers that may or may not include an art “intelligentsia,”
a more immediate contemporary art audience with their inner codes and
references, and the larger public.
Most curators and artists, when I have articulated this view in one
way or another, have expressed weariness on the notion of a pre-conceived
audience. To them, it sounds too restrictive and prone to mistakes. It is true
that to pre-establish a demographic and a social group is to oversimplify
their individuality and their many idiosyncrasies. At the same time, I usually
turn the question the other way around—is it possible to not conceive an
audience, to create an experience that is intended to be public without the
slightest bias toward a particular kind of interlocutor, be it a rice farmer in
Laos or a professor of philosophy at Columbia? The debate may boil down
to the art practice itself, and to the commonplace statement of many artists
who claim that they don’t have a viewer in mind while making their work,
in other words that they only produce to “themselves.” What is usually
not questioned, however, is how our very notion of “ourselves” has come
about. Our self is the construct of a vast collectivity of people who have
influenced our thoughts and our values, and to speak “to ourselves” is
already more than a solipsistic exercise, but rather a silent way of speaking
to the portion of civilization that is summarized in our brain. It is true that
no audience construct is absolute—they all are, in fact, fictional groupings
that we make based on biased assumptions. Nonetheless, they are what
we have to go by, and experience in a variety of fields has proven that as
inexact as they may be, they are more productive ways of working than by
blind or obstinate acting on ultimately subjective presuppositions.
The problem doesn’t lie on whether to reach for large or selective
audiences but in understanding for ourselves our own definitions of those
groups that we wish to speak to, and attempt to make conscious steps
to reach out to them in a constructive and more methodical way. In this
regard, an alternative space that attempts to find alternative audiences
30
doesn’t benefit by trying experimental methods—it could be better served
by traditional marketing. And this would not be possible unless one is clear
with oneself about articulating the audience toward whom one is speaking.

The conjunction of temporality, community and space, and its creative

combinations, are, of course, not enough. The larger question that lies
within the foundation of most alternative spaces nowadays is the why of
their making, their raison d’etre. Ultimately, what makes an organization, a
group, or even a single artist become consequential and contribute to the
greater cultural dialogue is not its structural effectiveness, but the resonance
of its artistic or philosophical message.
If the primary motivation for an experimental practice is status
seeking, the transparency of such search becomes quite evident. What makes
these spaces alive is the vibrancy of the ideas, the idealism of its founders,
and the underlying political, cultural or social cause toward they fight through
concrete actions—be it exhibitions, happenings, programs, marketing or
political campaigns. This underlying motivation is what fuels the innovation of
formats. And it, again, brings us back to the notion of temporality, or rather,
timeliness. The public program and the instant community as alternatives to
the alternative space offer the advantage that within their brief lives they can
embrace their raison d’etre more emphatically; like performance art, they are
not rooted in permanence. Spaces on the other hand, have to evolve; many
of them can’t and some of them devolve and suffer painful deaths. A public
program lives a short and happy life, affirming the integrity and individuality
of art and ideas, without the need to be multiplied or be given an artificial,
extended, afterlife.

NOTES

1. I have made mention of this phenomenon in a symposium I organized at the Museum of

Modern Art entitled Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education, May
15, 2009.
31
 2. On one occasion, at a project I was invited to create for a neighborhood museum, the
stipulation was that I had to engage ten English as a Second Language adult students as
collaborators in the making of the work, but the expectation was that the work would have
to be museum-quality.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation,
sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on topics ranging
from history, pedagogy, and sociolinguistics, in formats that are widely varied including the
lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction. His work as
an educator intersects his interests as an artist, which results in his work often reflecting on
issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality.
This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest,” a
nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska, to
Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant. He is the author
of various books, including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005;
Spanish edition; 2007, English edition), a social etiquette manual for the art world; The Boy
Inside the Letter (2008) Theatrum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures) (2008), the
play The Juvenal Players (2009) and What in the World (2010).

32
Robert Atkins

Alternatives & Aphorisms, Salon & Spectacle

Invited to contribute an essay for an anthology (tentatively?) called Playing

by the Rules: Alternative Thinking in Alternative Spaces, I smile in…
confusion. Will this be a manual for “playing by the rules”? Or, its (ironic)
opposite; that is, a guide to undermining them? I receive the following
editorial advice: “We want you to tell young aspirants what you think they
should hear. What they can use as a motivator. The kind of thing that at
that age makes you feel someone is talking to you. So, have at it without
restriction.” My belief in the need for mentoring—I am a historian, after
all—leads me unhesitatingly to accept this invitation. No matter that I
can only imagine my audience and its needs, or that advice may become
relevant only years after its distribution. So the value of my “talking to
you” today is something that in the end, dear reader, only you will be able
to determine.

Aphorisms
As prelude, I offer a few aphorisms, or aphoristic pieces of advice (which
are original save for the first and last.) In these prescriptive times, the
aphorism1 is a form that seems to me surprisingly out of date.
• That which does not kill you makes you stronger.
• It is better to play with the rules than to play by the rules.
33
 • To play by the rules is to buy into them. Buying into the rules
invariably exacts and extracts a price.
• Accommodation with the rules may ultimately prove necessary or
wise, but it is never a creative jumping off point.
• Rules are the products of culture—its punitive strictures and
betrayals of possibility.
• Laws, on the other hand, are the stuff of nature, inviolable and
absolute. To fuck your brother or sister, for instance, is to place
yourself outside of nature.
• But the inviolate is neither static nor predictable. Evolution—the
term itself embodies the notion of the incremental—is the juris
prudence of our species, predicated on natural selection.
• The revolutionary—the dream of romantics—sometimes occurs, as
with the asteroid-and-earth collision that resulted in the dinosaurs’
extinction and the emergence of our primate ancestors. But
humans—with the worrying exception of Dr. Strangelove—are
incapable of tipping the quantitative balance of things to the point
of affecting their qualitative character.
• Specific traits or instinctive behaviors are particular to species.
(I watch in surprise as my dog eats her mal-formed pup.) The
spectrum of traits particular to our species make us human, but
does not make us humane.
• Capitalism rewards the only human at the expense of the humane.
• Alternative thinking is the creation of mental space sufficient for
imagining the expansion of the realm of the humane. Art is one
form such speculation can take.
• Cut your losses.

34
History
It’s no easier to define alternative space now than at anytime during the
four-decades-long history of this phenomenon. In 1998, I wrote in Art in
America that:
For many of us baby boomers, at least, the term alternative space remains
synonymous with the network of seemingly institutionalized [nonprofit spaces
founded in the 1970s] such as San Francisco’s New Langton Arts, Houston’s
DiverseWorks, Buffalo’s Hall Walls, Atlanta’s Nexus Contemporary Art Center [and]
New York’s Kitchen … the new alternative spaces offered virtually the only venues
for the development of conceptually oriented, non-commercial forms such as
video, installations and actions… Most relied on artists to curate shows, rather than
professional curators. And, most radical of all, artists received fees for exhibiting.2

Generational change soon manifested itself with the so-called return of

painting in the mid 1980s and the emergence of hip, artist-run commercial
galleries in places such as the East Village. In retrospect, it seems that
the non-profit, National Endowment for the Arts-assisted alternative
spaces (and their Parallel Space counterparts in Canada) were simply one
alternative to the genteel gallery system of the 1950s that existed prior
to the explosive growth of the contemporary art world embodied in the
recent emergence of museums and auctions of contemporary art, academic
programs in curating, criticism and contemporary art history, and the latest
“development”—doctorates in studio art.
The original group of alternative spaces soon institutionalized itself.
The most visible sign of this was the founding of the National Association
of Artists Organizations (NAAO), the progressive Washington lobbying
or advocacy group for the artists’ organizations. During the Culture War
assault on multi-culturalism that began in the late 1980s—many of the
targets were its members—NAAO heroically resisted the gutting of artists’
First Amendment rights, while its museum-oriented counterparts tended to
capitulate to the oppressive, politically expedient cowardice of the day.
Despite its understanding and relatively effective championing of
the needs of its constituency, NAAO sometimes had difficulty identifying the
common character of its members. In addition to more-or-less conventional
35
 presenting and exhibiting organizations, it represented publications like
Atlanta’s Art Papers and conceptual/media artworks such as Jeff Gates’s
Artists For a Better Image (Art FBI), a one-man artist-advocacy outfit. I
remarked in my article that for NAAO, an artists’ organization “may be as
much a mind-set as anything else.” As time passes, this lack of boundaries
(or positively stated, this flexibility) looks increasingly like a sign of strength,
rather than weakness.
Similarly—and this is important—the apparent current hibernation
of NAAO shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as a sign of the feisty group’s
failure. (NAAO most recently surfaced to hold a conference in Los Angeles
in 2007, but its website at the domain name www.naao.net no longer
exists.) The history of the avant-garde is marked by change, transformation
and the embrace of alternatives: the demise of a group or association of a
specific (historical) character sometimes marks an organization’s exemplary
self-consciousness of its mission and relevance, rather than signaling only
failure and irrelevance. In organic terms, institutions, like corporations,
primarily exist to grow and reproduce, that is to perpetuate themselves.
Those that put themselves out of business at the appropriate moment for
appropriate reasons—like a politician or athlete who gracefully retires—are
rare and usually deserving of congratulations.

Theory
Alternative practice is a term that ought to be easier to define—or at least
identify—than alternative space. But it too is problematic: In this context
because it implies a sort of professionalism that has nothing to do with
my subject—the early modern salons in Europe and the US and the non-
mainstream or alternative activities and attitudes they nurtured. One of
their defining characteristics was a willingness to blur boundaries and
explore the hybrid and the interdisciplinary. Simultaneously partaking of
the ethos of art, politics, activism, community, and coffee klatsch, such
alternative gatherings played an essential and inadequately known role in
36
the transformation of Victorian culture into modernist life. This epochal
historical shift remains critically important to us today, too, as modernity
recedes and we grope our way toward… something else. As Jane Heap,
co-editor of the early 20th century literary magazine The Little Review,
dryly observed: “It is a great thing to be living when an age passes.”
Consider the moment just prior to World War I when an
age passed, when the American empire was still in its infancy. I’m not
thinking of the then soon-to-be-tested advances in the technology of
war, despite their convenience as a symbol and symptom of this change.
But rather of something larger: the tidal wave of modernity that swept
over (submerged?) Western culture during the first two decades of the
20th century. The notion of the tipping point, that is the moment when
quantitative change becomes qualitative, is useful here. It upends our
conventional approach to history in two useful ways: it offers us a tacit
(if temporary) acknowledgement that our awareness of the half-century
of socio-political-artistic preparation that preceded and enabled this
transformation is, in some contexts, insufficient or irrelevant; and it reminds
us that our belief in the existence of perceptible chains of causation is a
culturally determined, albeit central tenet of Western thought. (In fact, the
notion of the zeitgeist points in contradictory, opposite directions.)
The early 20th century embrace of modern art and life was
especially swift and thoroughgoing in the U.S. American provincialism was
so hidebound it required that modernist art be imported from Europe for
the epochal Armory Show in New York in 1913. (No matter, too, that those
importing it tended to be non-Americans or Americans with expatriate
experience in Europe.) Today much of the art exhibited at the Armory Show
seems nearly as close to its Victorian-era roots, as to the cubism and other
avant-garde styles we associate with the pre-war 20th century.
If the Armory Show signified the arrival of modernist art in the U.S.,
it seems astonishing that the modern novel par excellence, James Joyce’s
Ulysses, debuted just five years later. And no less remarkable that it was
37
 first published in an American publication, The Little Review, where co-
editors Heap and Margaret Anderson serialized it as Joyce wrote it. (For this
achievement, the magazine was tried and convicted of obscenity in 1920.)
Another American little magazine, POETRY, introduced virtually the
entire canon of modernist poetry—including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein—to
a small and global readership. A sort of alternative space, the little magazine
was (and remains) first and foremost a laboratory for experimentation,
a site of research and development. But the little magazine wasn’t only
an edgy alternative to the commercially published periodical, it was also
a place where careers were massaged; where new talents’ rough edges
were smoothed to fit within established, professional parameters of both
sensibility and personality. Ditto for the relationship between the alternative
space and the museum, and the off-off-Broadway production and its big-
bucks, Broadway counterpart. Each art form (or discipline) is an “eco-
system,” which operates pretty much like all of the other arts ecologies in
its attempt to maintain equilibrium and ensure product.
The avant-garde origination “myth” or narrative—all-too-familiar
after a century of development and refinement—is encapsulated in la vie
Boheme. Wherein, the protagonist is educated, hard working, rejected
from the, say… Whitney Biennial, a participant in some salon(s) des refuse,
all the while savagely epater-ing the bourgeoisie, and—ultimately—rising
to the top as one of the lucky few lionized for biting the hand that’s been
feeding it. Caricature aside, this view invests the DIY origins of any avant-
garde activity with authority as the low-investment, high-passion (and
backbreaking) demonstration of the appeal of some new and original
endeavor. Before the tidal wave of modernism engulfed Western culture,
before the existence of (oxymoronic) modern institutions such as MoMA,
and the more recent emergence of schools, auctions and art history courses
devoted to contemporary art, there were few proponents of modernism’s
utopian vision. Many (a majority?) of them were regular guests at the salons
38
staged in a few large urban centers in Europe and the U.S. For the purposes
of this essay, at least, think of these gatherings as the alternative spaces (no
caps necessary) of their day.

Salon & spectacle

The early 20th century critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote that “Complex works
of art speak not through individuals but ensembles.” Nowhere was this
group dynamic more evident than in the salons of Florence, London, Paris,
Chicago and (primarily) New York. Veritable crucibles of modernism, the
salons were usually hosted by women, many of them Americans—including
Mabel Dodge (whose successive salons were held in Florence, New York,
and Taos), Gertrude and Leo Stein (Paris), and, in New York, the Stettheimer
sisters and Louise and Walter Arensberg. At these gatherings, new and
revolutionary (to employ two then-contemporary buzzwords) abstract art,
atonal music, and imagist poetry, as well as psychoanalysis, feminism, and
anarchism, were debated and later disseminated by a stellar rosters of
talented and/or well-connected guests.
The salons of the second decade of the 20th century—slightly
earlier in the cases of Dodge in Florence and Stein’s Parisian gatherings3—
could hardly have differed more completely from the highly stylized social
life of the turn-of-the-century elite. (Consult Henry James for an only slightly
exaggerated description of tradition’s stranglehold on New York’s upper crust
at the end of the 19th century.) By contrast, almost anybody was admitted
to the new salons, although not everybody was invited back. Of disparate
vocation, economic class, and social standing, the salon’s diverse guests were
unlikely to have mixed at all during the 19th century. If this value placed
on inclusion was radically new, some of the character of these “evenings”
and “at homes”—including these terms—derived from 19th century social
custom: Close friends received an open invitation for dinner, while the majority
of guests came afterwards for discussion, or, at Mabel Dodge’s salons, for
general conversation. (Dodge re-instated this 19th century social format,
39
 which included a presentation or lecture followed by a lengthy discussion
period, partly to differentiate her Greenwich Village evenings from other
salons.)
Virtually the entire pantheon of early 20th century, avant-garde
artists regularly attended one or more of the salons—the artists Picasso,
Matisse, Duchamp, Man Ray, and Florine Stettheimer; the poets Wallace
Stevens, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams; playwright Susan Glaspell;
actress Eleonora Duse and writer/Provincetown Players founder George
Cram Cook; composer Edgar Varese, theater designer Edward Gordon
Craig, and dancer Isadora Duncan; the writers Andre Gide, John Reed, and
Arthur Cravan; along with literally hundreds of notable salon regulars in
Europe and the U.S. (Political visionaries were sometimes in attendance, too,
especially in New York, where salonistas included labor leader Bill Haywood
of the International Workers of the World (IWW) and leftist-feminist Emma
Goldman.) Given the small number of creators and consumers of early-
modern art and thought, it should come as no surprise that the relatively
small circle of its makers and boosters found the same, few environs
congenial. Guest lists at the New York salons overlapped and some guests—
such as the writer and promoter of modernism, Carl Van Vechten—were
welcome at all of them.
As the epicenter of modernism, the salon was the premier place
for networking between producers, purchasers and promoters of avant-
garde art. The art critic Henry McBride and the journalist Van Vechten
enthusiastically spread the word about what they saw and experienced.
Collectors Albert Barnes, Katherine Dreier, and sisters Claribel and Etta
Cone, as well as the Steins and the Arensbergs, acquired iconic paintings
from artist-salons habitués, which became the nuclei of the collections they
later donated to American museums such as the Barnes Collection, and
the Baltimore and Philadelphia art museums. Breathtakingly beautiful (and
now incalculably valuable), the collecting of these artworks has sometimes
overshadowed the salons’ contribution to the cultural life of the day.
40
 The most important was the sometimes-heated exchange of ideas
about topics that were likely to be frowned upon around more “proper”
dinner tables. These included—in both the general category (and the
specific): Politics (from anarchism to unemployment); international affairs
(from the exploits of Pancho Villa to Soviet collectivization); and gender or
sexual relations (from suffragism to birth control). Like Margaret Sanger’s
presentation about birth control, many of these talks were simultaneously
informal and consequential. In 1914, for instance, Dr. A.A. Brill, founder
of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, made the first presentation about
psychoanalysis to “lay” New Yorkers at Mabel Dodge’s salon. This was one
of many “firsts” Dodge could count and a reminder of the considerable
energy and attention that running the successful salon entailed.
I should point out that my focus on Dodge and her gatherings
seems to come at the unintended expense of the Arensberg and Stettheimer
salons. I am attracted to Dodge, especially, because she organized the most
wide-ranging of the New York salons, enlarging her guest list beyond the
arts to include articulate representatives of politics and psychiatry as well.
She also lived a wealthy, Bohemian existence that itself was riveting, larger
than life. The downtown-centered fusion of alternative lifestyle and avant-
garde art not only made her a paradigm of the sexually liberated “new
woman,” but prepared her for the next chapter of her life as Mabel Dodge
Luhan of Taos—collector, hostess, and wife of the handsome American
Indian, Tony Luhan.
Such private “collaborations” frequently ignited at the salons,
as did public programs, projects and pranks. Perhaps the best known of
them initiated in New York was the production and attempted exhibition of
Duchamp’s Fountain—a “readymade,” or unaltered manufactured object,
in this case a urinal—created for the 1917 exhibition of the Society of
Independent Artists. Pseudonymously submitted under the name R. Mutt,
it was simultaneously both a spoof and a serious test of the exhibition
policy of “no jury, no prizes.” Jury or no jury, Fountain was rejected from
41
 the show, joining a notorious list of censored modern artworks headed by
Gustave Courbet and his works’ rejection by Paris salon juries, circa 1848.
One undertaking that falls into the ought-to-be-better-known
category of collaborations unthinkable without the overlapping social and
professional circles of the salon was the Paterson Strike Pageant. Staged
at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1913, it was a bouillabaisse
of performance and media art, politics and labor advocacy, mourning and
anger.
As its title suggests, the pageant was a dramatization of actual
events : Early in 1913, the 25,000 silk workers of Paterson, New Jersey,
4

struck the city’s 300 mills, demanding increased wages and an eight-hour
work day. Following its success in organizing the wool workers of Lawrence,
Massachusetts, the previous year, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
sent its most experienced organizers to Paterson. Paterson was seen both as
a test of IWW leftism and a portent of potentially unchecked, anti-capitalist
ferment. By May, the strikers and factory owners were deadlocked in a costly
war of nerves. The IWW was determined to repeat its victory in Lawrence,
while the intransigent factory owners believed their most valuable asset was
the collusion of New York’s newspaper publishers to blackout any news of
the strike.
And there was plenty of it. As Bill Haywood told Mabel Dodge and
the leftist writers Hutchins Hapgood and John Reed in early May, Paterson
police had arrested strike leaders, trampled constitutional guarantees of
free speech and murdered a worker named Valentino Modestino. Haywood
excitedly described Modestino’s funeral, for which each of the silk mill
workers dropped a red flower on his coffin. “God! I wish I could show [the
public] a picture of the funeral of Modestino,” the exhausted labor leader
said. Dodge, infatuated with John Reed and recognizing an opportunity to
get closer to the charismatic writer, suggested “moving” the funeral from
Paterson across the Hudson River to New York. There they could re-enact
the funeral and the events that led up to it for the workers, and, of course,
42
for the press. Reed—a former Harvard cheerleader and future author of the
brilliant firsthand account of the Bolshevik Revolution Ten Days that Shook
the World—exclaimed, “I’ll do it!”
Others of Dodge’s circle were enlisted. On June 7, just three
weeks after Reed first met several hundred striker-performers on May 19 in
Paterson, the pageant was performed in Madison Square Garden. Virtually
every account—especially those of the many New York newspaper theater
critics who covered it (!)—deemed the Futurist-inflected pageant an
artistic success: From the funeral procession of 1,000 factory workers to
Haywood’s fiery demands for workers’ rights at the end of the production-
cum-demonstration, the audience noisily refused to remain seated, as the
spectacle played out against John Sloans’s glowing, 200 foot long, painted
backdrop of a menacing-looking factory.
Artistic and political success cannot of course be equated. The
record here is ambiguous, although it can be said with certainty that
the workers never gained additional benefits, the IWW’s standing and
Paterson’s economic well-being were disastrously diminished, and
any ongoing alliance between political and artistic revolution did not
emerge from the Pageant. While the strike’s outcome is attributable to
the unwieldiness of the coalition of labor interests and organizations
“managing” the strike, which long pre-dated the last-minute involvement
of Reed, Dodge & Co., the Greenwich Villagers have sometimes been
scapegoated for the poorly-handled, debt-ridden finances of the Pageant.
(The debt was a simple consequence of too many strikers without tickets
being let into Madison Square Garden.) On a positive note, the Pageant
garnered extensive press coverage, both for itself and the strikers, whose
actions and agitation were no longer blacked out.
Apart from these immediate outcomes, the historic legacies of the
Pageant—artistic or political—seems virtually non-existent, although its
media orientation seems to make it the spiritual ancestor—rather than an
actual influence—of the impressive accomplishment of AIDS-art-activists in
43
 the late 1980s and 1990s.5 Nor can this near-invisibility be ascribed simply
to the press’ anti-labor orientation and the trivialization of the arts endemic
to American culture. (Not to mention the slanderous, discrediting attacks
on the Dodge crowd by the tabloid press.) There was genuine confusion
about the taxonomy of the Pageant, as there often is with the new.
Uncategorizability and the blurring—or evading—of boundaries can render
a subject invisible, particularly if those boundaries are especially sensitive as
with those separating private from public, domestic site from political venue.
Might this also explain the parallel treatment—that is the lack of
attention—accorded both the Pageant and the salon hostesses (save for
those, like Gertrude Stein, with separate and successful “public” careers
as artist or writer)? Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess or identify the
(sometimes unconscious) condescension toward the realm of the domestic
and products made by “loving hands at home,” or to determine the causes
of a lack of attention that seems to result in unwarranted obscurity. Suffice
it to say that despite the impact of those who attended them and the
programs, collections, and associations that directly resulted from them, the
New York salons seem only to have created a small ripple across the surface
of collective consciousness or cultural memory, the Paterson Strike Pageant
an even smaller one.
If the Greenwich Villagers’ foray into the coupling of art and politics
points to at least the possibility of their successful union, two aphorisms by
leading avant-gardists of the day may be more telling. (Neither is a direct
response to the Paterson Strike Pageant, although they are contemporaneous
with it.) “Revolution is Art,” stated Margaret Anderson, co-editor of
The Little Review. Her economical dictum gains considerable resonance
considered alongside its fatuous, oft-stated inverse—“Art is Revolution.”
Or, in contrast to Picasso’s buffoonish description of painting as “an
instrument of war.” A longer, equally astute observation by Provincetown
Players’ founder George Cram Cook that “Work done in the spirit of play
has the only true seriousness,” similarly points in the direction of the avant-
44
garde’s radical approach to process. A startling expression of optimism,
it contrasts vividly with the tradition of dour American Puritanism. It also
provides a (partial) explanation for John Reed’s unlikely success producing
the Pageant and expertly midwifing the collaboration between the factory
workers and Dodge’s coterie of artists and intellectuals.
The virtuoso execution and ambitious agenda of the Paterson Strike
Pageant described in rapturous journal entries, letters, and in the extant
photo-documentation hint at the apparent power of the production. The
moral conviction and clear-eyed perception especially visible in the photos,
recall similar impulses evident in drawings for the design of spectacles in
Renaissance Florence. This historical analogy is hardly accidental, of course.
I intend it to raise the issue of the use (or abuse) of history. That is, to restate
the age-old question: “What is history’s value?”
Although the question warrants a book-length reply, consider
instead, and in conclusion, two more aphorisms: the dictum that ignorance
of history leads to its repetition; and its reverse: that knowledge of history
offers genuinely uplifting role models, as with the lives of saints. Both are
undoubtedly true, history does instruct and inspire. It also operates in a more
profound way, as a touchstone of humanity, and a signifier of membership
in the sole speaking- and writing species. The ability to write also plays a
central role in human development enabling the very existence of history as
we know it, that is from (or as) the historical record, inconceivable without
papyrus and stylus. This ability to write and record—admittedly I’m ignoring
the sophisticated cultures that relied on the oral transmission of history—is
what mainly differentiates humankind’s pre-historic phase from its (recent)
historic period.
In the six-or-seven-thousands-years’ long written record of human
endeavor, the temporal, characterized by the passage of time, is always
associated with change, rather than stasis. And like the proverbial Borgesian
archive or database, this comprehensive narrative encompasses all human
thought and activity, both conventional and alternative. Ironically, it is the
45
 alternatives that matter more than expressions of the mainstream. They
are, after all, the impetus for change, or history’s engine. So if, as the cliché
goes, it is only change that is constant, then it’s comforting to consider that
in a world as appallingly inhumane as ours, history favors the future, and
the alternative.

NOTES

1. An aphorism is a precept, or a concise statement of principle. Benjamin Franklin and

Friedrich Nietzsche are among the most notable aphorists in history.
2. Art in America (November 1998): 57-61.
3. Credit for Stein’s prescient interest in modernist art and the salon that sprang from it,
belongs mostly to her older brother Michael, with whom she initially co-hosted the salon and
from whom she became estranged in 1912. For a fascinating account of the salons see Steven
Watson’s Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press,
1991).
4. I am entirely indebted to Strange Bedfellows for this account of the Paterson Strike Pageant.
Ibid., 138-49.
5. In 1999, I opened the article “Off the Wall: AIDS and Public Art” (in the online journal,
Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/centerpieces/centerpieces_
index.html) derived from an earlier essay on the Queer Arts Resources website) with this
paragraph evoking the power and impact of media-oriented, public AIDS art:
Many of the most compelling artworks of the late-1980s and early-90s engage the
specter of AIDS—in sorrow, rage, and remembrance. Although most critics and curators
are well aware of the importance of AIDS-themed works by artists like painter Ross
Bleckner or photographer Duane Michals, few have a clue that artists and art-activists
created an alternative body of street- and public artworks about AIDS that was far more
influential. Remarkably, the iconic images or symbols of this plague are not made-for-
TV movies, photojournalistic pictures, or schmaltzy pop songs, but the “NAMES Project
Quilt,” a community artwork, and two artist-conceived emblems, “Silence=Death” and
the “Red Ribbon.” Their effectiveness is testimony both to the power of art and the
limits of popular culture.

Robert Atkins is an art historian, critic, and curator, who has written for more than 100
publications throughout the world. A former, longtime columnist for the Village Voice, he is
the co-editor of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (New Press, 2006)
and the author of ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords
(Abbeville Press, 1997, 2nd edition) and its modern-art companion ArtSpoke (1993). He is
currently at work on an anthology of his writing and heads the planning group for ArtSpeak
China, the first bilingual, collaboratively-authored, online resource about contemporary
Chinese art. More info at: www.robertatkins.net.

46
Biljana Ciric

Searching for Tomorrow’s Alternative China,

Vietnam and Cambodia

The rationale for selecting these three countries is as follows: all three
countries have very close political ties over the course of many decades,
and still through to today. However, these political and economic ties
have not produced an increase in cultural exchange between them. In
fact, in order to fuel this exchange, in 2008 I curated, in Shanghai,
one of the first exhibitions introducing Vietnamese and Cambodian
contemporary art practices. Vietnam and Cambodia are related to one
another in that they have very similar attitudes towards contemporary
art. This is reflected in the fact that their museum venues still do not
officially show contemporary art, while artist communities are trying
to develop very different working strategies, much of which remains
underground. This underground scene sometimes ventures above
ground, but in doing so often breaks certain unwritten rules, and is
usually suppressed. These political games generally force artists to invent
different approaches to the production of exhibitions, and are often
of an informal nature. Thus, the actual environment is an alternative
nature already, and produces different reflections on the significance of
being alternative in this region of the world.
Beyond this, the geopolitical relations between these three
countries and the confluence of their recent social reforms (each
country in it’s own stage of development) present the possibility of
further contextualization. This entails the ways in which this context
47
 could be seen both within the region as well as on a global level,
and positions these countries in a way that is opposed to ideas of
them being passive receivers of the already existing Western model
of modernity. This could be understood as another alternative that
introduces the importance of building local infrastructure and models
more suitable to local traditions, and which will only continue to
develop local knowledge and critical theories that are comparable to
like achievements in the West.
Therefore, the concept of alterity in these respects involves
the actual living conditions and cultural history and present
environment in which the art is being produced, and these are
significant divergences from the Western system and analysis of
artistic production. These conditions introduce new potentialities
that I will further discuss in this text.

Alternative Voices: Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian Case

Studies
It is very difficult today to find a companion in the Chinese art world
to discuss issues relating to alternative and nonprofit spaces. And it
is clearly evident that market forces largely drive art production in
China today. There are a handful of venues that can be defined as
alternative, while many other venues claim to be “alternative,” but
actually function as galleries, with simply a lower volume of sales
than ones that are openly working in the commercial sphere. Recently
there have been many new initiatives, from the development of
guerrilla-like, fringe art infrastructures, alongside a plethora of self-
identified museum spaces (which are actually just white cube spaces
without much programming), and an increase in flow of galleries
and auction sales, but all of which still cater to the needs of Western
collectors that continue to search for Chinese phenomena of cynical
realism, political pop, and gaudy art.
48
 Under this system, the commercial, economic side of the art
world is over-emphasized. In the last few years local wealthy players have
joined in the game, again stamping the contemporary art scene as a lucrative
investment opportunity or leisure commodity. But where is the concept of
national identity, of the country in the story of contemporary art in China?
Without many funding opportunities, without grants for artists and projects,
and annual budgets given over to state run art museums that, due to
their small budgets, are forced to rent their venues for exhibitions in order
to sustain. This situation is compounded by the fact that local critics and
curators, who once provided a critical voice, have become mere promoters of
commercial activities, curating commercial gallery exhibitions, and writing for
gallery catalogues and other review formats. This is a very obvious outcome
of the current situation, in which there is little support for an intellectual
discourse, and does not allow for the people of the pen to survive solely
through their writing (art magazines usually pay 100 RMB for 1,000 words,
which is around $12). So in this time when artists are selling their works for
millions of dollars, critics and curators began opening galleries and working
with the commercial sector in order to survive, thereby loosing their own
critical voice. As we say: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
While many still continue to talk about the art market, museums
continue to open and close, and the few museums that persist in what they
are doing are still not placed on the global map in equal relation with other
comparable institutions in other countries. The gap between museums
and commercial galleries is usually connected by the alternative/nonprofit
spaces in the art environment, and are in many cases the most important
catalysts within the scene, particularly in this part of the developing world.
And the artists, one might ask? Artists are left on their own
without any social benefit or incentives to re-invent their microcosms,
and to develop strategies that will keep the work relevant. This very brief
explanation, describing mainly the development of Chinese contemporary
art over the last two decades or so, also relates to the countries of Vietnam
49
 and Cambodia because of the similarity of these country’s developments
and art policies in particular, especially with the field of the visual arts.
Continuing onward, I will now point out a number of individual examples
that will help flesh out these ideas even further.

The Beginnings of an Alternative Strategy: China, and the need for

new start
The early 1980s avant-garde movement in China began as a kind intuition
on the part of the artists, in recognition of their need to express themselves
in different ways after the passing of the Cultural Revolution. Many of the
artists organized guerrilla exhibitions and events during the 1980s. This
kind of working methodology came to a halt after the 1989 Tiananmen
Square incident, after which artists again withdrew to their studios. The
early 1990s began with the growing interest in Chinese artists abroad, and
the building importance of cultural attachés of the various consulates that
has continued to the present day. Each country during the past twenty years
has developed different cultural exchange programs with China that are
largely governed by the ideological, political and economic strategies of the
given country with regard to the region at large. A recent example of this
is the ProHelvetia program that will come to an end in 2010. Other similar
strategies can still be found in places like Hanoi, where the Goethe Institute
and other consulates function as venues for artistic activities.
These kinds of programs, along with the presence of Chinese
artists abroad, contributed to the celebration of the flag of multiculturalism,
in which exhibitions of Chinese art were often viewed as “other,” a cliché
that is still discussed around the world today. This discourse was cemented
by the controversial exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989), which
paired contemporary art practices with traditional, spiritually based cultural
production of indigenous cultures.
Slowly becoming aware of the importance of it’s contemporary art
production, China made a decisive move in 2000 with that year’s edition
50
of the Shanghai Biennial, allowing contemporary works of art and different
media to become part of the exhibition. This initiative, and many other
strategic moves, lead to the building of the Chinese Pavilion in Venice, a
venue that showcased the official recognition of the contemporary art sector
as an important tool for the presentation of Chinese politics and culture to
the outside world, but without changing it’s own internal infrastructure
within the country.
Chinese artists believe that they had won a great victory by being
recognized on their own turf in 2000, but at the same time they also lost
their under-the-radar positioning that had been so important in shaping their
attitude. Simultaneously, it put them in the rather embarrassing position of
being institutionalized, and more or less consumed by others without as
much control over their situation.
This general climate also influenced a handful of alternative spaces
that heeded the call for the urgency of repositioning their role in the art
system. At the same time this offered a much broader reflection on what
kind of art infrastructure is possible today in order to create a more healthy
local art environment, with a long-term, sustainable strategy.
One of the earliest nonprofit organizations in China is the BizArt
center, which was in many ways a pioneer in its defining and positioning of
what it means to be a nonprofit in China, as well as defining the meaning
of an alternative role. Established in 1998 in Shanghai, over the years
BizArt has presented some of the most experimental artists of the time
and curated some of the most influential exhibitions of the last ten years.
Always operating with a very low budget—usually from foreign funding
sources—the organization has continued to avoid many of the commercial
aspects of art production. Some of the young artists shown there have
gained recognition in the art world through their BizArt exhibitions. But
after 2000 it seemed as though the significant role that BizArt had played
as an experimental venue began to wane in importance. One of the
main reasons for this is that many other museums and galleries began to
51
 venture into the nonprofit sector, and BizArt needed to reposition itself
as something different from these other organizations. The question
remains: What will the new role of venues like BizArt be like, and what
kind of projects should they support and develop? This question as of yet
remains unanswered as the group of artists that run BizArt slowly shift
their working methods.
One of the first results of this shift was the website Art-Ba-Ba
that serves as a platform for the discussion of art-related information and
events, which came about as a reaction to the perceived loss of a critical
discourse for the arts and media. The Art-Ba-Ba Web platform is a blog
format that attempts to spread awareness and space for free speech that
is not common in China generally. Another project is called HIPIC, which
was developed as an endless flow of images that anybody can contribute
to by uploading images to their website. Each image will be shown at
some point within the enormous slideshow for 30 seconds, and the project
has been screened in major cities across the globe, including Shanghai. In
one aspect the project has failed to realize its true potential for exhibition
in public spaces since so far its display has mostly been in the art districts
of Beijing and Shanghai, or in art fairs. The HIPIC project aspires to reach
a larger audience than merely the art world, particularly in light of it’s
participatory nature and open format, deconstructing the relationship
between artists and their artworks (all images are anonymous during their
display).
Later on followed the commercial project known as the Shopping
Gallery. This organization is a group of artists who work together and
are mainly self-funded, or else they gain support from other galleries
that represent them. This kind of working method asks for another
level of organization in terms of its funding structures and audience
outreach, as well as its temporary control of non-art-related spaces in
society. This set of circumstances forces these types of operations to
not only communicate within art circles, but also with a more general
52
audience, and even governmental bodies, which is often a much more
difficult task than having an exhibition in an art space that is a relatively
safe venture.
Another issue that I would like to put forward is the loss of the
exhibition’s voice, or the clear idea of what kind of exhibition program is
appropriate for an environment like that in China at this very moment.
This is an important consideration in determining the necessary steps that
will move us towards the role of the alternative space in society today.
Another important example of a possible approach is The Arrow Factory,
a store front space (roughly 10 square meters in size) placed within a
Beijing hutong, which serves as a bridge between the local community and
artistic production, a venture that explores the relationship between art
and everyday life. This is a topic that is not often mentioned with regard to
Chinese contemporary art practices, beyond certain political perceptions.
There are also a number of recent artistic strategies that are reflective of
the current situation in Chinese art. Artist Tang Dixin established the Street
Gallery, which is nothing more than a small wooden suitcase full of artists’
works of a price of no more than 100 RMB (around US $12). Tang moves
his street gallery around town, selling art alongside fake DVD vendors, or
socks, where one can find the works of very young artists alongside more
well-known artists for the same price.
These examples can be understood as baby steps towards the
creation of a space for contemporary art in public discourses within the
country, and towards realizing opportunities for the visual arts to be a
vehicle of social transformation. This may still be far off in the future, but
the present moment is of a crucial point of departure in this process of
repositioning the local art infrastructure without which China will never
have a common ground with the rest of the world. These largely grassroots
initiatives are important attempts that refer to what type of model of
infrastructure should be implemented in this cultural context in order for it
to have an affective contribution.
53
 One of the things that is most lacking is any kind of long-term
strategy in the arts. Here, I will provide an example of one: Last year I worked
on a project called Intrude: Art & Life 366, a public art project initiated by
Zendai MoMA, with the aim of intruding art into everyday life in the public
spaces of Shanghai. The project presented one project per day for the
entire year, culminating in 366 different projects. Speaking candidly, it was
a nightmare for us to find venues that would show our projects and work
with us. At the end of the year the project ended, but actually it felt more
like the beginning stage since we just then started to deepen the dialogues
and established deeper lines of communication with different social groups
and ways of collaborating. I suggested that the Museum should maintain
a small office in order to keep working on public art projects in China, and
which would continue to share and reflect on the experiences of the prior
year, to foster further involvement in the public spheres that were yet to
be fully realized. Unfortunately, my proposal was never taken into proper
consideration, because the whole point of the project in the end was the
spectacle of the 366 days of events.
The above aforementioned projects require the re-establishment
of the role of the visual arts in China today, not only as commercial, profit-
related organizations that are centers of investment, but also contributors
to the larger culture of the country, wherein the arts are able to work
as effective vehicles for the introduction of social change. That is what
alternative spaces need to realize as their true potential, I believe, as one of
the major activators of these processes of change. Only alternative spaces
are in a position to achieve these goals, if they are able to avoid converting
artistic experience into a mass spectacle and consumer item.
With most of the foreign funding being diverted away from China
in recent years, the building of a local art scene and basic infrastructure are
some of the most urgent calls to action. This will help China to develop
its own ground, and this foundation needs to be built sooner than later.
Mainly operated by private capital, private museums, and private galleries,
54
the economic base for artistic production is very unstable at this time. It
is absolutely crucial to develop a non-bureaucratic facet that supports a
wide range of artists, while also fulfilling governmental requirements. The
fact that many artists’ initiatives are rarely able to maintain their work is a
blaring call for concern.

Vietnam
The Vietnamese art scene is in many ways reminiscent of the development
of a contemporary art scene in China, especially as its first steps to this point
have been largely supported by foreign embassies and foreign interests
without much local infrastructure.
One of the first and most ambitious projects in this regard was
Saigon Open City in 2006; the first biennial event in the country, and the
brainchild of artist Dinh Q. Lei, was never fully realized because they were
unable to secure official permission for the exhibition. Saigon Open City,
despite its failure to successfully communicate with local governmental
bodies, was the first big step in organizing a truly international event in
Vietnam. Dinh Q. Lei initiated the biennial format, making an important
move towards the opening of the first alternative space, known as San Art
Center, supported by the Vietnam Art Foundation (which is registered in
Los Angeles). The return of many Vietnamese-American artists, especially
to Saigon, introduced different working methods to the local scene
that are interesting to explore. The Mogas Station Collective, as part of
their involvement in the Singapore Biennial in 2006, published the Aart
magazine in reaction to the lack of writing and information with regard to
what was happening in the region. This catalogue of information, artists’
projects, and writings, which were not available in art colleges or various
programs of study, provided information that was critical for the local,
regional, and larger communities. Artist and curator Rich Streitmatter-Tran
(also a member of Mogas Station) built up a small library in his home where
he shares books with young students and artists. The Wonderful District
55
 Collective is another group that organizes events in studio apartments,
under the title of Atelier Wonderful. Places like A Little Blah Blah and
Nhasan in Hanoi are also small, multifunctional venues that coordinate
artists’ projects, lectures, have an archive, and provide a space for artists’
gatherings.
The above aforementioned events that have taken place in the last
few years are interesting examples of the different steps taken within the
Vietnamese art community that actually contributes to the differentiation
of the process in Vietnam when compared to that of China or elsewhere.
The Vietnamese art scene, despite the fact that the art market is still
largely dependent on foreign collectors and galleries, expresses parallel
developments in the creation of local infrastructure that is very daring
in it’s approach. Saigon Open City is one good example of a community
initiated event, and made a strong statement with regard to the urgency
for change at a much higher level in the country. The show thus has already
introduced a change that will one day force the Vietnamese government to
start cooperating. From the text “Many Rivers to Cross, Ho Chi Minh and
Phnom Penh,” R. Streitmatter-Tran writes:

Vietnam on the other hand has enjoyed a relatively outstanding economy as it

moves from socialist economic policies to global markets, yet suffers strict control
of culture, speech and expression by the Communist authorities. Thus Vietnam
maintains a partially developed arts infrastructure with very few spaces and
organizations and little if any national support for the development of contemporary
arts in international integration. Cambodia might be seen as the inverse of
Vietnam, with a multi party elected government who rarely if ever interfere with
cultural production and yet plagued by economy that reaped the benefits of WTO
membership and is largely dependant on NGO’s and foreign capital….

Cambodia
During the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, from 1975-1979, around
ninety percent of the artists in the country were killed or fled. Today, the
local culture is being built upon the shoulders of the very young Khmer
who were born after this dark and violent period, or upon the return of
survivors who, with their families, managed to escape abroad. The Phnom
56
Penh art community gathers around spaces like the Reyum Art Academy,
Metahouse, Bophana, and the recently opened Sa Sa Art Gallery (an
artists’ initiated gallery space).
The Reyum Art Academy in Phnom Penh, aside from showing
young artists, runs a free Art Academy that provides the chance for kids
to get an art education instead of ending up on the streets. Supported
by a minor foundation abroad, Reyum, through its publication of texts
dedicated to the preservation of Khmer culture prior to the Khmer Rouge
era, continues to hold lectures on this topic on a regular basis. This kind
of initiative and many other works undertaken by the academy have
developed the necessary ground for future Khmer generations to continue
to develop.
The Bophana Audio Visual Resource Center in Phom Penh,
established by the Khmer acclaimed film director Rithy Panh, in collaboration
with the local government, attempts to preserve and make accessible to a
broader audience the history of Khmer culture. The name of the organization
stems from one of his early films: Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, which
depicts a young woman who is tortured and killed in the infamous S21
prison during Khmer Rouge campaign.
In the last few years, the so-called Mekong Region has become
of increasing interest as a region to invest in and has attracted much
interest from abroad. This shift also involves the field of culture wherein,
for example, the prominent Rockefeller family has initiated a Mekong
Art and Culture project that ran from 2006 to 2008, connecting Laos,
Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia through a series of workshops, seminars
and exhibitions focused on art production and education, working with
different institutions in each country (primarily the Fine Arts Universities).
This kind of project fosters the development of contemporary art and
provides an atmosphere wherein intellectual exchange is possible, and
where local knowledge can be produced and spread. This also provides
the conditions to search for a new model that will fit the particularities of
57
 the local context, and provides the opportunity to reposition countries like
this on the global map.

In countries without local infrastructures, there is a very urgent call for

such processes of repositioning. Today the edge between nonprofit and
for-profit spaces is very blurred, and largely concerns the channeling of
funds. Take for example the Frieze Art Fair in London, which curator and
theorist Maria Lind presents in a book on European Cultural Policies in
2015 as part of one branding house: Frieze Art Fair, Frieze Foundation,
and frieze Magazine, a situation that no one questions, since the outcome
of all three has been extremely successful in recent years.
The major issues for the cultural milieu of every country in
today’s global map are recognizing its own position and defining its
appropriate models of production and display within their particular
region. The seemingly similar paths of the three countries presented here
with regard to the development of contemporary arts actually have a
number of important points of difference which conveys the need for
different processes of development. In the last ten years there has been
a steady flow of Vietnamese-Americans back to Vietnam; they have
been instrumental in the building of a grassroots contemporary art field,
and their initiatives are local while also maintaining connections with
international communities. This is a very important point to make in
terms of re-defining the hierarchy of who is the initiator and who is the
selectee.
The lack of dialogue between China and the other countries of
Southeast Asia, or the region in general, is one of the most crucial points.
Not only because of the great opportunity for the exchange of projects, but
also the possibility for dialogue. To get involved in such processes could also
be a good point of departure for the construction of self-critical contexts.
Many of the countries in the region share similar issues that could be viewed
at the larger regional level, and it would be fruitful to consider how each
58
country is positioned within the region. This dialogue has yet to be initiated,
at least in the field of culture.
It is probably very difficult for someone who has been working in
a system that has a highly developed infrastructure to grasp the working
methods in locations where there aren’t any predetermined working
methods, yet, where things are still being accomplished. Artists, not art
institutions, nor galleries, nor museums, are the ones who have raised
these important issues through their work and activities. But the time has
come when activities such as these or implied strategies are not enough.
Different social realities provide different contexts, and it is time to view
these contexts in relation to one’s own knowledge and how one presents
his or her own culture. It is through the writing of history and challenging
the possible models of production that we will no longer take for granted
the systems of developed countries, and further explore how, with one’s
own critical contexts, each of us can establish dialogue with ourselves, our
neighbors, or someone who we cross paths with momentarily. It is about
re-defining what it means to be alternative; how alterity operates in local
contexts; and what kind of dialogue we need to re-construct with the rest
of the world. Challenging others first requires one to challenge oneself. This
should be the starting point for the alternative.

Biljana Ciric works as an independent curator in Shanghai. She was the director of the
Curatorial Department at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and was the China
networking curator for the 2006 Singapore Biennale. Her ambitious ongoing project Migration
Addicts was presented in Collateral Events at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and in the
Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. Her recent projects are
the exhibition Strategies from Within, at the Ke Center of Contemporary Arts, of contemporary
art practices in Vietnam and Cambodia; a major retrospective of Yoko Ono in China that
toured during 2008/09 to Ke Center for Contemporary Art and Guang Dong Art Museum;
the exhibition of contemporary Shanghai culture, History in making: Shanghai 1979-2009,
30 years retrospective (2009). In 2009 she established Mommy Foundation, which supports
young artists and their projects.

59
 René Block

TANAS – the alternative “alternative space”

One of the special attributes of what are known as “alternative spaces” is

that they can and should be open and flexible in the planning and design
of their programs. No cumbersome administrative apparatus interferes
with the freedom of planning. And no visitor expects the artworks to be
shown in a perfect museum-style presentation. The salient criterion of
well-known “alternative spaces” is an ability to act experimentally and
spontaneously, something I remember about them from New York in the
1970s when the Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, Printed Matter, and the
Institute for Art and Urban Resources opened downtown in the SoHo area
and complemented the programs of neighboring avant-garde galleries, not
to mention those of the uptown museums. P.S.1, founded in 1975, could
be considered an apex of this New York alternative scene, which received
ample and international attention from the start. The galleries were by
nature commercially oriented, that is, they represented only particular
artists and showed their works regularly, and the museums’ programs were
determined by the intrinsic demands of mounting exhibitions involving
years of advance preparation.
Well, the great social upheavals of the 1960s had also redefined the
artist’s role in society. The feminist revolution forced male creative artists,
too, to reconsider their societal role and act on it accordingly. Creative
spaces founded by artists’ collectives were a politically correct alternative
within the cultural system and consequently were often supported by public
60
funding. But even in the spaces founded and directed by curators, artists
also had a voice since they were heavily represented on advisory boards and
so could influence and keep tabs on the programming.
From today’s perspective, it is interesting to observe that many of
these once “alternative” spaces have now become institutions, subject to
the same rules. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the evolution of P.S.1,
which through clever and intelligent management has managed to become
part of the Museum of Modern Art, betraying the original intentions.
A corresponding evolution from alternative exhibition space to
institution had already come to pass more than one hundred years ago
in Europe, especially in the German-speaking countries of Switzerland,
Austria, and Germany. With the emergence of the bourgeoisie, late in the
19th and increasingly in the early 20th century, came the emancipation of a
social class that was more and more dissatisfied with the conventional and
conservative state-controlled cultural policies.
Associations were founded so that alternative exhibitions and
cultural programs could be realized. The bourgeois members financed these
art associations in order to convey a picture of progressive contemporary
art. Artists supported these initiatives by producing works for the members,
usually editions of graphic art.
Like so much else in German history, these activities were suspended
for the duration of the Third Reich. After the end of World War II, when
the destroyed cities were still in ruins, the first associations formed to make
a fresh start. The important work of cultural reconstruction accomplished
by these associations was duly recognized by most municipalities, which
later provided generous financial (and housing) support, so that at least in
all the major cities, art associations have become institutionalized and are
run by professional teams. But the original task still remains: to work out a
program alternative to that of museums and private galleries.
In light of this evolution of “alternative spaces,” it could in
turn be said that TANAS in Berlin has been founded as an alternative
61
 “alternative space.” A space that is neither an institution nor
supported in any way by the state—neither the Berlin Senate nor the
Turkish government. Funding comes solely from the private Vehbi Koc
Foundation of Istanbul. This independence makes it possible to present
a program in Berlin conceived exclusively as a platform for contemporary
art in Turkey.
In an article in one of the endlessly proliferating biennial/triennial/
quadrennial catalogues, South African artist Kendell Geers describes the
problems of non-”Western” artists as that of the perennial guest who gets
invited and must subordinate him/herself to the host’s rules, in this case
the “white cube.” Geers asserts that to place the non-Western object in
this context, without positioning the accompanying Western object in a
non-Western context, is to conduct neither a dialogue nor an exchange,
but rather to recreate colonial power structures. The non-Western object,
in its role of guest, is expected to play by and respect the host’s rules, even
if these are condescending or racist.
Even today, Turkish contemporary art still receives no funding from
the Turkish state. There are no institutions comparable to England’s British
Council, France’s AFAA, Finland’s FRAME or Germany’s ifa, just to name a
few, that might assist artists with projects abroad. The artists have always
been dependent on the contingencies and capabilities of those doing the
inviting. With the founding of TANAS, it was possible to break through
this standard operating procedure and to give Turkish artists a space that
belongs to them, in another city in another country, where they can come
into their own.
Located in a former industrial building close to the Museum
for Contemporary Art (in the Hamburger Bahnhof), TANAS offers the
opportunity for dialogue on an equal footing. Monographic exhibitions of
young artists alternate with projects organized by young Turkish curators.
Their projects, as a rule, usually involve the participation of an international
contingent of artists.
62
 TANAS opened in the spring of 2008 with a large show of the
works of Kutlug Ataman. Additional solo presentations made it possible
for artists Aydan Mutezaoglu, Esra Ersen, Bülent Sangar, Nasan Tur, and Ali
Kazma to realize new projects. Guest curators opened the doors to global
dialogue: Emre Baykal with Mahrem (2008) and WHW, a four member
curatorial collective who have been running an “alternative space” in
Zagreb for years and are the curatorial team of this year’s Istanbul Biennial,
with an exhibition structured as a prologue to the Biennial.

When René Block (born 1942) was 22 years old he opened a gallery in Berlin whose initial
exhibitions and performances were done by artists who back then were still emergent:
Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, KP Brehmer, KH Hödicke, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, and Nam
June Paik. In addition to the gallery, in 1972 Block began to work as a curator for the Neuer
Berliner Kunstverein, the Berliner Festwochen, as well as for the Academy of the Arts. From
1982 to 1992 he directed the departments Visual Arts and Music at the The Arts-in-Berlin
Programme of the DAAD and from 1993 to 1995 the Exhibitions Department of the Institut
für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) in Stuttgart. In 1990 he curated the 8th Sydney Biennial and
in 1995 the 4th Istanbul Biennial. From 1997 to 2006 René Block was the director of the
Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. He concluded to work on large art projects by curating
the Nordic Pavilion (Welfare-Fare Wel) at the 52th Biennale di Venezia (2007) as his final large
exhibition. That same year, in Berlin, he founded TANAS, a space for contemporary Turkish art,
which opened its doors in 2008 with a solo exhibition of Kutlug Ataman.

63
 Irene Tsatsos

What Now?

In other words, the aesthetics of the future are not mysterious.

They exist along a blurry border between reality and fantasy, and will disappear over the
horizon just as life will. But artists will be more engaged in life—no longer as a solidified
reality with an original single meaning, but as a continuous flowing process.
- Hu Fang, “New Species of Spaces,” e-flux journal #11
(December 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/101

An interest in sustainable horticulture, a desire to enhance labor power, an

aim to eliminate systemic redundancies, and a wish to move gracefully in
the world have inspired the team at Bullocks Permaculture Homestead on
Orcas Island, Washington. They have spent the last thirty years designing
and building an autonomous, self-sustaining settlement on ten acres, home
to fourteen people in six family units. On a remote island, with a population
of only about 4,500 people and accessible only by ferry, this enterprise
attracts approximately 1,000 visitors a year for tours and extended visits,
offers an internship program with between two and sixteen interns at
any given point, produces a range of courses and workshops, provides
landscaping and design consultation services, and runs a plant nursery.
Bullocks has created a viable living and working situation that is robust,
radical, and independent, yet at the same time fully integrated within its
communities—those of its immediate neighbors as well as its international
network of permaculturists. It is a creative, socially-engaged, alternative
space that reveals and nurtures experimentation, education, and a range of
other creative endeavors.
64
 “Permaculture,” a portmanteau of “permanent agriculture” and
expanded to include the notion of “permanent culture,” was, along with the
alternative space movement, founded more than thirty years ago. Based on
agricultural efficiencies, the premise of permaculture is to reduce the drain
on non-renewable and renewable resources while creating an abundant
living environment. A permaculture system—which can range from building
a home on ample acreage to an urban window box garden to renovating
a building for an art center—is developed through observing, identifying,
and analyzing patterns and habits already in place. A perrmaculture-based
design would apply these modes to the project’s development, integrating
environment and people while providing material and non-material needs
harmoniously and sustainably.
Early advocates quickly realized permaculture has a sociological
dimension, what those in the permaculture community call “invisible
structures.” Any given permaculture community, while based on a common
interest in matters of sustainability, is based around shared values. Bullocks
Homestead is a sustainable system based on horticulture, because that
was the passion that drew its founders together; a group of ceramicists in
Vermont, storytellers in Wyoming, or conceptually-oriented visual artists in
Manhattan will have completely different visions around which they might
coalesce, driven to create a sustainable enterprise dedicated to pursuing their
passion.

***

“Buildings are for eating,” said Gordon Matta-Clark.

So, it would seem, were whole sea bass encased in aspic, bone soup,
and old shoes, all of which were menu offerings at Food, the restaurant-
slash-artist project founded 1971 by Matta-Clark and Caroline Goodden
that could, with some revisionist thinking, be considered among the first
alternative spaces.
65
 Matta-Clark was a galvanizing social force in SoHo in the late 1960s,
before it was even called SoHo, until his death in 1978. Numerous accounts
from the time characterize Matta-Clark as driven in part by a deep desire to
connect socially—he was a founding member of the Anarchitecture group,
was notorious for gleefully and spontaneously generating what came to be
called mosh pits at loft dance parties, and engaged Wall Street passersby
with projects such as Fresh Air Cart (1972), in which he offered high-rise
office workers a whiff of fresh air while on lunch break.
Like its nascent art world exhibition counterparts, the team at Food,
dissatisfied with the limitations of what options were then available within
existing venues, identified a need and desire of members of its community,
and took matters into its own hands. The menus at Food—creative and
inexpensive—were ideal for its spirited artist community and neighbors.
In addition to its eccentric offerings (the bones from Food’s famous bone
soup were, after being served, washed off in the kitchen and promptly
fashioned into jewelry worn home by diners), Food served dishes comprised
of elements, and in ways, that are now standard restaurant fare: sushi and
sashimi (a menu developed by guest artist/chef Hisachika Takahashi, who
was Rauschenberg’s assistant), locally produced foods, and “house” made
baked goods, well and adventuresomely prepared in an open plan kitchen,
fully visible to diners.
“Gordon Matta-Clark’s generative ideas of community permeate
almost every aspect of his art and life,”1 said historian Judith Russi
Kirshner. Matta-Clark and friends built out the space, planned the menus,
and invited guest artists/chefs to prepare meals. Matta-Clark recognized
that our ability to perceive art starts with the very primal need to sustain
our bodies. He also realized that artists, at least those with whom he
fraternized, craved connection and community with one another. In its
three years Food is estimated to have employed about sixty artists as
cooks, waiters, and busboys. “He layered his activities on top of already
existent structures of daily living, economic networks, and circulation
66
systems, merging real estate, restaurants, or galleries. In the antic
atmosphere recorded at Food, the labor of nurturing was paramount, and
artists shopped, cleaned, cooked, and talked together.”2
Within the context of 1960s radicalism, the politics of Food,
permaculture, and alternative spaces were rooted in an idealistic social
critique grounded in a nurturing, proactive stance, rather than one based
on militant, at times violent, resistance. A site for spirited and diverse
engagement around art, eating, discourse, and collegiality, Food was,
like the alternative space and permaculture movements, a part of and
at the same time creating new ecosystems as well as new paradigms.
Matta-Clark’s thinking “followed more closely the symbolic resonance
of the nutritional cycle from raw materials to waste than it did anything
that might be said properly to belong to architecture”3—or to food or
performance, for that matter. Whether they would have considered the
matter in such a way, the founders of Food, like permaculture practitioners
and alternative space pioneers, observed social and work patterns of their
friends, colleagues, neighbors, and businesspeople in the areas they lived
and worked—their networks—and created systems that complemented
them.

***

Art and artmaking can often be messy—and may arguably, in some ways
necessarily be messy—as well as inefficient, laborious, and capable of much
tedium and repetitiousness. That said, I am regularly struck by the amount
of debilitating redundancy I see around me, particularly in the way people—
most of whom are artists—live and attempt to produce their work. So many
I know are struggling to make ends meet, simply to keep the roofs over their
heads and to maintain the various conventions that exist within individual
homes, from kitchens to studio spaces to rent or mortgage payments. This
was particularly striking at one point at the start of the current recession,
67
 in early 2009, when within a period of three days as many artists called to
tell me they had lost their jobs—one with an institution and two as studio
assistants for more established artists. Yet in an  increasingly desperate
effort to drum up work, any work at all, each of these artists was soliciting
the same set of institutions, studios, and former employers as the other.
Naturally enough, at challenging moments we return to what is familiar,
though in order to resolve these challenges we are often better off seeking
something entirely new.
Many artists and cultural practitioners, including those who had
shared stories of their recent despair, are entrepreneurial, creative, socially
and professionally connected, and essentially broke—and thus endowed
with similar skills, and likewise faced with similar challenges, that catalyzed
the founders of many alternative spaces years ago. Fortunately—and
inspiringly—they have kept their wits about them, turning their liabilities into
assets, putting their ingenuity toward creating innovative, alternative sites
for action. Bicycle Kitchen, Machine Project, Telic Exchange, and Journal of
Aesthetics & Protest (“a weirdo think tank”) are a few examples here in Los
Angeles, while two online examples include Feel Tank (“a feel tank, but this
does not mean we don’t think”) and Team Colors (exploring “questions of
everyday resistance, mutual aid, … and the commons”).
Back in the realm of permaculture, Bullocks Homestead’s challenges
are met with solutions that attempt to simplify and at the same time sustain
a practice. For example, the sleeping quarters surround a central, outdoor
kitchen, which are adjacent to an upper cistern that leads to a lower garden.
(One current project involves planting nut trees along a path so that years
from now, when the trees bear fruit, the nuts will fall onto the path. The
harvest, then, will be collected while taking a walk. As with the layout of
the garden and residences, the path is designed to provide flow with as
little resistance as possible.)
In every design solution, the product of one element supports the
efforts of another system, become increasingly productive and integrated,
68
minimizing waste and needless effort. It is a beautiful, succinct, and
potentially very rich concept; eliminate the backtracking and in so doing
make room for other creative endeavors, for vital, productive forces—
providing, to appropriate a kind of Marxian ideal, universal access to free
time for a collective that gardens in the morning, fishes in the afternoon,
and makes art at night.
“Utopia, like heaven, is kind of boring,” Nancy Spero said.4 She
was right. Lest this all sound like jejune 1960s back-to-the-land stuff, it
is important to note that permaculture, too, like every other living entity,
experiences fluctuations and growing pains. Even though permaculture
has produced constructive techniques and technologies for growing food,
building harmonious buildings, and generating electricity, its greatest
challenge remains one of effective, constructive social engagement.
“The dislocations inherent to social relations in the world in which we
live are deeper than in the past, so categories that synthesized past
social experience are becoming increasingly obsolete. It is necessary
to reconceptualize the autonomy of social demands, the logic of their
articulation, and the nature of the collective entities resulting from them.
This effort—which is necessarily collective—is the real task ahead.”5
Figuring out how to create thriving, fulfilling communities, organize
socially, and pursue right livelihood are considered to be among the
movement’s greatest challenges. This political/intellectual/social mandate
applies to alternative spaces as well.
Just as permaculture has a core value of ethics and sustainability
that remains constant irrespective of the system’s organizing principles,
alternative spaces, now as much as in the past, exist to promote a deeper
understanding of ourselves and the social and cultural context within
which we live. This is because making art, viewing it, and thinking about
it are, or should be, basic activities, fundamental to being human. Critical
thinking, including unfettered creative expression, are vital cultural values;
artists and contemporary art play essential roles in both testing and
69
 strengthening these values. Fearlessness, a willingness to probe, to irritate,
to ask questions were qualities critical to the inception of the alternative
space movement, and they remain critical to the future of any relevant,
engaged cultural practice.

(Parts of this essay are drawn from comments delivered at a panel organized and
facilitated by Anne Pasternak of Creative Time, with panelists Will Wilkins of Real
Art Ways and Rick Lowe of Project Row Houses, for a Warhol Initiative gathering in
Miami during June 19-21, 2003.)

NOTES

1.Judith Russi Kirshner, “The Idea of Community in the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” Gordon Matta-Clark
(Phaidon: London, 2006), 148.
2. Ibid., 152.
3. Ibid., 137.
4. As said to Hans Ulrich Obrist, quoted in the obituary of Nancy Spero (d. 2009), published by e-flux, http://
www.e-flux.com/shows/view/7365. “Her work was never crudely utopian—as she told me, ‘Utopia, like
heaven, is kind of boring.’”
5. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (Verso: London, 2007), 250.

Irene Tsatsos is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. From 1997 to 2005 Irene was the
Executive Director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), where she is credited with
revitalizing the organization’s reputation for experimental and rigorous programming. Prior to
that, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art as the exhibition coordinator of
the 1997 Biennial; she also held leadership positions at the Arts Club of Chicago and N.A.M.E.
gallery, Chicago. Having worked with a range of museums and alternative arts spaces Irene
enjoys a profile as a collaborative and forward-thinking facilitator of artist-initiated projects.

70
Raphael Rubinstein

Tributary or Source?

No cultural entity, no institution, no mode of art making, no style, can

survive without changing, unless its constituents are prepared to be content
with a frozen regime, a museum piece preserved and removed from any
ongoing history. Some examples of successful evolution: the Tate Gallery
(institution), Conceptual Art (mode of art-making). Examples of failure
to evolve: Whitney Museum of American Art (institution), geometric
abstraction (style).
Where does the alternative space fit in this scheme? Is it, at the
present moment, an instance of successful evolution or a cultural dead
end? Is it a vibrant, necessary participant in today’s art scene or a pickled
relic from another era? This question seems one worth asking just now,
as we teeter (and some of us have fallen in) on the verge of an economic
sink hole—just as earlier economic hard times helped make possible and
necessary the alternative space movement of the 1970s.
There’s no doubt that alternative spaces were necessary then: they
exhibited art that had a difficult time making it into commercial galleries
and museums because it was deemed unsaleable or declared itself not for
sale or employed means that existing art institutions couldn’t accommodate
or (perhaps most often the case) was made by artists who simply didn’t yet
have the reputations that galleries and museums required.
Much has changed since those days. Art once considered too
conceptual or unwieldy or ephemeral now has as good a chance as any
71
 painting or sculpture of finding a ready market. Museums not only accept
the kind of art that once flourished in alternative spaces, they actively
commission it, often at an epic scale. Lastly, galleries and museums alike
avidly seek out young artists, excited by new names as well as by new art.
A few years ago, when we were still in the midst of a smoothly
running, seemingly infinitely expandable market for contemporary art, some
observers feared that alternative spaces had lost their raison d’être; their
function of providing venues for new and radical art, it was claimed, had
been usurped by adventurous galleries and the “project spaces” of major
museums. As a result, Manhattan gallery goers could no longer count on
finding the next big thing in places like Artists Space and White Columns.
(Here’s a thought: What if nonprofit status is no longer a prerequisite for
alternative spaces? Judging by programming alone, the most “alternative”
space in New York in recent years has been a nominally commercial
enterprise: Mitchell Algus Gallery.) Lately, art critics have been proclaiming
or predicting a newfound relevance for alternative spaces. In October 2008,
just as the economy turned ugly, Jerry Saltz wrote in New York Magazine:
“Alternative spaces will become more important for shaping the discourse,
although they’ll have a hard time making ends meet.”
Those who suspected the death of the alternative space by the
turn of the century might have found further proof with the publication in
2002 of an anthology titled Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985, largely
devoted to the history of alternative spaces and art collectives. Edited by Julie
Ault, the book had its origins in a 1996 show at the Drawing Center. The
appearance of such histories generally marks the eclipse of their subjects. In
her introduction, Ault acknowledges as much: “In 1996 when I began this
project, the notion of the alternative was not entirely outmoded. A mere
six years later, the term has little currency. Only a vestige of an alternative
network remains.”
If there were any truth to this view—that alternatives spaces
became irrelevant by the dawn of the 21st century—it would be, first of
72
all, a testament to the success of the alternative space. The artist-created
initiatives that began sprouting up in the 1970s eventually were able to set
the agenda for what commercial galleries began doing in the 1980s and
afterwards. And it was not only artists who moved from alternative spaces
to galleries: quite a few dealers got their start among the nonprofits. One
of the best known of these was Helene Winer, who, with Janelle Reiring,
opened the New York gallery Metro Pictures in 1980. In Laura de Coppet and
Alan Jones’s 1984 book The Art Dealers, Reiring spells out the importance
of the alternative space in the 1980s art world. “Because Helene had spent
five years as director of Artists Space, she was absolutely invaluable to the
early success of our gallery. She had in fact spent five years looking at new
art, exhibiting it, and following the development of the artists she found
most interesting.” After naming some of the artists (Jack Goldstein, Robert
Longo and Cindy Sherman) who came to Metro Pictures following shows
at Artists Space, Reiring then says: “I think it is almost impossible for a
commercial dealer to show a young, unknown artist who does not have this
solid basis to their career and arouse interest in the show and the work. Our
job is to capitalize, exploit, and enlarge an interest that had already begun,
not to create that interest.”
Reiring is clearly describing a vanished world. The prospect of
young artists devoting years to building a “solid basis to their career” in
the domain of alternative spaces before being ready to join a gallery is
laughable in an age when artists so often move directly from MFA programs
into commercial galleries. This isn’t to deny that some careers do still
develop more slowly, but I think that, for better or worse, we have lost the
belief in the artistic benefits of a period of apprenticeship or minor-league
experience.
But what about that word “alternative”? In Reiring’s scenario,
the alternative space is not an alternative to some mainstream but simply
the mainstream’s tributary or feeder. The supposed obsolescence of the
alternative space a few years ago might well have had its origins in the shift
73
 from offering artists and viewers an “alternative” to becoming simply a
proving ground for commercial galleries.
But isn’t this the risk of every type of “alternative”? Think, for
instance, of alternative rock, a supposedly dissident musical style that
sought to escape the restrictive conditions of the recording industry.
While alternative and indie rock rather quickly devolved into mere stylistic
options within the pop mainstream, and independent record labels often
functioned as feeders for mainstream labels, the situation in the music
industry lately has been changing. The driving force behind this change is
technology, specifically the rise of the Web as a means of distributing music
and communicating about music. With the eclipse of the CD, the rise of
MP3s and file sharing (pirated and authorized), and the ubiquity of online
social networking, it has now become feasible for bands to bypass record
labels and connect with fans directly, via their own independently created
websites. In effect, in the realm of music, the Web has seen the appearance
of thousands (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) of alternative spaces.
Despite globalization, the art world in its bricks and mortar version
is still extremely centralized and hierarchical. All those “major” galleries and
museums, all those bureaucratic biennials, all those elegant mausoleums
erected by mega collectors, still hold on to profits and power, and, by and
large, art has to pass through them before it, too, is seen as major. This is
the kind of structure that alternative spaces were once created to oppose.
If alternatives are flourishing in the online music world, in the art
world they are relatively marginalized. In the online art world, “alternative”
websites are even more marginalized. Maybe this is an inescapable
consequence of the obdurate physicality of most works of art. Music can
be converted into digital formats with much less loss than visual art. It’s
significant that what is perhaps the most important “alternative” art world
website—Kenny Goldsmith’s indispensible Ubu.com—is largely devoted to
those art forms (video, film, and sound art) that are most easily transmitted
in digital formats.
74
 So, let’s assume for the moment that if alternative spaces are
to exist in an influential way they are not going to exist on the Web, or
at least not exclusively. What shape, then, can they take? Having been
deprived of their chief former rationales (if one accepts that there no
longer seems to be any such thing as an alternative art and that galleries
have bypassed the developmental function of alternative spaces), what is
it, exactly, that alternative spaces have to offer? What productive role can
they play?
As I think about two particular spaces I’ve seen lately that offer
something emphatically different from what prevails in the official art
world, I notice that they are not located in London, New York, Berlin, or
Los Angeles, but in a converted gas station in Houston, Texas, (The Station
Museum) and at the end of a rough dirt road in rural Pennsylvania (Mildred’s
Lane). Of course there are interesting alternative spaces in New York and
London—some new and tiny, others venerable and commodious—but they
generally follow some established model, usually of experimental-space-
for-young-artist variety. Could it be that it has become virtually impossible
to establish any new kind of alternative space amid art world centers? The
problem is not just real estate values—we all know that it’s hard to attain
freedom with a hefty monthly rent to pay—but a more subtle psycho-social
mindset that makes it difficult for anyone who has to negotiate daily with
the gallery-museum-collector-complex to set out in an entirely different
direction.
The two spaces I’ve singled out are very different. The Station
Museum is a privately funded exhibition space in a large converted industrial
building in one of Houston’s historically African-American neighborhoods.
Its founder and director, James Harithas, devotes much of his programming
to art coming out of zones of conflict around the globe, hosting exhibitions
of art from Iraq, Colombia, and Palestine; the Station Museum also presents
solo shows of a wide range of maverick American artists such as Mel Chin
and Norman Bluhm, I don’t know of any other space like it. (Disclosure:
75
 I am in the process of curating a show at the Station Museum of the
political paintings of Paul Georges.) Mildred’s Lane is a combination artist’s
retreat-art school-installation site set up on some 90 acres of woodland in
northeastern Pennsylvania by artists J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion. Artists
are invited to create new works on the land and in its weathered barns and
farmhouse. Each summer, small groups of young artists attend three-week-
long seminars. Puett and Dion pursue quasi-archeological investigations of
the farm’s previous inhabitants.
The Station Museum and Mildred’s Lane derive a refreshing artistic
freedom from their locations, and from their self-sufficiency. They don’t
have to cater to existing audiences, nor are they desperate to attract visitors.
If people come, I’m sure the people who run these two outfits are happy
to see them, but because they don’t have to prove anything to grant-giving
institutions or to boards of trustees, they don’t have to concern themselves
with numbers or demographics. Their strength is largely in the degree to
which they are not institutions.
In most cases, an alternative space that has fulfilled its original
mission is confronted with two options: to close or to turn into an
institution. Perhaps alternative spaces should be run along the lines of
literary magazines: as Cyril Connolly observed when he launched Horizon
in 1939: “A magazine should be the reflection of its time and when it
ceases to reflect this, should come to an end.” (Horizon folded in 1949.)
If the people running a space choose the second route, the chances of it
remaining “alternative” are pretty slim, so maybe the best kind of alternative
space is the short-lived one. Is there a third option?
Let’s imagine an alternative space that doesn’t close and doesn’t
become an institution (or let itself be absorbed into some other institution),
but finds a way to continually evolve, perhaps by changing its mission, its
name, its location, its protagonists. In short, after a certain point, for an
alternative space to remain alternative it must become an alternative to
itself. Like certain artists when they find one mode of making at an end
76
and turn to something radically different (for example, Philip Guston circa
1970), independent exhibition spaces should be willing to change their
styles, trying something completely different. Not because a change of
style is automatically beneficial, but because flexibility is what they are all
about.
But we still haven’t answered the main question: how necessary
are alternative spaces today? Do we need them? Do they do something
that otherwise wouldn’t get done? Show art that wouldn’t otherwise
be shown? Instead of trying to answer these difficult, if not impossible,
questions, let’s think about the role of alternative spaces beyond their
function as exhibition spaces. In some circumstances, they can serve wider
cultural purposes, especially by offering themselves as venues for other art
forms. It could be argued that one of the most important achievements of
Artists Space in the late 1970s was not in helping to start the careers of
those Metro Pictures artists, but in hosting the music festival that launched
the No Wave movement in 1978. A few years later, another downtown
New York space, White Columns, sponsored a pair of influential music
festivals, Noise Fest (1981) and Speed Trials (1983), with dozens of bands
such as Sonic Youth and The Fall. No one these days thinks of Dia as an
alternative space, but in the 1980s it functioned as one in its modest Mercer
Street space, which was the site of regular readings by many of the best
contemporary poets, including John Ashbery and James Schuyler. Are there
any alternative spaces today with equally ambitious programs outside of
visual art?
It could be that one of the best ways for an alternative space
to become an alternative to itself would be to do something not about
the problematic “alternative” in its name but the less obviously charged
term “space.” Above I proposed that an alternative space might consider
changing its location as a way to become an “alternative to itself,” but a
better course of action might be to dispense with a location altogether, and
turn into a completely nomadic project. A great model for this approach
77
 is Performa, the performance-art biennial that presents works in dozens
of different venues around New York City. More explicitly, this year, the
Subvision festival in Hamburg, Germany, is inviting 12 artist initiatives
from various countries that are explicitly “nomadic,” that is, which mount
exhibitions in constantly changing venues. In a novel approach, New York-
based apexart has set up a franchise program for which artist groups
anywhere in the world can apply: apexart relocates to the winner’s city for
a month-long exhibition.
Architect Zaha Hadid has also recently been experimenting with
nomadic exhibition spaces by creating podlike and tentlike pavilions that
are being transported around the world. Hadid isn’t the only person
to be exploring nomadic architecture. Designer Chuck Hoberman has
been making transformable structures that incorporate mobility and
adaptability; it would be fascinating to see him tackle an exhibition
space. Also relevant as historical precedents (recently rediscovered) are
Jean Prouvé’s “nomadic structures” of the 1940s and 1950s and Gordon
Matta-Clark’s Open House (1972), a dumpster converted into a walk-in
sculpture/homeless shelter.
Matta-Clark’s dumpster reminds us that there’s no need for
anything elaborate when it comes to mobile exhibition spaces. Of course,
shipping containers have been a feature of art fairs for several years, and
some cash-starved dealers have even operated from trucks. But, in fact,
tents would probably be the best solution for mobile alternative spaces.
Here’s one way they could be used: every alternative space in a given city
acquires a tent, and on a particular weekend, each space sets up its tent
in a park or some other open space. The result would be a tent city of
completely new exhibition venues among which visitors could wander.
One thing accomplished by defining “space” as nomadic is to
align exhibition practice more closely to the virtual world where “sites”
are everywhere and nowhere at once. The challenge is to do so without
losing touch with the tangibility that still defines most visual art. Ultimately,
78
the survival of alternative spaces depends not on nomadism or any other
specific strategy, but on our ability to continue redefining the term, and on
the resourcefulness of those who find themselves compelled to push into
public view works of art that no one else is yet ready to acknowledge.

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based poet and art critic whose books include Polychrome
Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002 (Hard Press Editions), Afterglow of Minor Pop
Masterpieces (Make Now) and, as editor, the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State
of their Practice (Hard Press Editions). From 1997 to 2007 he was a senior editor at Art in
America; he continues to be a contributing editor to the magazine. Since 2007 he has been a
professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston and is also on the faculty of the Art
Criticism and Writing MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

79
 Marina Grzinic

Art, Activism and Theory

I am interested in thinking about the possibility of an alternative space for

art, culture, activism, and politics that can be termed as radical art and
political space with practices, interventional logics, and subjects that bear
the same name of alternative and radical at once. In order to come to
the point of what these practices/spaces/subjects are, we should rethink
what is the opposite side of the radical political practice today. To be even
more precise, it is not that I want to ask what is its opposite, as it was the
case in modernism where we could speak clearly about a certain binary
mechanism in society, but I ask for the conditions of its im/possibility?
My answer is clear: It is neoliberal global capitalism and its processes of
normality and normalization.1
Therefore, I want, firstly, to think about processes of how the norm
is established or, better to say, to analyze the way normality is set to work
in the neoliberal global capitalist world. Secondly, I want to give another
view of what an alternative radical art and political space with practices,
interventional logic, and subjects consist of today.
I decided first to refer to the construction of normality as it was
defined by philosopher Ljubomir Bratic.2 He argued that normality is
a constructed consensual process. I want to develop this further. I will
make reference to the recently published anonymous French text titled
Introduction to Civil War (published in English3) which was developed by
people associated with the journal Tiqqun,4 who were as well those who
80
were arrested in the village of Tarnac in France on November 11, 2008. They
were arrested in conjunction supposedly with five incidents of “sabotage”
against high-speed trains throughout France.5
In Introduction to Civil War we can read the following statement:
“Under the regime of the norm, nothing is normal though everything
must be normalized.” Therefore, we can think of the operation of
construction of normality in two moves. First, what we have at work
is a situation of exceptionality, a state of exception, so to say, which is
followed by an abrupt violence—and this is extremely important—that
immediately normalizes precisely what was an ab-normal act. As it is
stated in Introduction to Civil War, “nothing is normal though everything
must be normalized.” If nothing is normal (i.e. it is abnormal, a state of
exception), things cannot be “gently” normalized, therefore a violent act
is to be imposed in order that everything becomes normalized. However, I
have to insist that the two moves (both of exceptionality) follow one after
the other without a delay (precisely as digitalized media claim that today
we can see “life” live on TV—in real time), therefore they follow precisely
as something “normal.” Normality simulates continuity. This continuity
is the one that displays “normality” (also if necessarily retroactively) not
as a process of (immediate) brutal exclusion (as we customarily think
that this is the way “normality” is applied), but as a process of limitless
inclusion.
What is my point? As it is claimed in Introduction to Civil War,
“nothing and no one is excluded from this space, or rejected into an
identifiable exteriority. What is called ‘excluded’ is here only a modality
of a generalized inclusion. [Normality] is therefore no longer anything
but a single and same field, homogenous but diffracted into infinity of
nuances, a regime of limitless integration that sets out to maintain the play
between forms-of-life at the lowest possible level of intensity.” Therefore,
the norm establishes a reversed process of exclusion, it is going on through
“dissolving, digesting, absorbing, and deactivating all alterity a priori.”
81
 The goal is an integration that positively eliminates exteriorities in order to
permit their subsequent recirculation.
Moreover, even this process of the way normalization functions,
which should be alarming for any critical and radical position, is, so to
speak, today normalized. This goes so far that even the text Introduction
to Civil War announces that “A nagging little neurosis makes one want
to continue to distinguish the just from the unjust, the healthy from the
sick, work from leisure, the criminal from the innocent or the ordinary
from the monstrous. But we need to acknowledge the obvious: these
old divisions are no longer intelligible.” And continues: “The differences
have not been suppressed, however. They are still there, but without
consequences.”
I want to draw attention precisely to this point. As it is obvious
that even these revolutionary forces which wrote the text Introduction to
Civil War and which are, despite being anonymous, situated in a social and
political radical context, accept such way of thinking without, so to say,
being irritated, disturbed any more by justice or injustice. This means that
even such radical positions are indifferent (they are not irritated) to the fact,
for example, that people are being secluded and labeled illegal just because
they are migrants or because they are “captured” by European Union police
on, as it is claimed, the “nonexistent ‘borders’ of free E.U.” It is due to such
thinking that we have to be very clear that the PROCESSES of normality
and normalization are not just a theoretical description, but operative even
where they should be nullified.
Therefore, it is precisely because of such a process that can be
labeled “normalization from within” that little by little we take as “normal”
the excessive violence by police, for example, exercised on the border in
between U.S. and Mexico, or on May 1, 2009, in Linz. On that day, on
May 1, the ANTIFA (antifascist forces) and other activists, for example maiz
– Autonomous Center by and for Migrants from Linz, who fight against
racism and discrimination, attended the traditional demonstrations at
82
the International Workers’ day. But they were all under harsh attack and
brutal control by police forces, though it is claimed that in Austria and
in other neoliberal capitalist states worldwide the rights to demonstrate is
guaranteed by the constitution itself.6
The problem is therefore double. In Introduction to Civil War, on one
side we see activists and theoreticians advancing a critique of normality and
on the other we actually see precisely this “abnormality” being normalized.
Even more, the Introduction to Civil War claims rightly that the norm works
precisely because it presents itself without memory. As we could see in Linz
on May 1, 2009, it was possible to use such enormous police forces that
were even applauded by the conservative parties in power, since as it was
precisely, stated normality has NO memory, and therefore the applauded
normality of using abnormal police repression to prevent demonstrations
on a national holiday prevents the so-called general public to link this
repression with what happened at the heights of Nazism in 1934 in Linz.
As formulated by the activists in Linz who constantly refer to memory
and to history, precisely 75 years ago on May 1, 1934, those who were
demonstrating were put in prison by the Nazis.
Therefore, the only way to stop the normalized amnesia of
neoliberal global capitalism is actually to interrupt the logic of the norm.
This interruption is what characterizes the alternative radical practice. Or
to put this differently, in the past a subversive act was possible as it was
subversion against the clear foreclosure and division in society. We had
the borders. The big Other, the virtual symbolic order, the network that
structures/d reality for us, was the one giving, so to speak, “consistency”
to our acts. It guaranteed in the time of liberal capitalism a binary division
of society, and this gave almost a guarantee for the intervention of the
subculture against the dominant culture. Today the world presents itself in
an endless circulation (the world “imperialism” is an excellent concept that
captures the logic of neoliberal global capitalism) that is seen, as I stated
above, as a limitless inclusion and an endless exchange.
83
 In order to act it is necessary to draw a border. To draw a border
within the inconsistency of the big Other, within the limitless inclusion
means to act, to act politically. The act changes the very coordinates of
this impossibility. It is only through an act that I effectively assume the big
Other’s nonexistence. This implies not only that s/he has to take the politics
of representation into her/his hands, and set the border within the cynical
situation that the only thing which is impossible today is impossibility as
such, but, as is argued by Jelica Sumic-Riha,7 it is necessary to build the
framework as well, the foreclosure that would set the new parameters,
giving the new coordinates to the political act. The political act is a division,
the setting of a border within a space. It reconfigures, closes, or stops, if you
will, the imperialism of the circulation without differences by establishing
new parameters within the space. It establishes a new structure to which
to relate (de-coloniality of knowledge,8 de-coloniality of power, lesbian
and queer political platform, etc.). An act is always performed through
enunciation and it not only sets the parameters that initiate the act itself,
but the parameters in relation to the Other to whom it is addressed, as
well. Therefore, the question is always to which histories we attach our
representational politics and how we position ourselves within a certain
social, economical, and political territory.
Under the regime of the norm, negativity is never recognized as
such, but reduced to a simple default of the norm. Groups and positions
who fight against the process of normalization, but not proposing the so-
called “constructive critique” that is another way to keep the status quo
in society, but asking for the complete shifting of the parameters of the
norm, are made to disappear, treated as not present in the space, simply
not mentioned, evacuated, also through a rhetoric that accuses them
of being ready to adapt to the new normalizing demands. Therefore, in
order to prevent the empty norm from circulating and reproducing itself
incessantly, it is necessary to expose precisely those projects that the norm
makes unimportant, obsolete. We have to extract from this situation of
84
normalized amnesia such projects that politically interrupt the empty
circularity of the norm. Such spaces and positions are radical critical
practices that although their point of departure starts in different fields,
they have the same objective—the formation of radical critical discourse
which is not tautological, but has, as it was stated by Sebastjan Leban,9 at
its core a constant struggle for a political subject, not as an individual entity
but as a constitutive self-determined part of a larger social and political
collectiveness.
Today normality is in direct relation to biopolitics. What does this
mean? Biopolitics that was initially researched by Michel Foucault10 and
extended further by Giorgio Agamben11 presents today, I argue, not so much
the direction of how life is administered, but the way of its differentiation.
Agamben proposed the division in between on one side modal life, life
that presents itself only as an infinite, I would say shopping mall, catalogue
of forms-of-life, and on the other side life without a form, that is, bare or
naked life. Or to say differently what I just stated about biopolitics. This
process of differentiation of life, of life that was some decades ago seen
as one, in terms that you had life or you hadn’t (meaning “I am dead”)
is precisely what biopolitics is. Life is not anymore “one,” but it is caught
in a process of its pure formalization. The outcome which is what matters
in the First capitalist world (that contrary to life it does not want to be
called as such but rather just global world, as otherwise in the process of
differentiation hierarchical divisions become disturbingly visible)—are only
forms-of-life.
It is not claimed without an intensive analysis that what was in the
past termed as “the subject” (a politically emancipated agency) presents
today just a form of individualization in the neoliberal global capitalism. As
it is pointed out in Introduction to Civil War, in the end what matters is only
the differentiation between forms-of-life. All that is at stake today in the
First capitalist world with its biopolitical procedures is forms of life seen in its
smallest angle of torsion. These torsions are just a process of individualization
85
 where the subject is only an individual, more or less successful, brand. The
situation is a complete interiorization and this is what capitalism does: it
changes every social or political dimension, or every commons in, so to say,
individualization. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise the claim that
there is no outside to the biopolitical of the first capitalist world. Everything
that has its source in the “Outside” (misery, death, illegality, etc.,) has to
disappear.12 Or, as it is stated in Introduction to Civil War, what does not
belong to the mode of presentation of the norm does not exist, and what
does not exist cannot be part of the process of unveiling the norm or the
process of normalization.
This is why as well nobody really thinks that alternative radical
spaces are really possible. For the alternative radical political practice implies
as well a clear negativity. On the other hand biopolitics establishes its power
precisely through regulating life only as a battle of forms-of-life, as pure and
constant positivization. Therefore all that is in any connection with misery,
death, illegality, and so forth, and therefore as well any radical alternative
political space as the space pointing a finger to these, has to disappear
for real in terms that people are secluded or in a symbolical way being
completely extracted from memory and history.
Introduction to Civil War exposes clearly that at the heart of
biopolitics that exercises biopower and connects the First capitalist world to
biocapitalism there is no such thing as death. Life in the First capitalist world
is presented only through forms-of-life that compete as brands. Biopolitics
is reserved only for the fictitious battle of forms-of-life, although death is
all around the biopolitical First world and in its pure center as well; death is
produced and reproduced constantly and thus constantly hidden. As argued
by Rubia Salgado, from maiz, Linz, the interest in the lives of migrants may
well be a hot topic today, but in reality is nothing but an instrumentalized
topic. The biopolitical in the First World includes life as a political concern,
but only, as stated in Introduction to Civil War, through its exclusion from the
political sphere.
86
 The first consequence is that there are practically no political
subjects in the First capitalist world anymore. Or better, if it is true that
there are almost no alternative spaces and alternative radical practices
in the First capitalist world then we should start to think about defining
the alternative spaces and political subjects differently. It is not that they
have simply vanished, they are there but not recognized as such. Because
in biocapitalism the alternative spaces and their subjects are seen only as
brands competing for more or less stylish, as well as political forms-of-life.
Only those able to draw a border in the space, presenting it as a border
in the space that is not at all a binary act, take the active role in these
new processes of rethinking alternative spaces and political subjectivity. In
order to do this it is necessary to transcend the “genre” of the topic that
is at stake and universalize it through its direct connection to the capitalist
system of economical, political, social, and ideological reproduction, so to
say, to the class struggle that points to the exploitation and expropriation
for capital profit.
The second consequence is that precisely because of what has been
said so far we can question biopolitics. I stated that it is not outside to the
biopolitical of the first capitalist world. Everything that has its source in the
“Outside” (misery, death, illegality, etc.,) has to disappear. Therefore, it is not
possible to conceptualize biopolitics without a process of its repoliticization—
as what we see in the outside and in the inside is but misery, death, illegality
everywhere (Sudan, Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Guantanamo, Gaza,
Chechnya, New Orleans, etc.,)—through what I, in relation to Achille
Mbembe, bring to the floor of our discussion, and that is necropolitics.
Biopolitics is a horizon of articulating contemporary capitalist
societies from the so-called politics of life, where life (via Agamben, no
longer matters if bare/naked life or life with forms) is seen as the zero degree
of intervention of each and every politics into contemporary societies. Today
the capital surplus value is based on capitalizing from death (Latin necro)
worlds. In the text “Necropolitics,” (2003) Achille Mbembe discusses this
87
 new capital logic and its processes of geopolitical demarcation of world
zones based on the mobilization of the war machine.13 Mbembe claimed
that the concept of biopolitics due to the war machine and the state of
exception being one of the major logics of contemporary societies might be
better replaced with necropolitics. Necropolitics is connected to the concept
of necrocapitalism, that is, contemporary capitalism, which organizes
its forms of capital accumulation that involves dispossession and the
subjugation of life to the power of death. The necrocapitalistic exploitation
and expropriation imply new modes of governmentality that are informed
by the norms of corporate rationality and deployed in managing violence,
social conflicts and the Multitude.
Therefore to precisely articulate this non-existent outside that is
as well an outside in the First capitalist world, it is necessary to repoliticize
biopolitics with necropolitics. It presents a historization of biopolitics in
terms of its intensification and as well brings back what is continually
purged out of the biopolitical: death, exploitation, and expropriation.
Necropolitics is not a simple process of the development of biopolitics, of
making it exuberant by using a new adjective, but it is biopolitics’ border, its
internal negativity, its “truth.” With necropolitics, we can precisely define
the transformation of the regulation of life within extreme conditions
produced by capital. Necropolitics regulates life through the perspective
of death, therefore transforming life into a mere existence, below every
life minimum and this process is as well taking place in the First neoliberal
capitalist World.
In the very end I would like to discuss three positions that
constitute the alternative radical practices positions: The Research
Group on Black Austrian History and Present (Araba Evelyn Johnston-
Arthur and Belinda Kazeem), Vienna; maiz – Autonomes Zentrum
von & für Migrantinnen (Autonomous Center by and for Migrants),
Linz, Austria; and Lëvizja VETËVENDOSJE (“The Movement SELF-
DETERMINATION!”) from Kosovo.
88
 Albin Kurti, activist and theoretician from Prishtina, Kosovo,
the core member of Lëvizja VETËVENDOSJE (“The Movement SELF-
DETERMINATION!”), writes in his text “IN DEPENDENCE. From Stability
of Crisis to the Crisis of Stability,” published in Reartikulacija no. 6, April
2009, that the aim of the international E.U. and U.S. forces in Kosovo is to
assure “normality” through “stability.”14 Both words are out of joint. He
states: “Over five billion euros have been poured into Kosovo in less than
10 years. Stability is therefore an expensive thing. To preserve the status
quo, more efforts are needed than to make progress. Staying still requires
more money than moving forward. But, what exactly is kept stable? The
actual order, the present state of things.” And continues “The international
rule in Kosovo propagates itself as a post-conflict mission.” Though, as
he formulates, the international rule in Kosovo was not and is not a post-
conflict mission but was always a pre-conflict mission aimed to prevent
conflicts. If it were the other way around, he further explains, “it would
have dealt with past conflicts; it would analyze the previous war’s causes,
consequences, sources, patterns, and history. But it does not.” Stability as
normalization prevents one thing; it suspends history. History will show that
the International Mission (which considers the local population immature)
itself is immature, as, Kurti says, it behaves “like a 10 year-old kid!”
The battle of the Movement SELF-DETERMINATION! (Lëvizja
VETËVENDOSJE!) is in mobilizing people for self-determination.
VETËVENDOSJE! organizes demonstrations and gatherings where people
march, where activists deliver speeches, and where there is a massive
action: 700 bottles with red paint have been thrown on UNMIK and the
Government’s buildings. Kurti argued: “In our actions against the regime
we act outside the regime’s experience. Creativity emerges as necessity in
resistance.” Why is the question of self-determination so important? As
Kosovo was defined as a sui generis case, of its own kind/unique in its case
that implies that norms and experience teach us nothing, experimenting
seems to be the only way to move “forward” and international rule
89
 equals a club of scientists utterly objectifying Kosovo. Since we did not
achieve independence through self-determination, the independence lacks
sovereignty—it is a form without substance. Unique in its case means that
Kosovo is not only treated, but is, within the international community, a
case of homo sacer, preserved like a rare animal or a species threatened
with extinction.
maiz – Autonomous Center by and for Migrants, founded in Linz
in 1994 with the objective to expand the political and cultural participation
of migrants in public life, focused its activities initially on education.
Rubia Salgado, member of maiz and activist, explained the importance
of cultural projects and art interventions that are consciously utilized
in order to frame where they stand, what they want and what are the
alternatives and perspectives for migrants. Salgado explained, “We do not
wait to be invited, but we take every public event to invite ourselves.”15
Salgado stressed, lessons have ultimately been learned. Due to the current
topicality of the migration issue, maiz is often invited to participate in
a growing number of artistic projects launched to intervene against
racism. Experience has shown, however, that such ostensibly anti-racist
projects only reaffirm the stereotypical attitudes informing the prevailing
racist discussion by, for example, reinforcing the cultural “otherness”
of foreigners, thus condemning migrants to the role of objects and
unscrupulously instrumentalizing them.
The Black Research Group on Austrian Present and History is an
independent research group on Black Austrian history whose structural
approach represents the basis for writing Black counter-histories in present
Austrian reality. Black and Austrian represent a contradiction in terms of the
goal of the research group to break the invisible and to undertake new ways
of writing history—that are inseparable from the processes of self-definition
and self-determination. By making visible and audible Black Austrian
experience and presence, the group presents a way of writing history that
no longer treats Black people as exotic objects and exceptional phenomena
90
but relocates them both as subjects and as a part of Austrian history. In
the project “No! Against racism, exploitation and colonization!” presented
in the cultural center Pavel house in 2008, in Laafeld, Austria, the group,
notably its two core members, Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur and Belinda
Kazeem, displayed a poster with dates when Marcus Omofuma, Seibane
Wague, Richard Ibekwe, Edwin Ndupo, Yankuba Cessay, Rodney King,
and many of them never named, died. The circumstances in which Marcus
Omofuma died show that the police forces in Austria exceeded any border
of legality, but were never prosecuted. The second demand of the Research
Group on Black Austrian History and Present is a process of decoloniality of
Austrian history and presence from structurally, institutionally, and historically
incorporated racism, discrimination against the migrants, especially black
migrants, and also those of the second or third generation living in Austria.
They are made invisible, discrimination normalized. Therefore by claiming
space for themselves The Research Group on Black Austrian History and
Present connects two apparently different struggles in one single move of
political self-determination.
What is important is that asking for self-determination today implies
precisely a movement already asked by Frantz Fanon in 1961. In his book
The Wretched of the Earth,16 being one of the most important books on
decolonization in the 20th century, Fanon argued that the right to self-
determination, borne on the wind of history will be effective only when we
ask from self-determination to be clearly analyzed and implemented. In all
the listed projects we see a step further from just a declaration of existence,
what follows here is, as argued by Sumic-Riha, the rigorous practices of
consequences, the logics of consequences (of the declaration), where the
impossibility of the foreclosure of the capitalist discourse turns into the
condition of a new possibility. In all these projects what is at work is precisely
a new conceptual and paradigmatic political act, implying a setting of a
new framework. The political act is an act that sets a border, a division and
reconfigures, cuts, closes, if you want, stops the imperialism of circulation
91
 without differences and establishes new parameters in the space of politics
and art. This political act works hand in hand with history that could be
understood as appropriated, and rearticulated as a powerful political tool of
intervention.

NOTES

1. See Marina Grzinic, “Political act as self-determination. Against scientific academism and
empty art radicalization,” in NORMALITY IN [THE] CRISIS. Options for radical art practices in
heterogeneous social space, symposium conceived and organized by Martin Krenn on May 16,
2009, in Linz, Austria. Participants of the symposium: Alejandra Aravena, Marina Grzinic, Ruth
Noack, Gerald Raunig, Dmitry Vilensky, and Stephen Wright. The symposium was part of the
Festival of Regions 09 – Normality at the Subversive Fair in Linz.
2. See Ljubomir Bratic, “A Strategy of Deployment. Reflections on the play Liebesforschung,” text
published as part of translate. Beyond Culture: The Politics of Translation, a multi-annual research
project that aimed at exploring the political articulation of the notion of cultural translation in
artistic practices as well as in political social movements from 2005 to 2008/9, Vienna. Text by Brati
originally in German was translated into English by Mary O’Neill and published online February
2007. See http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0307/bratic/en#redir#redir.
3. See Introduction to Civil War. First published in French in the journal Tiqqun, a radical
publication of theory, was translated into English by Jason Smith for the journal Soft Targets.
All the quotations are from this online source. See http://tarnac9.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/
introcivilwar1.pdf.
4. Tiqqun is the French transcription of the original Hebrew term Tikkun olam, a concept
issuing from Judaism, often used in the kabbalistic and messianic traditions, which indicates all
at once reparation, restitution, redemption, and which covers in large part, among others, the
Jewish conception of social justice.
5. The most controversial of all these arrests is of Julien Coupat, who was detained for half a
year (released in May 2009) without charges being filed against him. A petition on his behalf
was signed among many others by Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc-Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben.
6. The Declaration “Against Police Violence and for Freedom of Demonstration,” issued on
May 3, 2009, in Linz called for a common action to protest against brutal police repression.
7. See Jelica Sumic-Riha, “Jetniki Drugega, ki ne obstaja” (Prisoners of the Inexistent Other),
in Filozofski vestnik/Acta Philosophica, journal, published by the Institute of Philosophy ZRC
SAZU, Ljubljana 2007.
8. See Walter Mignolo statement that says: “Decolonizing Knowledge: Postcolonial Studies,
Decolonial Horizons is part of a larger intellectual and political initiative generally referred to
as the ‘modernity/(de)coloniality research project.’ A basic assumption of the project takes
knowledge-making, since the European Renaissance, as a fundamental aspect of ‘coloniality’—
the mission of saving the world by imposing an ideal model of society, of economy, and of
being. ‘Decolonizing knowledge’ becomes, then, a task and a process of emancipation from
assumed principles of knowledge and understanding of how the world is and should be.”
Published at http://tarragona.waltermignolo.com.
9. See Sebastjan Leban, “De-linking from Capital and the Colonial Matrix of Power,” in Pavilion
no. 14, edited by Marina Grzinic, Bucharest, 2010 (forthcoming).
10. See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” (Lecture at the Collège de France, February 1,
1978), in: Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, & Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104.
92
11. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998). Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics,
Agamben argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, and throughout the history
of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.
12. Just one of the examples occurring on a daily basis in the First Capitalist world that can
be counted to 100 (but they are in reality hidden) is the secret deportation of 100 Vietnamese
families, men, women, and children on June, 8 2009, by Air Berlin from Berlin to Hanoi.
Precisely because of alternative groups it was possible to get this secret information.
13. See Achile Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, no 15 (1) (2003): 11-40.
14. See http://www.reartikulacija.org/RE6/ENG/positioning6_ENG_kurti.html. All references to
Kurti are from this text.
15. See Rubia Salgado, “Participation and Documentary. Artists and Migrants in Participatory
Art Projects,” in CITY VIEWS. A photo project: migrant perspectives, Martin Krenn, ed.
(Vienna: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2004), republicart, Bd. 3, http://www.republicart.net/publications/
cityviews_index.htm.
16. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, new translation by Richard Philcox (New
York: Grove Press, 2004).

Dr. Marina Grzinic is a philosopher, artist and theoretician. She lives in Ljubljana, works in
Ljubljana and Vienna. Dr. Grzinic is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Institute
of Fine Arts, Post Conceptual Art Practices. She is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at
the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in
Ljubljana. She also works as freelance media theorist, art critic, and curator. Her latest book is
Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, Academy of Fine Arts,
Vienna and Schlebrügge. She has been involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration
with Aina Smid, Marina Grzinic has realized more than 40 video art projects. She is the co-
editor of REARTIKULACIJA artistic-political-theoretical-discursive platform from Ljubljana. For
more info: http://www.grzinic-smid.si/v
93
 Julie Ault

Of Several Minds Over Time

The following excerpts from earlier writings, and the current observations
that follow them, track my thinking on the import and influence
of alternative structures in the art field. First is an excerpt from the
introduction to the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Cultural
Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement, NYC, 1996,
which analyzed the growth, decline, and then-current potential of the
alternative arts network. The second excerpt derives from my introduction
to Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985, the book that extended
from that inquiry begun several years earlier. This second piece reflects
my thinking in the early 2000s, as the notion of alternative appeared
outmoded, and the once-vital field became history. These revisited texts
are followed by some thoughts that emerge from considering apexart’s
interrogation of the current relationships between alternative thinking/
practice and alternative space. I combed the earlier writing to remind
myself what I thought was at stake at key moments of shift, and combine
them here to convey, albeit fragmentarily, the contextual condition of my
relationship to the subject.

Why is today the same as every other day? (1995)

The very word alternative produces endless arguments. It is provocative
and meaningless, and suggests simultaneously an opening up and a
closing down. Naming oneself alternative sets up both distance from
94
and bondage to dominant institutions and ideas. It implies both a
subordinate and a rebellious, perhaps productive, relationship to power.
For critically constructive activities and structures it becomes essential
to reject the term as a label. The more radical a group or effort, the
more likely it is to resist the tag. “We are not alternative to anything” is
a much-echoed sentiment that defies simple binary readings of power
and its dynamics. Resisting the label positions margin as center: maybe
not center center, but central in a given context. These are not just word
games. Identifications and refusals have real consequences in the art
world system, the real world.

Anarchy, hierarchy
The art world system. The social, economic, and political systems and
forces that determine and influence what happens in the cultural field form
an arena that has no central governing body, a space in which variously
antagonistic, competitive, and harmonious institutional and individuated
relationships occur. But of course, structures encourage certain behaviors
and penalize those who do not respond.
Superficially, the art world configuration of entities and institutions
locked in relativity defines itself along frictions and clearly delineated
functions—between alternative and mainstream, nonprofit and for-profit,
subordinate and dominant. Specialization and interdependence go hand in
hand. Whatever the details, the system still operates and reproduces itself.
A fundamental question arises from a purely positional picture of the art
world as a system. What are the relations within that system? Relations
refer to interactions between elements, and the positions they occupy vis-
à-vis each other. The arrangement of units is a property of the system, not
of the elements themselves.
A significant dilemma facing alternative spaces and structures is
the onset of bureaucracy and hierarchy. Openness and commitment to
flexibility in programming as well as in daily operations are frequently
95
 sacrificed to the demands of funding constancy, which mandate
conventional, static administrative processes. Financial stability takes
center stage when salaries and rent are past due. Under these conditions
it’s difficult to be spontaneous or debate essential questions about
philosophy and purpose.
Alternative spaces, mid-level organizations, and larger cultural
institutions too often accept their roles as participants in the art world
system with little tangible resistance. Consequently, a balance of power
is achieved, expectations and functions are overdetermined, and creative
approaches no longer flourish, and are perhaps no longer welcome.
The unwelcome associations of the label alternative—
marginalization and diminishment—are further complicated by the perils
of a market culture that smoothly incorporates alternatives as style—
pressworthy and, until recently, fundable. Social critique and political
meaning are often diffused by mainstream commercial processes.
Alternative is always contextual. Despite the predicaments, the
idea of alternative, in some genuine sense, still carries exciting possibilities
of being responsive—even reactive—but also constructive, creative, and
generative. Ideally, alternative might refer to origins, beginnings, processes,
and journeys. When an alternative becomes a container or destination, it
takes on a structural function and becomes a form of official or accepted
dissent within an established system.
Many of the activities represented in Cultural Economies have
positively affected constellations of cultural power, which continue to shift.
Yet economic, cultural, and social power (abstract and concrete) perseveres
structurally, regardless of reformatory changes and redress. Despite possibilities
for change, one truth seems evidenced by the cyclical nature of conflicts
between artists and cultural institutions and audiences: the only remedies for
structural problems are structural changes. This is why artist-run alternative
spaces, and eventually alternative networks, evolved in the first place.

96
Alternative New York (2002)
Public funding for alternative spaces and structures was accompanied by a
conflict. In order to comply with funding guidelines, hierarchical structures
were required, and daily operations turned bureaucratic. Remaining open
and flexible in programming became improbable within these conditions,
which demanded program planning, sometimes years in advance, as well
as adherence to regimented administrative procedures. Over time, as the
venues and organizations that composed an alternative sector adopted
business models of organization and became entrenched in routines
resulting from guidelines for administration and programming imposed by
funding agencies, new disillusionment and dissatisfactions occurred among
artists, this time with the alternatives themselves. The symbiotic relationship
between public cultural funding and the development of the alternative art
sector is calculable. Amid that history many alternatives collapsed into their
opposites, eventually coming to resemble that which they had originally
sought to counter.
The number of alternative spaces, collectives, and collaborative
structures that formerly constituted a vibrant cultural network but
have closed their doors or dissolved in recent years seems to signal the
disintegration—even the obsolescence—of an alternative art sphere as
once known. There is only a vestige of an alternative network remaining,
whereas previously there was an alternative art world made up of venues
and voices, practices and projects, agendas and events, embedded in New
York City’s art world system.
Several questions emerge at this juncture. Where have alternatives
and challenges to the status quo of the art industry since located? What
forms have they taken? Is the concept of alternative as known through this
movement any longer viable or desirable? What happened to the political,
cultural, and social agendas and practices that provoked the alternative arts
field initially? Is there a continuum? Some argue that significant changes
have occurred within the art institutions that were criticized and challenged
97
 by alternative initiatives. Some say, now, everything is possible within the
mainstream art world. Having worked in this field for over twenty years,
I can attest to some welcome changes—to more inclusive curatorial
policies in many art institutions, to dislodged boundaries and hierarchies
between mediums, and to new levels of cultural democracy. I can also
attest to enduring opposition to substantive structural changes in the art
system. In response to criticisms and charges of elitist and discriminatory
policies—from artists, from actual and potential audiences, as well as from
funding agencies—many institutions widened their doors and appear to
be more democratic in recent years in terms of whose work gets exhibited,
sponsored, commissioned, and collected. Yet, just when many mainstream
cultural institutions sought to critically redress elitist museological practices,
the virtual collapse of the NEA functionally undermined the potential
civic roles they, and art, might play. In the early 1990s, small and large
institutions went searching for corporate partnerships, and hired marketing
consultants to develop moneymaking strategies in order to diversify their
financial support. Simultaneously, what remained of public funding, as well
as subsidies to artists from private foundations, got linked to the idea that
noncommercial art must prove its social function through predetermined
(and quantified ahead of time) community engagement. Collaborative,
public, and socially engaged art practices have to some degree been
codified and made bureaucratic at the expense of the real and risky social
relations that might be engendered.
I would like to believe that critical alternative activities have
permanently altered accepted notions of possible definitions and functions
of art. But a casual tour of New York’s art spaces, galleries, and museums
on any given day of the week does not necessarily support that belief.
Clearly the overhaul of the art industry and its social relations, posited by
many alternative organizations and lobbied for by numerous individuals
and groups, did not happen. Most art institutions are still hierarchically
organized with boards composed of preeminent members of high society
98
and finance. Most art institutions have no artists on their boards. Currently,
there is little evidence of experimentation, grossly insufficient exposure for
unaffiliated artists, curtailed potential for art’s infiltration into daily city life
and publicly used space, and limited indication of cultural activism by or for
artists. Art has not been reconnected to larger society, as was desired by
some, or to political and social issues. The art world remains just that—a
world unto itself that operates according to its own values and with its own
economic system.
In spite of the alternative arts movement, during much of the 1990s
and continuing into the present, the art field is marked by polarization,
with “aesthetic” practice (and product) at one end of the spectrum, and
“the political” at the other. The persistence of such obfuscation is one of
the problematic binarisms that many participants in the alternative sphere
aimed to disentangle and dislodge, through analysis, protest, dialogue, and
example.

Institutional Pathology and Alternative Paths (2010)

Alternative is a contextual concept that requires its actions and
manifestations be infinitely mutable. For some time now the notion of
alternative has been confined to what is shown, discussed, and publicized
rather than how and with what methods and forms. Alternative space is
considered to be venue rather than medium or an end in itself—which
is a far cry from artist-run, practice-centered, community-building models.
Alternative structures took a philosophical hit from institutionalization and
its concomitant economic dependency that in turn promoted hierarchical
organization and conventional procedures. In many instances, missions,
rhetoric, inner workings, and public programming became entanglements
of contradictory agendas, with incongruous results. Reflexivity, which
is innate to alternative structures, gave way to proverbial institutional
pathologies. Customized organizational structures and methods
representative of divergent values have been tragically neglected in favor
99
 of standard bureaucratic reproduction. (There have been and are significant
exceptions, but I’m referring to the norm.) For me, the lost opportunity in
the alternative arts movement lies in the failure to effectively envision or
create reflexive modus operandi that can persevere even as they mutate.
(Again, there are exceptions, but I’m talking about the larger picture.) If
institutions are going to reflect and advance alternative principles and
produce culture differently, every aspect of organizational process requires
rethinking and potential reconfiguring. As the young Soviet poet Vladimir
Mayakovsky so aptly wrote early in the 20th century: “All things cry out,
give us new forms.” Starting from the core.
Assigned locations for alternative ideals and actions presume relative
freedom while concurrently defining and delimiting: hence the paradox of
alternative space. Was “free space”—freedom from and freedom to—ever
achievable or is it more myth than lived experience? Specific situations may
fleetingly seem free; in keeping with the paradox, however, the trajectory
of the alternative arts movement verifies both yes and no.
Perhaps a useful analogy to the territorialized cultural economy
lies in the structure of the romantic triangle. One partner in a primary
relationship takes on a lover, thereby creating a harbor for transgression.
Dissatisfaction with the main partner is diverted into satisfaction with
the other. Competing arenas of convention and transgression interlock
as they compose the field of intimacy. The unsatisfactory situation seems
improved thanks to the inclusion of the structural substitute, which
shifts the relational ground and everything that happens on it. How the
circumstances, desires, and denials of the three individuals interface
affects the configuration’s duration. Inevitably though, rupture happens.
When the lover departs, experimental modes of being and yearning for
the unhindered lose their site of articulation. Typically it is then that the
initial partners confront one another and work through their conflicting
agendas to reinvest, recompose, or part. Whatever happens, the divergent
proposition that was activated by the triangle must in its aftermath arrange
100
different means for expression. Now that the love affair artists and others
initiated with alternative structures is largely history, we seem to be in a
similar transition.1
In the mid 1980s, on the cusp of his Soho gallery debut, an artist
friend who had until then exclusively exhibited his art in alternative spaces
and nonprofit venues confidently told me, “Now everything is possible
within the market.” Some time later, in the mid 1990s, during a lecture
to art students, a curator from a prominent New York museum was asked,
“What can’t you show? What isn’t allowed into the museum?” Without
skipping a beat he said, “There’s nothing we can’t show.” (Paul McCarthy
was invoked as a case in point.) Incredulous on both occasions, I thought,
these are delusions, fantasies that do not function at ground level. I still feel
the claims are inaccurate, but now regard them less defensively than back
when I believed in the need for and viability of alternative spaces.
Has the dissolution of margin and center occurred? The terrain of
the art world and its sectors changed dramatically in the last decade and are
continually in flux. Yet even though the old divisions do not prevail in name
it is uncertain how they might operate in the social mind-set. What if, once
and for all, we individually and collectively were to reject binaries including
marginal and mainstream, radical and traditional, nonprofit and commercial,
political and aesthetic—both in language and practice—and renounce
convenient headers that mark cultural activity? Locatable containment
a thing of the past, “alternatives” would cease to function as fetishized
situations and potentially be anywhere and everywhere, transforming
culture as we know it. Wouldn’t a widespread and unpredictable rerouting
of thinking and practices commonly filed under different, oppositional, and
transgressive arise? (Or is this already accomplished—not by purpose but
by default—within current all-pervading, all-absorbing market culture?) It
follows that the dislocation of alternative space should engender critical
reinvestment in challenging and transforming existing art institutions
on their structures, priorities, organizational forms, and programming
101
 formats. (Or does cynicism only deepen in the absence of the refuge and
sympathetic facility that the places of so-called alternative discourse seem
to offer?) Segregation and integration are incredibly complex paradigms,
which cannot be separated from the power dynamics that set the stage for
cultural enactment. (Personally I am more ambivalent and at a loss about
these issues than ever.)
Too many art institutions of all size and attitude seem hell-bent on
preserving their authority and infinite self-reproduction as though solvency
and existence were enough. Having been on a number of treadmills
during my work history—first within the collaborative Group Material and
subsequently on my own—I can confirm the deadening effects that full-on
production and representation have on one’s creativity and spirit. In order
to satisfy the system (use and be used), one has little choice but to enter
into fixed participation and work at an industry-determined pace. Although
I sometimes thrive on deadlines and pressure, at other times my optimal
working process and pace (on either a particular project or in general) are
in sharp contrast to external expectations and the demands of institutional
machinery. The scary part of being on a treadmill is it could go on ad
infinitum if the brakes are not deployed. No one will pull them for you.
Reflexivity is an internal process. I have found it essential to periodically stop
and remind myself this is not how I want to work, or spend my time. What
comes after is the struggle to restore balance between public and private
activities, between performing and artistic process, and to ultimately reclaim
my prerequisites for new thinking and work—an empty calendar and mental
spaciousness.
Institutions get on the industry treadmill just as individuals do. It’s
no secret that the art industry collectively suffers from a cultivated form of
Attention Deficit Disorder. Art institutions likewise appear unwilling and
unable to entertain ambiguity or include periods for behind-the-scenes
reflection and exploration geared toward deepening their work and their
methods. Were cultural institutions to regard their process as a creative
102
one that is reflexive, doubt ridden, and productively discontinuous rather
than a bureaucratic one that rigidly and arrogantly takes itself and its
ways for granted, some benefits might ensue. The notion of the time-
out—time to analyze, to think, to inquire and reflect—is essential to any
dynamic enterprise. Perhaps the most important questions any institution,
organization, or individual practitioner can periodically pose inward (as well
as publicly) are, “Why do this? Is there need? Is there desire? Does my/
our work fill a void? What is at stake beyond immediate pressures and
deadlines? What would happen if we stopped and took stock? What if we
closed our doors for a month? A year? Could it be productive? How would
we do things differently if we didn’t do what we’re doing, if we threw the
manual out the window? Why is today the same as every other day?”
Programming mania is a burgeoning problem germane to art
institutions as they rival for funding and audiences in a less differentiated
field, regardless of their orientation and scale. I wonder at the sheer volume
of the habitual filling of calendars and spaces, which in the process applies
institutional generalities that exhaust people (staff, art field practitioners,
audiences), practices, and topics. Subject matter is hashed and rehashed
with different participants, different titles, in different places, and on
different dates. Programming by name artists (artists that embody or
represent a specific classification or have marquee appeal) is common.
Relentless programming is necessarily dependent on people’s willingness
to repetitiously propagate their work and its portrayal, at once distributing
ideas and contributing to the production of the hosting institution.
Authoring artistic identity fluidly and subtly becomes a formidable
challenge given cultural forces and their penchant for labels. The field
is overrun with presentations, panels, events, and exhibitions; capable
participants meet the expedient programming call of hosting institutions,
but how can discursive mediums be taken seriously in such a setup? A
detrimental cycle is in motion. (In my experience I increasingly encounter
insensitive programming attitudes focused on “plugging me in,” with no
103
 substantive dialogue whatsoever about the context, content, methods,
or purpose.) No doubt such programming trends are symptomatic of the
daunting institutional expansionism that has been de rigueur for some time
as well as the imagined requisite that institutions do constantly project—to
get and give their money’s worth. As far as programming is concerned,
small nonprofits, museums, and everything in between mirror one another,
obliterating differences as they attempt to consolidate their identities
and niche markets. (More evidence of the dissolution, albeit uncritical?)
Bureaucratic and business model mind-sets with competition at their core
guide all variety of arts institutions; even as the cultural field expands it is
made narrower by these approaches.
People supposedly depend on routines and conventions for security
and sanity, but ultimately such prescriptions are control devices. Many
entrenched procedural rules are insensitive to practitioners and simply
do not accommodate other ways of thinking and doing. While it might
seem unrealistic to negotiate each activity anew within one’s daily life or
in the processes of institutional goings-on, generalizing social relationships
continues to produce alienation all around. Courage and open-mindedness
are required to do otherwise.
Reading through these earlier texts reminded me that the problems
that played out in many alternative undertakings were inherent and
present from jump. Possible effects on the art world system were likewise
burdened. The arc from relative optimism to realism to pessimism in my
current impressions is striking. Primarily this retrospection confirms my
irreconcilable ambivalence about the art field cultural economy, and how I
can productively function within it.
A lot of energy participating in the system goes to supplying
prescribed shallow descriptions as well as formulaic events and exhibitions
that fuel institutional reproduction while draining creative practitioners, short-
circuiting ideas, and shortchanging viewers. Some might say, “Goes with the
territory.” “That’s just how things work.” “Sign of the times.” But does it have
104
to be this way? Of course not. Let’s start doing things intentionally. Seriously.
If only with our individual manners of participating in the system and through
what we ask of it, and through what we ask of one another.

NOTES

1. See Laura Kipnis, Against Love. A Polemic (New York: Vintage Books, 2003) for an insightful
and entertaining reading of the social roles of love and adultery in contemporary culture.
Against Love inspired my analogy of the romantic triangle to the alternative/mainstream
dichotomy.

Note: The 1995 comments are excerpted from the introduction to the catalogue, Cultural
Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement, NYC (The Drawing Center, New York
City, Spring 1996), and the 2002 excerpt is from “Alternative New York” in Julie Ault, Martin
Beck, Critical Condition, Selected Texts in Dialogue (Essen: Kokerei Zollverein/Zeitgenössische
Kunst und Kritik, 2003). That essay was a revised version of “For the Record,” introductory
essay to Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press and The Drawing Center, 2002).

Julie Ault is an artist, writer, and editor who independently and collaboratively organizes
diversiform projects. Her work emphasizes interrelationships between cultural production and
politics. Recent projects include working with Danh Vo on the publication where the lions are,
Basel Kunstahalle, 2009, Wet and Wild: The Spirit of Sister Corita, signal, Malmö, 2007, and
Installation, Vienna Secession, 2006, in collaboration with Martin Beck. Ault is the editor of Show
and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (Four Corners Books, 2010), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (steidl/
dangin, 2006), and Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985 (University of Minnesota Press, 2002),
and is the author of Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (Four Corners Books, 2006).
105
 Renaud Ego

The Forest in the Clearing

One evening, on my way to the theater at La Friche de la Belle de Mai, an

alternative art space in Marseille, I saw a tag that read “CULTURE = CAPITAL
– DEATH TO ARTISTS.” The expression was violent, embodying a kind of
schematic radicality, but it was equally disturbing to see the commercial and
promotional devaluation of art summarized in this way. In France, Marseille
is seen as a large, but poor, city, where for years municipal bureaucrats and
the so-called political “elite” have shown a disconcerting contempt for
culture. Within that context La Friche de la Belle de Mai has served as a
place of resistance. Nearly sixty different venues are located here, covering
a very broad spectrum of artistic expression, from the most marginal to the
well established, and sometimes the most innovative. Confronted by the
anger of the tag, I thought of the recent past, when violence had torn apart
the disadvantaged neighborhoods of the urban periphery throughout the
country. The rioters, very young for the most part, had burned schools, a
media center, a library, as if those institutions had betrayed the promises
they appeared to embody, namely, that education and culture guaranteed
that everyone would find a job and have a role to play in French society. But
that society is undermined by a level of social and ethnic segregation that
education, much less culture or art, can rarely overcome.
There is a language of anger, and that language is violence. We
can see it as a failure of expression. We can even see it as what remains
106
of an articulate being when deprived of language. But violence expresses
anger in a way that is immediate, inseparable from the speaking body,
and possesses an accuracy that mere argument would find difficult to
preserve. People are shocked when I say I am surprised that it is not more
widespread. It is not that I wish to see violence erupt, only that it would be
natural. Yes, strangely enough, calmness is the norm. However, the effects
of economic aggression are widespread, profoundly affecting “cultures,”
in the sense given to the word by anthropologists: the uses, behaviors, and
beliefs current in a society. Apathy is one of its manifestations. Rimbaud’s
old imperative remains: “Find a language.”
That the aura of art and literature has paled, I have no doubt.
Believing in the power of images because of their global distribution over
digital or broadcast networks is one thing. But to evoke the magic associated
with the earliest images, when humanity observed the inherent power of
representation without really understanding it, is another. Yet, even with
the transformations brought about by the passage of time, some of that
prestige remains. Even when caricatured by the entertainment industry and
derided by the widely held belief that equates wealth with money, something
of the richness implicit in the idea of creation survives. But by defecting, by
disengaging, as certain guerilla techniques recommend, or simply, by that
invisible vagabondage through which the complex tissue of contemporary
societies promotes movement, individuals and small groups trace subterranean
lines that sometimes become issues when exposed to daylight. This is the
vocation of those “minor leagues,” as Steven Rand proposed calling them,
whose creativity overflows the field of art—this much is obvious.
How do they work? I will limit myself to what I am most familiar
with. Through the cumulative action of the work of writers and artists,
they have expelled art and culture from the ideal spheres in which a
retrograde ideological apparatus has maintained them. By reinscribing
them in the world, by chasing them from the paradise of ideas, they have
enabled them to function quite differently: through capillary action, and
107
 the use of a complex logic of contamination. The effects are barely visible,
often ambiguous, and devoid of any claim to purity or grandeur. What
in France are called “urban cultures”—artistic forms that have for years
been considered marginal or minority, such as rap, graffiti, or hip-hop—
have emerged into the open and even acquired a patina of respectability.
A century ago this would have been impossible. Of course, in the process
of their mediation, they have lost in aggressiveness what they have gained
in recognition. Now they are exhibited in officially sanctioned venues and
disseminated widely through record company catalogues. Conservatives
see their very emergence (as always) as a sign of the loss of taste and,
more broadly, as a form of relativism in which all things are equal: Gang
Star and Henri Dutilleux, Fab Five Freddy, and the anonymous creators of
the caves of Lascaux. Others focus on the commercial promotion of such
transgressive icons. But with their official acceptance, their provocation and
the artistic forms associated with it become a form of kitsch, inoffensive,
and vaguely ridiculous. The balance is difficult to maintain. For my part, I
note that these languages have spread their power of violation elsewhere
to become the basis of artistic and social practices shared by a large part
of the world’s youth. How can we remain deaf to this? How can we refuse
to listen to them, aside from simple matters of taste?
Today, we work in a space where the different spheres of society are
connected to one another. The marriage of art and power, and now fashion,
luxury goods, advertising, and economic power, have a single face, even
though they have been celebrated for countless years in other forms (we
need only consider the courts of Europe or the cities where Bach, Velazquez,
Titian, and Mozart were employed). The competition among the world’s
capitals, which spend lavishly to build monuments ostensibly designed by
the stars of modern architecture or open museums of contemporary art,
is also an implicit recognition of the inherent value of the idea of creation.
That it’s a question of capturing its effects or its images for very different
purposes goes without saying. The market generates activity—architecture,
108
as the production of monuments, is flourishing today—and brings about a
desire for creativity that escapes a logic that is not inherent to architecture
but to its owners. The great virtue of norms is that we seek to surpass them.
Cultural institutions know this, and they so deeply fear being seen as dated
that they are always on the lookout for the latest fashions. Unfortunately,
what is called new is most often merely pompous.
But in this incessant movement, genuinely fine works of art are
discovered. An official institution like the Georges Pompidou Center
in Paris has for years been an exemplary venue for the presentation of
minority cultures. The Center has displayed sophisticated works that are
largely unknown and, much more importantly, helped transform cultural
habits by breaking down the barriers among artistic disciplines and the
viewing public. An exhibit such as the 1989 Magiciens de la terre changed
the way we look at primitive art. Has P.S. 1 lost its edge by becoming a
satellite of MoMA or has it merely lost the prestige that ensured, in the
eyes of a limited public, its earlier marginality? I don’t know. Whatever
the case, the distinction between official institutions, assumed to be
inherently conservative, and marginal spaces, where real creativity
emerges, has become fuzzy. We move at the shifting border between the
two; exchanges take place in all directions and contribute to the sense of
confusion. The strategies of infiltration are mutual, and there has never
been such a diversity of art projects as today. We can get lost in this, the
untarnished mirror of a confused era. However, I prefer the misuse of this
freedom and even the vanity of certain kinds of excess to the comfortable
self-sufficiency of a passionless art, bound up with a closed definition of
itself or subject to a one-dimensional notion of the sense of history.
Yet, when speaking of the institutions and places necessary to
the mediation of art or, in my case, literature, we are already beyond the
margins defined by the time and space in which a creative work appears.
For it is always a question of a nascent thought and, potentially, another
thought generated by an experience that is both unexpected and shared
109
 by all existence, reinvented in other languages, and aligned with different
customs. And it is always the doing of individuals or very small, local groups:
Dada, born in a cabaret in Zurich, where artists and poets from all Europe
came together; bebop, in a handful of clubs in New York City; hip-hop
in a Bronx ghetto; or cubism, in three or four studios in Montmartre and
Montparnasse. I could multiply the number of examples, all of which (and
this is reassuring) express the inherent ability of individuals to acknowledge
and respond to the anonymous injunction addressed to us by humanity’s
quest for fulfillment. Once again, Rimbaud expresses the reasoning behind
this with limpid concision: “The inventions of the unknown demand new
forms.” Forms of organization, life, love, action, forms of art—they are
all one. Their articulation is a kind of expression, and that expression is
sometimes capable of changing the direction of history.
But how can we encourage this? And in asking this question, I am
not referring to forms of collective action, an expression that has imprinted
some of its melody on the world, but to the infinitesimal and primary
vantage point of the individual, without which it would not exist. For
example, the individual that I am. How can one preserve the alert readiness
that guarantees critical and creative freedom, when everything conspires
to make this impossible? Basically, by safeguarding for oneself a “temporal
space” for observation and attention. In my case this coincides with the
table in the café where I write these lines, or the train where I began them
a few days ago, or the house where I will continue them. Thus understood
as a mental rather than a physical space, the “studio” is the possibility of a
withdrawal that is also an opening. This does not mean having to sacrifice
oneself to an outmoded vision of art, literature, or any other activity
brought to its conclusion, but to evoke the work, the concentration, the
care needed to construct thought liberated from its constraints. To express
this somewhat more crudely: sometimes it’s a struggle, and it requires a
kind of stoic discipline to achieve that coincidence with ourselves when we
stop struggling. In the studio of the painter Gérard Fromanger, I read the
110
following quote from Picasso, which was pinned to the wall like a discreet
invitation not to disturb him for too long: “Nothing is accomplished
without solitude. I created a solitude for myself that no one suspects.” It’s
true, the invention of solitude, an interior space both spiritual and physical,
is a form of combat. And nothing is more threatened by the instruments
of fascination that seek to occupy our thoughts than the very possibility of
such interiority. In that sense, how can we avoid thinking of advertising’s
invasion of the public space, which our sight pays for and which makes use
of our eyes, without our consent, to accomplish its goals? This is merely
the most obscene form of a much more insidious intrusion, permanent
and profound. Our future depends on our resisting it. Otherwise, all we
have is the syrupy lie of universal commercial distraction that, draped in its
ludic and seductive attributes, tries to grab our attention in order to make
us its captives. Although threatened, this interiority remains the meaning
of the clearing. The clearing lies in the heart of the forest, as we are truly
in the heart of the world, to negotiate a withdrawal, and it is the very
place where the forest takes over. “The solitary will be soiled by all,” wrote
Henri Michaux in his luminous expression, defending, in withdrawal, an
equitable relationship to others, to the city, and to the world. The last of
the silent, the last of the invisibles is a solitary individual who preserves a
way of life essential to everyone. Like the shepherd or the last nomadic
tribe. Faced with the uniformization of ways of life, it is a justification
of biodiversity understood as the sustained possibility of a plurality of
individual becomings, necessary for humanity’s survival.
That this withdrawal threatens the social order, there is no doubt.
For, such a position also means taking a stand, if only in the form of
a categorical refusal of the pressure of society to use, and co-opt, our
time. The marginality of such withdrawal is coincident with the room for
maneuver it affords, but exclusion may also be the price we pay. We would
have to be naïve or inconsistent not to acknowledge the risk. As Gérard
de Nerval wrote, “there are doctors and government officials who make
111
 sure the field of poetry is not broadened at the expense of the public
thoroughfare.” If, as a writer and, especially, a poet, I have for a long
time belonged to an avant-garde, it is one of precarious freedom, shared
by those whose actions involve a kind of defection, even at the price of
the economic uncertainty such a situation implies. It is neither a privilege
nor a gift, much less a peremptory demand for acknowledgement. It is
simply a condition of existence, a condition necessary to the intensity with
which one chooses to live one’s life. Compared to my friends, overcome by
bitterness and sometimes despair, I at least have the advantage of my own
inabilities: inept at holding a job, resistant to any form of discipline that is
not self-imposed, for a long time I have lived by inventing, for better or for
worse, my own means of subsistence. Without compromising or disguising
my words, but with the luxury of a non-negotiable independence.
This withdrawal is no more a form of detention than solitude is a
form of isolation. Both are an opportunity that, in my experience, creates
exchanges, encounters, and a word-of-mouth network, even within
the micro-economy it generates. Such a network is one kind of minor
league; there are many others. It is a community without attachments
but one that is secretly active, just as combinations of chemical elements
give rise to new compounds. It is a constellation of work, reflection, and
activity that, like the constellations of stars, is visible only in the night
sky. In my case, it consists of friends, writers, artists, journals, publishers
large and small, newspapers, the various institutions I work with, the
schools where I lecture, the podiums where I read. Within it, “small”
structures (publishers, for example) are frequently the boldest, for their
agility prevents loss of energy. This constellation has no stable form and
no clear limits, for it possesses multiple, crossed extensions, which each
of us is capable of giving it. Nor does it have a center because, since we
are all within it, we are also a center. Finally, it has no origin and no limit,
because it is the metamorphosis of the various groups or networks to
which everyone supplies a piece of their own history. Is it a space? Yes, but
112
not in the sense of having extent. It embodies an elusive (and therefore
free) form of interconnecting relationships. Is it an alternative space? Yes,
but more like a “possibility,” which exists in every social organization when
individuals not connected by some shared sense of belonging (religious,
ethnic, political) are able to act in concert. There is no model, even if
every era reinvents the modalities of operation. Ultimately the veiled
permanence of such constellations is the proof of their effectiveness and
value, the inestimable value of escaping any monetary estimate. That is
why such minor leagues are “priceless” in both senses of the word: within
a civilization whose general value system is based solely on the monetary
dimension given to the notion of “price,” nothing and no one can buy
them. They have no equivalent and that is why they escape the problem
of market value.
What I have described as my working and living space, could just
as easily apply to what is happening today on the Web and which has
made that space, although on a much different scale, such a fascinating
environment. The reasons for this can be found primarily in the libertarian
egalitarianism of its architecture, its fundamental lack of hierarchy, its
metamorphosis, and its development, which makes mapping it difficult, if
not impossible. Computer tools, digital language and its variants, represent
a major revolution that, far beyond the technology itself, affect the way
we live, work, and interact. We all observe this in our own life. But it is
equally true, and in a much more subversive way, because of the quality
of the content that each of us places at the disposal of others, without
the anticipation of recompense. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler sees in
this the emergence of an ethics of contribution that erases the distinction
between producers and consumers, and the capitalist model based on
such an organizational structure. He cites the examples of Wikipedia and
open-source software, which is based on the collective transformation
of software through improvements made by users, without any one
individual profiting from those improvements. Likewise, there are many
113
 websites where individuals with similar interests or animated by a shared
commitment, exchange information and make it available to anyone,
without any recompense other than participating in the construction of a
common space. Such behaviors point to a symbolic extension of capitalism
and are an intuitive recognition of the inherent value of the gift. That
is why, in France, the culture industries are fighting tooth and nail to
criminalize exchanges that threaten to overturn their economic model.
The laws that have been voted in, at their initiative, are ridiculous because
they are inapplicable, and they are retrograde because their proponents
do not see in these new forms of behavior an anthropological rupture that
no one can stop.
Of course, the question of remuneration comes up. But it is
also because they present themselves as inimical to the organization of
capitalism that alternative models of exchange have come into existence.
Yet, in these practices of sharing, other forms of payment are involved.
The advantage one gets may take the form of prestige (access to a
certain kind of fame), self-esteem (through generosity), or even a kind
of sociability (being a member of a group), but it is one that cannot be
reduced to commercial benefit. In that sense, it embodies something that
ruins the classical utilitarianism of business theory, as the anthropologist
Marcel Mauss had already shown in 1924 in The Gift, which revealed how
egotism and cupidity are not the exclusive motives for individual action,
far from it. We are forced to conclude, therefore, that such contributions,
and the pacific virtue that Mauss recognized in them, have found on
the Web a place in which to manifest the creativity of other modes of
existence, freed of the violence inherent in competitive economic models.
Collective knowledge spaces based on the contributions of participants
express an impassioned individual relationship to an object. The sharing
of knowledge, like the ethics of scientific research, and an openness to
strangers—an underlying principle of the work of art—serve as a challenge
to the capitalist logic of expropriation. The Web is already the theater of
114
their confrontation, and giving credibility to the idea of an alternative is
not the least of its virtues. Faced with an ideological model that terrorizes
the imagination by claiming that “there is no alternative,” another world
clears a path to the invention of other outlets.
Every technology is Januslike. Television could have been a tool of
awareness and understanding but instead has become an instrument of
total mindlessness and mind control, which the president of the leading
French network expressed as follows: “For an advertiser’s message to
be understood, the viewer’s brain has to be accessible. The job of our
broadcasts is to make them available. That means entertaining them,
relaxing them so they are accessible in the interim between two messages.
What we’re selling to Coca-Cola is the human brain time available.” His
statement has the virtue of clarity. Such tensions already exist on the Web,
but if I am naïve enough to believe it might escape such a fate, it is because
it is still made by all of us and not managed only by a few. In its decentered
and headless character, I perceive a very strange echo of the vow made
by Lautréamont: “poetry must be made by all, not by one.” We should
not interpret this to mean that everyone must become a poet, but rather
that the work of the poem, like the work of art, is the creation of a space
accessible to all, in which each of us participates from wherever we happen
to be, just as the reader and viewer also make the poem or painting, or
the play that is performed on stage. The universality of the work of art lies
in its claim that it is intended for us all. And even though something tells
me it won’t be equally accessible to everyone, I have no proof that this is
the case. The success of an aesthetic intention, which is another way of
saying the effectiveness of a work of art, is unverifiable. That is its enigma,
the condition of its possible universality, and what commits it to perpetual
reinvention.
The connection I wish to establish between what is at play in a
work of art and practices that have been developed on the Web is not one
of straightforward equivalence. But in either case we find an energy and
115
 a desire that reflect the richness of existence as well as possible strategies
for escaping the powers of repression or the capture of that vitality. If the
poem possesses for me the greatest experiential intensity I have found, it is
because it is not work but life. My being is not divided among the different
individuals that I am. They all participate. Each of my experiences—friend,
lover, parent, neighbor, flâneur—has a place, and this too is the sense of
Lautréamont’s statement. I am united in a relation of equanimity with all
the beings who compose me. It seems that this is the best way to be in the
world; I even have the sensation that I am in this way reborn to the world
at every moment. In this can be found the alternative I have invented to
escape the violence—the intimate divisions, internal walls, and unhappy
schizophrenias—inherent in every social order, especially one that seeks to
reduce my identity to that of a worker or consumer. There is a sense of
violation inherent in creation. The minor leagues are its conductive bodies
and the emblematic forms of its implementation. It is also their spirit that
holds sway, in certain Web spaces, with enhanced efficiency. That their
voices will grow louder is a foregone conclusion; in fact, they have only just
begun to be heard.

Translated by Robert Bononno.

Born in 1963, Renaud Ego lives and works in Paris. He is a French writer, active in the field
of literature and art studies. With other writers he founded in 1999 the literary review La
Pensée de Midi. In addition to his books of literature–poetry and novels–his essays and stud-
ies deal, more or less, with the question “what is an image?” shared by literature and visual
arts. Among his books of poetry are Le Désastre d’éden, Le Vide étant fait, La Réalité n’a rien
à voir. He wrote the poetry book Calendrier d’avants with Matthieu Messagier, a poet about
whom Renaud Ego wrote the essay L’Arpent du poème dépasse l’année-lumière. Among his
essays are also San, a book on rock paintings in Southern Africa, and various studies on art.
Recently published, his last book, Une Légende des yeux, plays with the boundaries of liter-
ary categories and mixes various narrative writings to tell the biographical story of a gaze.

116
Boris Groys

The Weak Universalism

In our times we know that everything can be an artwork. Or rather,

everything can be turned into an artwork by an artist. There is no possibility
for a spectator to distinguish between artwork and a “simple thing” on the
basis of this spectator’s visual experience alone. The spectator must know
that a particular object is used by an artist in the context of his or her artistic
practice to be able to identify this object as an artwork or as a part of an
artwork.
But who is the artist? And how the artist can be distinguished from
a non-artist—if such a differentiation is possible at all? That seems to me
to be a much more interesting question than the question of how we can
differentiate between artwork and the “simple thing.”
Meanwhile, we have a long tradition of institutional critique.
During the last few decades, the role of collectors, curators, trustees,
museum directors, gallerists, art critics, and so forth. has been extensively
analyzed and criticized by artists. But what about the artists themselves?
The contemporary artist is obviously also an institutional figure. And
contemporary artists are mostly ready to accept the fact that their critique
of art institutions is a critique from within. Thus, it seems that, today, the
artist is defined simply as a professional fulfilling a certain role in a general
framework of the art world that is based—as any other bureaucratic
organization or capitalist corporation—on the division of labor. And one
can also argue that part of this role is to criticize the art world with a goal to
117
 make it more open, more inclusive, better informed—and because of that
also more efficient and more profitable. This answer is certainly plausible,
but at the same time not really persuasive.
Let us remember the well-known maxim formulated by Joseph
Beuys: “Everybody is an artist.” This maxim has a long tradition going
back to the early Marxism and Russian avant-garde and therefore is
almost always characterized today—and was already characterized at
Beuys’ time—as being Utopian. Namely this maxim is understood as an
expression of a Utopian hope that in the future the mankind that currently
consists predominantly of non-artists becomes a mankind consisting of
artists. Now one can agree that such a hope is somehow implausible. But
I would never say that it is Utopian if the figure of the artist is defined as
it was just defined. A vision of the world that is completely turned into
the art world and in which every human being has to produce artworks
and compete for the chance to exhibit them at this or that Biennial is
by no means a Utopian vision. Rather, it is a dystopian vision—in fact, a
complete nightmare.
It can be said—and, indeed, it was often said—that Beuys had
a Romantic, Utopian understanding of figure and role of the artist. And
it is also often said that this Romantic, Utopian vision is passé. But this
diagnosis does not seem to me to be very persuasive. The tradition in
which our contemporary art world functions—including our current art
institutions—was formed after the Second World War. This tradition
is based on the art practices of the historical avant-garde—and their
updating and codification during the 1950s and 1960s of the last century.
Now, one does not have an impression that this tradition changed a lot
since that time. On the contrary, through time it became more and more
solidified. The new generations of professional artists find their access
to the art system predominantly through the network of art schools and
educational programs that have become increasingly globalized during
recent decades. This globalized and pretty uniform art education is based
118
on the same avant-garde canon that dominates other contemporary
art institutions—and that includes, of course, not only avant-garde art
production itself but also the art that was made later in the same avant-
garde tradition. The dominant mode of contemporary art production is
the academicized late avant-garde. That is why it seems to me that to be
able to answer who is the artist one should first of all turn back to the
beginnings of the historical avant-garde—and to the role of the artist as
it was defined at that time.
All art education—as any education in general—has to be based
on certain types of knowledge or a certain mastery that is supposed to be
transmitted from one generation to another. Thus, the question arises: What
kind of knowledge and mastery is transmitted by contemporary art schools?
This question, as we all know, produces a lot of confusion in contemporary
minds. The role of the pre-avant-garde art academies was well enough
defined. There it had to do with the well-established criteria of technical
mastery—in painting, sculpture and other media—that could be taught to
the art students. Today, art schools partially return to this understanding of
art education—especially in the field of new media. Indeed, photography,
film, video, digital art production, and so on require certain technical skills
that can be and are taught in art schools.
But of course, art cannot be reduced to the sum of technical skills.
That is why today we see the reemergence of the discourse on art as a form
of knowledge—a discourse that becomes unavoidable when art becomes
to be taught.
The claim that art is a form of knowledge is by no means new.
Religious art had a claim to present the religious truths in a visual,
pictorial form to a spectator who could not contemplate them directly.
And traditional mimetic art pretended to reveal the natural, everyday
world in a way in which the common spectator could not see it. Both of
these claims were criticized by many authors—from Plato to Hegel. And
both of these claims were endorsed by other authors—from Aristotle
119
 to Heidegger. But whatever one can say about the corresponding
philosophical pros and cons, both of these claims about art being a
specific form of knowledge were explicitly rejected by the historical
avant-garde—together with the traditional criteria of mastery connected
to these claims. Through the avant-garde, the profession of the artist
became de-professionalized.
The de-professionalization of art has put the artist in a pretty
awkward situation because this de-professionalization is often interpreted
by the public as a return of the artist to a status of non-professionalism.
Accordingly, the contemporary artist begins to be perceived as a professional
non-professional—and the art world as a space of “art conspiracy” (to use
the Baudrillard’s term). The social effectiveness of this conspiracy seems
to present a mystery that can be deciphered only sociologically (see the
writings of Bourdieu and his school).
However, the de-professionalization of art undertaken by the avant-
garde should not be misunderstood as a simple return to non-professionality.
De-professionalization of art is an artistic operation that transforms art
practice in general, rather than merely bringing an individual artist to the
original state of non-professionality. Thus, the de-professionalization of art
is in itself a highly professional operation. Later I will discuss the relationship
between de-professionalization and democratization of art. But at the
moment I would like to discuss knowledge and mastery that are needed to
de-professionalize art.
In his recent book, The Time That Remains (2005), Giorgio
Agamben describes—using the example of Saint Paul—the knowledge and
mastery that is required to become a professional apostle. This knowledge
is messianic knowledge—knowledge of the coming end of the world as
we know it, of contracting time, of the scarcity of time in which we live—
the scarcity of time that annuls every profession because the practicing of
every profession needs a perspective of longue durée—needs the duration
of time and the stability of the world as it is. In this sense the profession
120
of the apostle is, as Agamben writes, to practice the “revocation of
all the vocations.” One can also say “the de-professionalization of all
professions.” The contracting time impoverishes, empties all our cultural
signs and activities—turning them into zero signs or, rather, as Agamben
says, weak signs. Such weak signs are the signs of the coming end of time
being weakened by this coming, already manifesting the lack of time that
is needed to produce and to contemplate strong, rich signs. However,
at the end of time these messianic weak signs triumph over the strong
signs of our world—strong signs of authority, tradition, and power. But
also strong signs of revolt, desire, heroism, or shock. Speaking about the
“weak signs of the messianic” Agamben obviously has in mind “weak
messianism”—a term introduced by Walter Benjamin. But one can also
remember—even if Agamben does not—the term “kenosis” that in the
tradition of Greek theology characterized the figure of Christ—the life,
suffering, and death of Christ being a humiliation of human dignity, and
an emptying of the signs of divine glory. The figure of Christ is in this
sense also a weak sign that can be easily (mis) understood as a sign of
weakness—a point that was later extensively discussed by Nietzsche in his
“Anti-Christ.”
Now, I would suggest that the avant-garde artist is a secularized
apostle, a messenger of time who brings to the world the message that
time is contracting. That there is a scarcity of time, even the lack of time.
Modernity is, indeed, a time of the permanent loss of the familiar world
and of traditional conditions of living. It is a time of permanent change, of
historical breaks—new ends and new beginnings. Living within modernity
means to have no time, to experience a permanent scarcity, lack of time
because modern projects are mostly abandoned without being realized—
every new generation develops its own projects, its own techniques and
its own professions for the realization of its projects—that become again
abandoned by the following generation. In this sense, our present time
is not a post-modern but an ultra-modern time because it is the time in
121
 which scarcity of time, lack of time became increasingly more obvious.
We know it: today, everybody is busy—nobody has time.
Through the time of modernity we saw all our traditions and
inherited lifestyles being condemned to decline and disappear. But today we
do not trust also in the longevity of our present, actual fashions, lifestyles,
and ways of thinking. In fact, already at the moment of the emergence of
new trends and fashions we immediately begin to imagine their unavoidable
disappearance that we anticipate to come rather sooner than later. (Indeed,
when a new trend emerges the first thought that comes to one’s mind is:
how long will it last? And the answer is always: not so long.) One can say
that not only modernity but—and even to a much greater degree—our own
time is chronically messianic, or, rather, chronically apocalyptic. Everything
that exists and everything that emerges is almost automatically seen by us
under the perspective of its impending decline and disappearance.
The avant-garde is often associated with the notion of progress—
especially, technological progress. Indeed, one can find many statements
of the avant-garde artists and theorists that are directed against the
conservatives and insist on the futility of practicing old forms of art under
the new conditions that are determined by the new technology. But this
new technology was interpreted—at least by the first generation of the
avant-garde artists—not as a chance to build a new stable world but as
a machine of destruction of the old world—and also of the permanent
self-destruction of the modern technological civilization itself. The forces of
progress were perceived by the avant-garde predominantly as destructive
forces.
Thus, the avant-garde asked the following question: how could
art continue or, rather, how could artists continue to make art under the
conditions of the permanent destruction of cultural tradition and the familiar
world through the contracting of time which is the main characteristic of
the technological progress? Or, to say it in different terms: how to resist
the destructiveness of progress. How to make art that would escape the
122
permanent change—art that would be atemporal, transhistorical. The
avant-garde did not want to create art of the future—it wanted to create
transtemporal art for all times. Time and again one hears and reads that we
need change, that our goal—also our goal in art—should be to change the
status quo. But the change is our status quo. The permanent change is our
only reality. We are living in the prison of permanent change. To change the
status quo we have to change the change—to escape from the change. In
fact, every Utopia is nothing else—the escape from the change.
When Agamben describes the annulment of all our occupations and
the emptying of all our cultural signs through the messianic event, he does
not ask a question about how we can transcend the border that divides our
time, our era, from the coming one. Agamben does not ask this question
because the Apostle Paul does not ask it. Saint Paul believed that an individual
soul—being immaterial—would be able to cross this border and would not
perish even after the end of the material world. However, the artistic avant-
garde wanted to save not the soul but art. And it tried to do so by the means
of reduction—the reduction of the cultural signs to the absolute minimum
so that one could smuggle them across the breaks, shifts and permanent
change of the cultural fashions and trends.
This radical reduction of the artistic tradition had to anticipate the
full degree of its impeding destruction by the power of progress. By the
means of reduction the artists of the avant-garde began to create images
that seemed to them to be so poor, so weak, so empty that they would
survive every possible historical catastrophe.
When Kandinsky speaks in his On the Spiritual in Art (1911) about
the reduction of all painterly mimesis, all representation of the world—the
reduction that reveals that all paintings are actually combinations of colors
and shapes—he wants to guarantee the survival of his vision of painting
through all possible future cultural transformations, including even the most
revolutionary ones. The world that is painterly represented can disappear—
but the combination of colors and shapes will not. In this sense Kandinsky
123
 believes that all the images already created in the past or to be created in
the future can be seen also as his own paintings—because whatever the
images were, are, or could be, they remain necessarily the combinations of
certain colors and shapes. And that relates not only to painting but also to
all other media such as photography, cinema, and so forth. Kandinsky did
not want to create his own individual style but use his paintings as a school
for the spectator’s gaze—a school that would allow the spectator to see
the invariable components of all possible artistic variations, the repetitive
patterns underlying the images of historical change. In this sense Kandinsky
does interpret his own art as being timeless.
Later, Malevich undertakes an even more radical reduction of
the image to a pure relationship between image and frame, between
contemplated object and field of contemplation, between one and
zero—to the Black Square. In fact, we cannot escape from seeing the
black square—whatever image we see we see simultaneously the black
square. The same can be said about the ready-made gesture introduced
by Duchamp—whatever we want to exhibit and whatever we see as being
exhibited presupposes this gesture.
Thus, we can say that avant-garde art produces transcen-dental
images using here the Kantian meaning of this notion. These are images
that manifest the conditions for emergence and contemplation of any
other image. Art of the avant-garde is the art not only of the weak
messianism but also of the weak universalism. That means: it is not
only an art that is using zero-signs being emptied by the approaching
messianic event. It is also the art manifesting itself through weak
images—images having weak visibility, images that are necessarily,
structurally overlooked when they are functioning as components of
strong images having a high level of visibility—such as images of classic
art or mass culture.
The avant-garde is non-original because it did not want to invent—
it wanted to discover the transcendental, repetitive, weak images. But, of
124
course, every such discovery of the unoriginal was understood as an original
discovery. And like in philosophy and science to make transcendental art
means also to make universalist, transcultural art because to cross a time
border is basically the same operation as to cross the cultural borders. Every
image made in a context of any imaginable culture is a black square too—
because it will look like a black square if it is erased. And that means that it
always already looks like a black square—for a messianic gaze. This makes
the avant-garde a true opening for a universalist, democratic art. But the
universalist power of the avant-garde art is a power of weakness, of self-
erasure. Avant-garde became so universally successful because it produced
the weakest images possible.
Still today one can hear at exhibitions of avant-garde art: ”Why
should this painting, let say by Malevich, be here, in the museum if my
child can do it—and maybe even does?“ On the one hand, this reaction
to Malevich is, of course, a correct one. It shows that his works are still
experienced by the wider public as weak images—notwithstanding their
art historical celebration. But, on the other hand, the conclusion that the
majority of exhibition visitors draw from this comparison is a wrong one.
One thinks that this comparison discredits Malevich, instead of using this
comparison as a reason to admire one’s own child. Indeed, through his
work, Malevich opened the door into the sphere of art for weak images—
in fact, for all possible weak images. But this opening can be understood
only if Malevich’s self-erasure is duly appreciated—if his images are seen
as transcendental and not as empirical images. If the visitor to Malevich’s
exhibition cannot appreciate the painting of his or her own child, this visitor
can also not truly appreciate the opening of the art field that allows the
paintings of this child be appreciated.
Avant-garde art remains also today de facto unpopular—even if it
is exhibited in major museums. Paradoxically, it is generally seen as a non-
democratic, elitist art not because it is perceived as a strong art but because
it is perceived as a weak art. That means: The avant-garde is rejected—or,
125
 rather, overlooked—by the wider, democratic audiences precisely because it
is a democratic art. The avant-garde is not popular because it is democratic.
If the avant-garde were popular it would be non-democratic. Indeed, the
avant-garde opens a way for an average human being to understand
himself or herself as an artist—to enter the art field as a producer of weak,
poor, only partially visible images. But an average person is by definition
not popular—only stars, celebrities, exceptional, and famous personalities
can be popular. Popular art is made for a mankind consisting of spectators.
Avant-garde art is made for a mankind consisting of artists.
But, of course, here the question arises: what has happened
historically to the transcendentalist, universalist avant-garde art? In the
1920s this art was used by the second wave of the avant-garde movements
as an allegedly stable basis, as a fundament for building a new world. This
late avant-garde’s secular fundamentalism was developed in the 1920s
by Constructivism, Bauhaus, Vkhutemas, and the like—even if Kandinsky,
Malevich, Hugo Ball, and some other leading figures of the early avant-
garde wave rejected this fundamentalism. But, even if the early generation
of the avant-garde did not believed in the possibility to build a solid new
world on the weak basis of their universalist art they still believed that
they had effectuated the most radical reduction, and produced works of
the most radical weakness. But meanwhile we know that this was also an
illusion. It was an illusion not because these images could be made weaker
as they were, but because their weakness was forgotten by the culture.
Accordingly, from the historical distance they seem to us either strong (for
the art world) or irrelevant (for everyone else).
That means that the weak, transcendental artistic gesture could
not be produced once and for all times. Rather, it should be repeated time
and again to keep distance between the transcendental and the empirical
visible—and to resist the strong images of change, the ideology of progress,
and promises of economic growth. It is not enough to reveal the repetitive
patterns that transcend historical change. It is necessary to constantly
126
repeat the revelation of these patterns. The repetition itself should be
made repetitive. Because every such repetition of the weak, transcendental
gesture produces, as I said, clarification and confusion—by the same move.
Thus, we need further clarification that again produces further confusion.
That is why the avant-garde cannot take place once and for all time, but
must be permanently repeated to resist permanent historical change and
chronic lack of time.
This repetitive and at the same time futile gesture opens a space that
seems to me to be one of the most mysterious spaces of our contemporary
democracy—social networks like Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Second
Life, and Twitter that offer global populations the opportunity to place their
photos, videos, and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished from any
other Conceptualist or post-Conceptualist artwork. In this sense this space
has been opened initially by radical neo-avant-garde, conceptual art of the
1960 and 1970s. Without the artistic reductions that were effectuated by
these artists the emergence of the aesthetics of these social networks would
be impossible—and they could not be opened to the mass democratic
public to the same degree.
These networks are characterized by the mass production and
placement of weak signs that have low visibility, instead of the mass
contemplation of strong signs that have a high visibility as was the case
during the 20th century. What we are experiencing now is the dissolution
of the mainstream mass culture as it was described by many influential
theoreticians: as era of Kitsch (Greenberg), of “cultural industry” (Adorno)
or as a society of spectacle (Debord). This mass culture was created by the
ruling political and commercial elites for the masses—for the masses of
consumers, of spectators. Now, the unified space of mass culture is going
through a process of fragmentation. We still have the stars, but they don’t
shine as bright as before. Today, everybody writes texts and places images,
but who has enough time to see and read them? Obviously, nobody—or it
could be only a small circle of likeminded co-authors, acquaintances, and
127
 relatives. The traditional relationship between producers and spectators
that was established by the mass culture of the 20th century has become
reversed. Earlier a chosen few produced images and texts for the millions
of readers and spectators. Today, millions of producers produce texts and
images for a spectator who has either scarce time or no time at all to read
or see them.
Earlier, during the classical period of mass culture one was expected
to compete for public attention. One was expected to invent an image or a
text that would be so strong, surprising, and shocking that it could capture
the attention of the masses—even if it happened only for a short span of
time. Andy Warhol famously spoke in this context about fifteen minutes of
fame.
But at the same time Warhol produced films like Sleep or Empire
State Building, which were several hours long andso monotonous that
nobody could expect spectators to remain attentive during their whole
length. These films are very good examples of messianic, weak signs because
they demonstrate the transient character of sleep and also architecture
that seem to be endangered, put in the apocalyptic perspective, ready to
disappear. At the same time these films, actually, do not need any time of
attention—in fact any spectator at all—just as the Empire State Building or
a sleeping person do not need any spectator. It is not accidental that both
of these films by Warhol function at their best, not in a cinema theater,
but in a film installation, where they are as a rule shown in a loop. The
exhibition visitor can look at them for a moment—or maybe not at all.
The same can be said about the websites of the social networks—one can
visit them or not. And if one does visit them then only this visit as such
becomes registered, and not how much time one has spent looking at
them. Contemporary art’s visibility is a weak, virtual visibility, the apocalyptic
visibility of contracting time. One is already satisfied that a certain image
can be seen or that a certain text can be read—the facticity of seeing and
reading becomes irrelevant.
128
 But, of course, also the Internet can become—and partially
becomes—a space for the strong images and texts that begin to dominate
it. That is why younger generations of artists are increasingly interested
in weak visibility and weak public gestures. Everywhere we witness the
emergence of artistic groups in which participants and spectators coincide.
These groups make art for themselves—and maybe for the artists of other
groups if they are ready to collaborate. This kind of participational practice
means that one can become a spectator only when one already has become
an artist—otherwise one simply would not be able to get an access to the
corresponding art practices.
Now, let us come back to the beginning of this text. Avant-garde,
contemporary art that stays in the avant-garde tradition is an art that
operates by reduction—producing in this way atemporal and universalist
images and gestures. It is an art that has and represents the secular messianic
knowledge that the world in which we live is a transitory world, subject to
permanent change and that the time of any strong image is necessarily
short. And it is also an art of low visibility that can be compared to the low
visibility of everyday life. And it is, of course, not accidental because it is
primarily our everyday life that survives through historical breaks and shifts
precisely because of its weakness and low visibility.
In fact, today, everyday life begins to demonstrate, to communicate
itself as such—through design or through contemporary participatory
networks of communication—and it becomes impossible to differentiate
the presentation of the everyday from the everyday itself. The everyday
becomes a work of art—there is no more bare life, or, rather, bare life
demonstrates itself as artifact. Artistic activity is now something that the
artist shares with his or her public on the most common level of everyday
experience. The artist shares art with the public as earlier s/he shared with it
religion or politics. To be an artist has ceased to be an exclusive fate; instead,
it has become an everyday practice—a weak practice, a weak gesture. But
to establish and to maintain this weak, everyday level of art one has to
129
 repeat permanently the artistic reduction – resisting strong images and
escaping status quo that functions as permanent exchange of these strong
images.
At the beginning of his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel asserted that
art was already during his time a thing of the past. Hegel believed that in
the time of modernity, art could no longer manifest anything true about
the world as it is. But the avant-garde art has shown that art still has to say
something about the modern world, that it can demonstrate its transitory
character, its lack of time, and at the same time to transcend this lack of
time through a weak, minimal gesture that needs a very short time or even
no time at all.

This essay first appeared in e-flux journal #15, April 2010.

Boris Groys is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Center for Art and Media
Technology in Karlsruhe, and since 2005, the Global Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Arts and
Science, NYU. He has published numerous books including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man
Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, and The Communist Postscript.

130
Naeem Mohaiemen

Asterix & the Big Fight:

Proxy Wars, Temporary Coalitions

“The deaf mute has no enemies in this city.” This was the only advice from
the director of a Dhaka art center. I had returned to the city after a month
break. In the interim, I had been hearing on email, on Facebook, on blogs,
all sorts of chatter about a big conflagration between Bangladesh and
France. About art of all things, over a big museum loan.
I expected to come back and get inside the fray. But she was
sounding a word of caution. Take some time to absorb. Think before you
dive in. It was halfway through 2007. The controversy, brewing for a few
months, was over the Musée Guimet’s Masterpieces of the Ganges Delta:
Collections from the Bangladesh Museums show in Paris. By the time
I returned to Dhaka, it had taken on Rashomon tones. Each side had a
passionate reading of the event. Seen one way, it was French diplomatic
arrogance, and cultural imperialism over-reach, presuming the Bengalis
didn’t know how to handle their own heritage. Seen another, it was also
partially Bengali shadow politics over internal schisms that was disrupting
the project.
At issue was whether a loan of Bangladeshi artifacts could be
made to a French museum on fair terms. Very soon after that “deaf mute”
conversation, the Guimet loan was overtaken by a maelstrom of events: the
attempt to take artifacts out of the Dhaka museum was met by protestors,
the French embassy waged ham-fisted diplomacy, court cases blocked the
museum loan, and finally, a crate full of artifacts were stolen from the airport
131
 tarmac. After the airport theft, the Bangladesh government canceled the
entire loan, the Musée Guimet suffered “Annulée” signs on Paris posters
and at least half a million euros of losses.
A heated culture war, where a French museum became embroiled
in controversy, larger issues of cultural appropriation and theft played out
on Dhaka streets. But at a distance of three years, I started to think through
whether other readings were possible: a showdown as an attempt by local
cultural activists to create new spaces for resistance. The real target was
not only the French Embassy, or the museum, but also indirectly the military
government on whose watch the loan was going through. A museum
exchange as a proxy war, a rehearsal or proving ground for uniting cultural
movements that were creating alternate spaces for resistance. A faulty
and jittery performance of resistance in one space (cultural nationalism),
allowing resistance communities to be built up on the main stage (democracy
movement).

Mercury Rising & Airport Capers

In 2007, an agreement was signed to host Masterpieces of the Ganges
Delta at the Musée Guimet in Paris. There was excitement in the world
archaeological community, because many of these fragile masterpieces
have never been shown outside Bangladesh. The region is associated with
dynasties going back to 4th century BCE, and Paharpur is identified as one
of the oldest Buddhist monasteries in the subcontinent (on UNESCO’s list of
protected monuments). The 188-piece collection that was to be loaned is
mostly Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain artifacts, and a smaller section of Islamic
material. The exhibition was part of a Bangladesh-France joint project,
which started with the 1992 excavations at Mahasthan. After the exhibition
of the excavation results at Bangladesh National Museum in 1999, a larger
show was to be organized in France. The French Embassy also expressed
a wish to train local experts in museum preservation science as part of
knowledge and technology transfer.
132
 The Guimet staff started coming to Bangladesh from 2002, to
organize training seminars for the staff of the National Museum and the
Department of Archaeology. The exhibition, which became an official
project in 2005, was to be another step in this Bangla-French cooperation.
The Guimet’s website announced: “Bangladesh possesses an immensely
important cultural heritage, this arising from the fact that the eastern half of
Bengal has been one of the culturally richest regions of the Indian world.”
Some time in 2006 a group of protestors started charging
irregularities in the Guimet show arrangements. Bangladesh has an
unfortunate history of art theft. Thin borders with India and Burma, little
enforcement, and corrupt officials make stealing archaeological objects
relatively easy. When the 1977 Ad Hoc Committee on the Return and
Restitution of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin (ICOM) carried
out a case study of countries that had lost part of their cultural heritage,
Bangladesh was one of the countries identified. Firoz Mahmud and Habibur
Rahman also document art theft in Museums of Bangladesh (Dhaka, 1987).
The trade in stolen objects is assisted by local collaborators, and in one case
the former director of a national museum was alleged to be involved in art
smuggling.
A group of “concerned citizens” filed a lawsuit in court blocking
the Guimet loan. Protest letters started appearing in newspapers. The
lawsuit, weakly framed during petition, was rejected by the court. Now,
more heavy-hitters became involved, and another lawsuit was filed. In the
interregnum between lawsuits, one shipment was sent to the airport. Here,
it was intercepted in the cargo holding by the National Intelligence Agency,
and sent back to the museum. Things were getting serious. Intellectuals
lined up on both sides of the debate—it felt like civil war within Bangladesh’s
urban middle class (civil society a.k.a. shushil shomaj).
The press went high intensity: “Guimet can’t be trusted.” This was
a bit puzzling, as the French are not usually targets for local suspicion (at
best, indifference). It’s usually India whose involvement makes for tense
133
 politics (as per Zafar Sobhan, “India is the third rail of Bangladeshi politics.
You touch the issue at your peril”). But here, suddenly, anti-French sentiment
bubbled up with no past history and certainly no colonial relationship. The
French embassy was a key factor, continuously aggravating tensions with
their undiplomatic statements: “It is time for the few opponents to this event
to recognize they are a tiny minority and act accordingly.” The mercury shot
up. How dare the French, wrote bloggers, we won’t be treated this way.
A second concentric circle (anthropologists, art historians, and journalists)
now formed around the nucleus of protesters.
The substantial issues being raised repeatedly were: inconsistent
inventory numbers, missing accession numbers, and poor paperwork. Much
of this could have been the result of incompetence on both Bangladeshi
and French side, but it took months to clear up the confusion (in a series
of increasingly disorganized press conferences). The core conflict was over
the insurance value for the collection—initially reported to be one million
euros. This amount was later called “financial fraud” by an international
archaeological expert. In the face of protests, the insurance was “upped to
two million euros and then doubled to four million euros through custom
bonds” (French embassy statement). By then, it was too late—suspicion
had bled over the entire project.
Time was running out, the court battle had already caused Guimet
to miss its opening date. A Thursday decision by the higher court made it
legal for the artifacts to go abroad, again. On Friday, delivery trucks arrived
at the museum. But word spread fast (even on the weekly holiday, when
we’re usually asleep). Protesters scaled museum walls, rocks were thrown at
the trucks, a man was arrested. Seemingly undeterred, the shipment rolled
out to the airport.
The blogosphere went nuclear. The arguments turned very bitter,
with supporters of the show called Forashi dalal (French agents). In a
letter to the French government, protestors wrote: “Recent actions of the
museum have removed any semblance of trust in the organization, and we
134
are no longer willing to loan our prized possessions to an organization with
such standards of behavior.” Cultural theorist Brian Holmes interjected on a
blog:

there’s something all-too neocolonial about the shiny, refurbished, spectacular Musée
Guimet and the booming tourist economy into which it fits, where visitors take such
exquisite pleasures in thousand-year antiquities without any particular concern for the
present-day cultures of the former European colonies. When the official reps don’t
show a little respect while getting the goods out today, then the veneer cracks and
lots of bad memories can rise to the surface...

The controversy is a crucible—power dynamics made solid. The

Guimet was taking on the burden of its own history­­—especially the post-
1945 acquisition of the Louvre’s Asiatic collection, which contains, as per
Kwame Opoku, “thousands of stolen objects.” It was also becoming a
signifier for a whole set of colonial/postcolonial museums’ bounty of
illegally acquired artifacts. Protestors pointed to the 2002 Declaration on
the Importance and Value of Universal Museums which the Louvre has
signed—it can be used to argue that if an artifact is endangered in its home
country (famously with the Buddhas of Bamiyan), a museum can keep it
for safekeeping. The Guimet is not linked to Louvre beyond the Asiatic
collection acquisition, but things became rapidly blurred in the controversy.
During the Eid holidays, with the legal battle exhausted, the second
shipment was sent to the airport. At one am, French officials completed all
customs formalities and the government videotaped proceedings. At two
am, one of the airport officials recounted the crates and discovered one
had vanished. In a panic, Joint Forces sealed off the airport. Airport guards,
museum officials, cargo workers were all arrested. The Culture Ministry
held an emergency meeting. Trucks were stopped at Indian borders. The
empty crate was eventually found floating in a pond. Missing were two
invaluable pieces: a terracotta statue and a bust of Vishnu. A slow-motion
tableau played out, like the pages from a noir novel. The police recovered
“smashed pieces” from a local garbage dump. Astoundingly, authenticity
of these broken pieces was confirmed only through a “manual inspection.”
135
 Supposedly the thieves got “scared” and broke the statues. Some local
art smugglers were arrested. These smalltime operators managed to
penetrate a high-security airport? This seemed very unlikely, at least to me.
The French embassy, in its usual diplomatic fashion, called it
“conspiracy by a very small nexus of persons to embarrass France and
Bangladesh.” This did little to calm the situation. As foretold in the fiasco
script, the Bangladesh government canceled the show. ANNULÉE signs were
plastered over Guimet posters in the Paris underground. Astonished at the
turn of events, the Guimet staff started repacking the crates, to send it all
back to Dhaka. They had already spent 400,000 euros out of their operating
budget on show expenses, a huge loss to their pocketbook. Culture Affairs
Advisor Ayub Quadri, who earlier announced that if “one single piece went
missing” he would pay out of his own pocket, resigned. In a tragic coda,
Bangladesh ambassador to France Ruhul Amin, under fire from all sides, had
a brain hemorrhage after a meeting with French counterparts. Dead at 48.
British Archaeology magazine said the whole affair had gone
“bizarrely, Pete Tong” (“Sad tale of the Guimet Museum’s cancelled
Bangladeshi exhibition,” March 2008). No winners in this affair, but a lot
of collateral damage. Protestors stood up to the French. Culture wars were
fought and won. But where will ground reality take us? I had been trying
to get some answers from the French organizers (all incredibly wary of
contact with the Bangladeshi side). Now one of them wrote me a bitter
email, sounding a funereal tone: “All the echoes I received from different
museums around the world (e.g., Metropolitan, British Museum, V&A, etc.)
lead me to think that no one will try to organise such an exhibition before
many years.”

Standing In the Shadow of Main Stage

Step back for a moment and look at the political context within which
this culture war played out. This was never about the French (as country,
concept, or empire). the Alliance Française Dhaka is known for an open
136
cafe, a for-rent gallery, and sparsely attended film screenings. It has no
history as a flash-point for anti-French sentiments (or even pro-French,
more a mild passing glance level curiosity). Clearly the real instigator for the
energy behind the confrontation was elsewhere, embedded within local
country history. For a turbulent four decades since independence in 1971,
Bangladesh has grown economically in spite of an extremely intermittent
democracy. Various shades of military or quasi-military regimes ruled
from 1975 until 1991. Since 1991, full democracy has also been a mixed
outcome, with the two main parties carrying out a ferocious feud (both led
by women leaders, dubbed the “Battling Begums” by trite Western press).
Confrontation between government and opposition has led to blockades,
strikes, and riots. Bangladesh’s history of street protest, from colonial India,
to neo-colonial Pakistan, to anti-army movement of the 1980s, complicates
matters. The line between anti-autocracy protests and opportunistic
vandalism is always a blur.
After 2001, Bangladesh’s internal stability became a worry for
Northern blocs, due to a sizable Muslim population (fourth largest in
the world). From 2005-2006, Bangladesh seemed to be experiencing
a democracy meltdown: rigged voter lists; crooked judges; debates and
battles. As street protests reached a crescendo, the United Nations, the
Asian Development Bank, and local Embassies all actively intervened.
On January 10, 2007, the U.N. announced that if the Bangladesh Army
supervised elections in this chaos, they could endanger their own U.N.
peacekeeping role. Bangladesh is the largest contributor of troops to U.N.
peacekeeping operations, a major opportunity and revenue generator for
the Army. As predicted by many, on January 11, the Army responded to the
U.N. statement, removing the civilian leaders and installing themselves as a
“Caretaker Government.”
The Army is savior and bête noire in Asian histories. Always claiming
to intervene to stabilize countries, but at a terrible price to local institutions,
democracy, and human rights. Some regimes, like Burma’s SLORC, are still
137
 in control after decades and there’s no return to civilian rule. In Bangladesh,
with the recent history in mind, pro-democracy activists immediately began
to put pressure on the “temporary” Army government, to prevent this
“interim” period from becoming permanent. But in the gradual buildup of
anti-army organizing between 2007-2008, we noted the relative absence
of cultural players—artists, actors, writers, filmmakers.
Before there was a professional middle class under the banner
of shushil shomaj, culture workers were a primary force of resistance to
anti-democratic forces. When Bangladesh was still part of Pakistan, this
started with the 1952 language riots (in protest against the announcement
that Urdu would be the state language of Pakistan). In the 1960s, the
Pakistan state tried to insist that the “Hindu” poet Rabindranath Tagore be
replaced by more “Muslim” voices like Kazi Nazrul Islam. By 1968, radio,
books, and magazines were all waging hidden sorties against the Pakistani
military junta. This reached surreal heights in the late 1960s when Shawkat
Osman’s satirical novel Kritodasher Hashi (‘Slave’s Laugh’) received the
National Award from the same military dictator who was the object of
not-so-hidden satire.
After Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan in 1971, the
cultural arena focused on building up “national identity,” “new nation.”
This usually meant the arrival of an unquestioning cultural politics,
with a focus on institutionalization and material rewards for the artists
(chairmanship of institutions for the older guard, fame and money for
the younger). Perhaps, disappointingly, this demonstrated that alternative
cultural spaces take on their sharpest political positions under oppressive
regimes. Oppositional cultural politics came back to the forefront under the
Ershad military junta of the 1980s. The General was an amateur poet, and
in addition to force-feeding his poems and songs on national television,
he founded a “National Poetry Council” which recruited careerist (and
courtier) poets. But this cultural investment boomeranged, hardening
the position of “refuseniks” within the arts. By the end of the military
138
regime in 1991, cultural activists were at the front lines of the democracy
movement. Veteran artist Quamrul Hassan (attributed to be designer
of the country’s flag), scrawled a satirical drawing of the General, and
wrote underneath “country in the grips of the world’s most shameless.”
Opposition came also from absence—all newsreaders (including my
aunt) walked off the sets of national television, refusing to read the pre-
packaged bulletins of the junta. Actors also started boycotting dramas
on national television. The military scrambled to fill empty eight and ten
o’clock news slots with new faces, but fears of being considered “scabs”
made this a difficult task.
Within this history of continued cultural activism on a national
stage (the artist as a public intellectual with direct impact), I look back at
the Guimet affair through an altered prism. During the years 2007-2008,
Bangladesh feared another resumption of a long period of military rule.
The military also started with a hard clampdown: an indigenous rights
activist was tortured to death, a CNN stringer was brutalized and fled to
exile, newspaper editors were arrested, talk shows were told to stop live
phone calls, and pugnacious TV hosts were blacklisted. As a chill of fear
descended, safe spaces were needed where democracy movements could
gather strength. We can then look at the confrontation over the French
museum show as a mobilizing tactic for larger, more risky confrontations
against the state. Putatively, the target was the French museum and
embassy’s high handedness. But very soon it expanded to include the
military’s handpicked “Culture Advisor,” and finally, by unvoiced extension,
the military government itself. I recall watching an angry guest on a talk
show, asking, “how dare they take away our statues, like prisoners in a
box” and thinking this was on-screen shadowboxing. His main target,
indirectly, seemed to be the military government. Using the Guimet issue
as a platform, artists were able take to the national stage. A debate on
culture politics became an indirect referendum on the military, after all it
was happening on their watch.
139
 Early opposition to Guimet came from professors at a few
universities. As the circle widened, anthropologists and art historians
who were focused on North-South dynamics entered the debate. Their
participation expanded the issue beyond the mechanics of a museum loan,
to larger questions of cultural theft. Finally, the gravitational pull of events
pulled in activists, writers and many young artists. Many of these temporary
coalitions lasted beyond the Guimet affair, and even beyond the military
regime. Although there seems to be a national syndrome of post-crisis
exhaustion and demobilization, some of the alliances lasted at least until
this year. Today, some artists who first connected during this debate are
focused on new areas of activism. In particular, artists, and musicians have
become active in organizing around oil-gas exploration (where multinational
involvement is subject to controversy) and around state power through
security agencies.

A Manifesta Parallel
After hearing my reframing of the artifact drama, a friend quipped, “You’re
trying to make lemonade out of lemons.” According to him, we have
not, in the end, rewritten global art power dynamics. The artifacts are
back in dusty conditions in local museums, where they will be poorly lit,
badly maintained, and eventually stolen by international smugglers. The
cancellation of the show is, in his opinion, a small irritation for the French,
but a larger net loss to Bangladesh. Other friends scoff at this position as
one that is fundamentally “weak-kneed” in the face of European cultural
institutions. Seen from that point of view, the confrontation has energized
the Bangladeshi museums to be more assertive in future negotiations, to
act as equals not submissives.
I search for new framings to recover positive results from these
confrontations. A few years back, the collapse of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus
was a small quake within the artworld/biennial space. The roving European
biennial project ensnared in a battle over a divided city, political oversight
140
of government officials, and the rights of visiting international artists
to traverse the borders easily during the project. The city officials sent a
sudden press release declaring they had fired the curators. The curators
responded with a press release that stated city and political interference
had stopped the project. Perhaps there was more going on behind the
scenes, but this is what I discerned from “official” statements. The collapse
was very public, and seemingly all sides lost out (the city, the curators,
the audience, the Manifesta institution). An epitaph by Jeffrey Kastner
sounded, at least in part, resonant of the Guimet incident: “...the saga
of Manifesta 6 does raise intriguing questions for contemporary curatorial
practice—about the nature and scope of temporary exhibitions mounted
in complex local contexts via collaborations between native and
international groups; about the risks and rewards of exhibition concepts
that have dramatic, high-profile public components; about the functioning
of multiperson (and multistrategy) curatorial teams.” (Artforum, September
2006; emphasis added)
After the press duel and ensuing legal battles (over financial loss)
faded out, part of that original curatorial team, as well as participating
artists, took the cancellation as an opportunity to do something new with
the demolished Manifesta concept—that of a “school in exile.” Instead
of Cyprus, they now chose Berlin (I suppose for “formerly divided city”
symbolism, but also where a lot of artist energy was migrating at that time
from New York). Later these strands evolved into United Nations Plaza,
grouped under the (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) title “History of Productive
Failures: From French Revolution to Manifesta 6.” The failed divided city
biennial became a starting point for new conversations, and certainly some
of the initial interest of the Berlin audience may have come from wanting
to see how the exile portion would work out. The opening event even
had Cyprus officials in audience, although they lost interest soon after—
perhaps the four hour Diedrich Diederichsen session on day three was the
killing blow. It would be hyperbole and overreach to say that the Cyprus
141
 collapse was the sole factor behind this new quasi-institution (which also
recently ended, but fragments possibly found their way into Night School
at New Museum and elsewhere). But it certainly was a creative use of the
remnants of a failed project and an overheated political confrontation.
Can something similarly positive emerge, in the long run, from
the cancelled Guimet show? The oppositional energy that galvanized
that movement has dissipated. The Army has stepped down and a new
democratic government has taken over. The left-leaning Awami League,
which has deep inroads into cultural space, is now in power. As in the past,
many cultural workers have reverted to an insular, celebratory mode. But in
this time of temporary stability, we could imagine that the unruly coalitions
that came together to challenge the Guimet could now channel their energy
and relationships into building other projects. They can possibly leverage
the unlikely alliance between anthropologists, lawyers, archaeologists, and
artists to reach out to other partners and builders. The intention would be
to evolve and channel oppositional culture wars into a productive end state.
These would not be projects to resurrect a failed idea, but rather creative
binding together of tactically useful elements within the aftermath. The
intent would be to generate new structures that can provide alternatives to
unequal, fetishistic, or unstable culture exchanges.

Naeem Mohaiemen [shobak.org; naeem.mohaiemen@gmail.com] is a writer, artist, and technologist

working in Dhaka and New York. His art projects look at histories of the international left and utopia/
dystopia slippage. He has shown at the Whitney Biennial (Visible Collective, “Wrong Gallery”), Bangladesh
National Shilpakala Academy, Dubai Third Line, Finnish Museum of Photography, Kolkata Experimenter,
Art Basel, etc. Naeem writes on problems of majoritarianism for Ain Salish Kendro (www.askbd.org) and
Drishtipat (www.drishtipat.org), and has worked on technology projects such as CellBazaar (mobile phone
market; corp.cellbazaar.com). His essays were published in Rest of Now (Manifesta 7, Rana Dasgupta/Raqs
ed.), Indian Highway (Serpentine Gallery, Hans Ulrich-Obrist ed.), Sound Unbound (MIT Press, Paul D Miller
ed.), Men of Global South (Zed Books), Nobody Passes (Seal Press), and Asian American Superhero Comics
(New Press).

142
Winslow Burleson

Flying Solo: Rules to Live By

A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion,

does not act as if it were real, so he escapes the suffering.
—Siddhartha Gautama

Within Buddhism, the idea of the world as an illusion is central. Tied down
to our misleading expectations for what is possible, what is probable, what
is real, we often forget we have the ability to reframe reality. We become
stuck, and in this stagnation we fail to create or to try something new.
Our limitations bind us from our potential. We settle for being merely
mediocre. A wise man, though, may remove himself from this perceived
reality. As the Buddha explains, if we act as though the world were not
reality, we can move beyond the illusion of reality and touch something
deeper, something truer.
Buddha’s wisdom can shed some light on your aspirations and
actions. Throughout life, we all face numerous “rules” about what you are
to do and to avoid. These rules, often fabricated by individuals who have
already succeeded in the field, many times by breaking the rules themselves,
have their purpose, but it is critical for you to remember that they are not
the sole reality. The greatest successes and, perhaps, the greatest wisdom,
emerge out of new realities and new lenses. Stripping yourself of these
notions of right and wrong will open you up to paths never seen before.
You will find yourself working within a whole new reality, a reality that is
essentially limitless.
143
 In my work in the transdisciplinary field of Human Computer
Interaction applied to motivation, learning, and creativity, I have a pointed
interest in what we define as reality and how this effects how we act and
what we can achieve. One of my mentors, Allan Kay, widely credited with
envisioning and motivating the realization of the laptop computer said,
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it!” In fact, this is precisely
what we do, in real-time, all the time, as the future unfolds. Another
researcher whom I’ve been fortunate to interact with offered a kernel
of wisdom that is particularly valuable to our present consideration of
rules. Dr. James Blascovich, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, conducts
experiments on social motivation and social influence using virtual reality.
His work has led him to the following pervasive understanding of the
“real” world: “it, everything around us, it is all virtual reality.” That is
to say, that we create our own perceptions of what happens and what
is possible. We (perhaps all too often) play by the rules, even in realms
where rules do not exist. In this way, we often restrict ourselves from the
potential we have to transform the world.
I invite you to visit the Motivational Environments research
group, at: http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/intrinsic, to see how my students
and research is engaged in transforming the rules. One of our projects,
“game as life, life as game” does this explicitly, through reflective and
proactive augmented experiences that alter the rules of everyday living.
This is a mixed-reality game that asks you who you are and who you want
to become (to define your aspirational self), the experience then unfolds
through any number of channels, motivated by the difference in your
answers. The game-engine behind this application gathers self-reported
and sensed data from physical activities and through wearable sensors,
your physiology, even elements of your emotion and engagement are
incorporated. Your levels will increase as you engage in activities that
you aspire to; as you exercise, sleep, meditate, and engage in beneficial
social interactions the game provides a reflective interface, and at times
144
a motivating lens on your opportunities. Through sounds, lighting, even
robotic pets (e.g., similar to iRobot’s roomba), your exercise equipment
can invite you to it through sounds that motivate exercise; your kitchen
might create an inviting ambience welcoming you to prepare and
enjoy a healthy meal and deep social experience; your computer and
bedroom can collaborate to prepare a smooth empowering transition
to relaxation and sleep. Through these forms of envisioning the possible
and mediating reality we are empowering people to live actualized
lives. Within this experience there is opportunity to embed any number
of transformative experiences and wisdom. One of my recent favorites
comes from Tina Seelig, Executive Director for the Stanford Technology
Ventures Program, who provides, “insights on life, leadership, and the
little things that make a big difference in an entrepreneurial setting.” In
her presentation titled, “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (http://
ecorner.stanford/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1549), she presents,
among a wealth of wisdom, her admonition to, “never miss an
opportunity to be fabulous.”
In a second example of my research, our development of Affective
Learning Companions, we echo and buttress Seelig’s sentiments. These
companions are on-screen characters that engage learners in ways that
attend not only to their cognitive needs but also to elements of their
social and emotional experience and reflection. These characters are
literally becoming learners’ personal tutors and coaches. With these
systems we employ the power of Stanford Psychologist Carol Dweck’s
motivating message: “the mind is like a muscle, and that even though it
may be difficult, if you keep trying you will learn and grow your mental
muscles.” Dweck’s work demonstrates that believing and taking to heart
this simple credo dramatically improves learners’ motivation to engage,
persevere, and master the material at hand. Again, we find, life, reality,
learning, and possibility, is malleable, and to a great extent based on our
perspective.
145
 A third example, from my research, of transforming perspective
and asking, what is possible, comes in our development of the
pervasive paradigm shifts exposed by Slow Computing, a perspective
that considers interactions with Stonehenge, Pyramids, sundials, water
clocks, and many modern kinetic and acoustic sculptures to be forms of
pervasive human computer interaction, that are in many (if not most)
ways richer than fast computing experiences that too often limit us, for
far too many hours a day, week, or lifetime, to a keyboard, mouse, and
screen.

Considering the illusory and actualizing nature of “reality,” from Bhudda

to Blascovich, and Seelig to Dweck, we might ask ourselves, “Why do we
get bogged down in what we are supposed to do or not supposed to do
in our life?” Moreover, how can creativity flourish—and your work and
experience expand—if we remain trapped in terms of appropriate paths
towards success? Both Buddha and Blascovich attest to our self-imposed
limitations. Their wisdom points to our potential to unearth alternatives
in our perspectives, our societies, our world, and our everyday practice.
Recognizing what determines our own limitations and expectations and
actively questioning and experimenting broadly with the removal and
reinterpretation of these, will allow us to reframe our entire experience, our
definition of what the rules, of success, of curation, “ought to be.” Just
think of the potential!
Do not allow yourself to be barred from your chosen paths because
the practical voices in your heads dictate that you play it safe and remain
within the acceptable lines. Rather, challenge yourself to break onto the
stage with a fresh new and unexpected approach (for how else can you
truly learn?). The alternative—sticking fundamentally to the status quo—is
far too dangerous.
Let me share with you some tools and approaches that you may
find useful throughout your journeys. Experiment with these concepts and
146
build upon them. As Dr. Seuss says in Oh the places you’ll go! you never
know where you’ll end up!

Define Success Personally

An important step in becoming successful is to develop your own
definition of success. If you have not already, I challenge you to consider
fundamentally your own goals. What do they look like? How do they
fit your ideal for your life? What are the highest priorities? Why are you
doing anything else?
If you’re unsure of how to evaluate balance and meaning in your
priorities, Harvard Business School’s professors Laura Nash and Howard
Stevenson’s study on success might be an important resource for you.
Their research explained that high achievers found success in the four
spheres of life (happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy) by
seeking “just enough.” As these researchers point out in their book Just
Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life, “If we value
achievement and adopt celebrity standards, we will certainly fall victim to
our own excess. Nothing will be enough, and success will never satisfy.
If we’re high achievers, we may be plagued with self-doubt, feeling that
we’ve never done quite enough.”1 Unobtainable terms of success actually
undermine the achievements individuals have accomplished. They are left
feeling uncertain, disappointed, and, often, depressed. Do things that
make you happy, do things that build skill and have impact.
Diminishing your goals may appear counterintuitive, but
remember that you must be the resident of your own life. Without your
own set of standards, you will not experience your life in its fullness and
diversity. Don’t fall into the trap of suffering with the illusory “rules”;
Buddha and Blascovich point to the fallacy of that approach. Remember:
you have your own inner voice. Listen to it!

147
 Seize the Opportunity to Fail

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
—Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan’s fame and fortune may prevent us from realizing just
how much failure is integral to his success. Sometimes these opportunities
materialized, other times they slipped through his grasp. The fact that he
continued to try allowed him to actually achieve his goals. He clung to the
opportunities offered him, and was able to bring them to fruition, through
dedication, practice, and perseverance.
A successful person must be able to seize opportunity. No paradigm
shifts nor new art movements, no creativity has every occurred without
a motivation or willingness to add something new to the mix. In their
vision and their willingness to challenge the established rules of the arena,
successful and creative individuals have been able to mold art, culture, and
life in new ways. Their success was invariably tied to their ability to take
hold of new opportunities. That said, few—if any—were able to create
such an impact on their first attempt. You cannot welcome success into
your life without becoming comfortable with failure. As Michael Jordan
explained, his career records would not have been possible had he not been
willing to fail, and to fail often. Numerous artists reiterate this concept, both
in their lives and in their art. In fact, it typically takes ten years or 10,000
hours of expertise (trail and error progress) before great work is achieved.
Your preparedness to fail will lay a strong foundation from which you can
launch your success.
Stanford University’s Product Design motto offers an excellent mantra
for you as you begin to seize new opportunities: “Express, Test, Cycle.” Every
new experience, new application, and new interpretation is an expression
of the idea you are trying to create. Know your idea, and work to give it
actuality. Then take the opportunity to test it. Who knows what the result
148
will be! Regardless of what happens, whether it is failure or through-the-
moon success, be ready to try again. No two attempts will be the same. Each
one offers new opportunities for victory or failure. But making the attempt
will teach you something new and give you the chance to reach someone.
Remember: A spectacular failure is better than a moderate success. Stretch
yourself!

Own your Responsibility

The next significant characteristic for success is responsibility. Many
will assume that responsibility to the task equates to a business-sense
responsibility. While commissioners, gallery owners, and the like, all may
consider this rule-based business-like approach important; it cannot be
your first priority. Your first responsibility is to yourself, your ideas, to create
a space, realize a vision, advance an idea, and create a masterpiece. Be
responsible to your ideas, to yourself, through your actions.
While it might feel safer to do something that you know you can
do, your sense of responsibility should remind you not to be satisfied with
the safest path. Try (and maybe fail) when there is the opportunity to do
something different. If you hold yourself accountable to your potential,
you will allow yourself to explore new perspectives, whether you succeed
or fail. Such an exploration demands responsibility in pursuing those
perspectives.
Whenever you take the chance to try a new perspective, there
will invariably be numerous options and paths you may take. The greatest
temptation—and the greatest trap—is to spend all of your time evaluating
your options instead of committing to one path and holding yourself
responsible to it. In my time as a Junior Watch Officer, at Sea Education
Association, I was frequently given key responsibilities in docking a tall ship.
Every time we pulled into port, we had to make a choice: either to pull in
forward, or pull alongside the dock. Both options brought numerous other
predictions to mind: Would the wind be against me when it came time to
149
 depart? Would a swell rise that would press the boat onto dock? How many
lines would be needed to secure ship? With each of these questions came a
new challenge. In the end, I had to predict, prepare, and commit. Choosing
to wait wouldn’t dock the boat, and failing to commit would result in
damaging the vessel. Taking the responsibility to execute one option, while
leaving other contingencies open, if needed, was the only way to actually
accomplish the task.
I tell this story of my experience to demonstrate a point. You will
face numerous options every day. While some of these may seem safe,
some interesting, some daring, and some unappealing, you will ultimately
be in control of your own decisions. Hold yourself accountable to what
your vision is. Remember your definition of success. Take advantage of the
opportunities that speak to your goals and your perspective. Maintain a
sense of purpose. And be ready to fail and try again—to persevere and
succeed.
Taking responsibility for your decisions will also open the doors
to your success. Knowing your limits, recognizing opportunities, remaining
faithful to the completion of your idea, returning to the task at hand after
failure, and a healthy dose of creativity will go well for you in building
towards achievement. When you are entrusted with resources—space,
materials, time, and galleries—you get to choose how best to use these.
Taking chances on something new and executing it will allow you to have
an impact. It is in the taking of responsibility that the other tools in your
toolbox may be of use. And when you gain a sense of responsibility to
yourself, you’ll find it to be an actualizing resonance through which to
realize your creativity.

Unleash Creativity
Perhaps the most important tool in your toolbox is your creativity. Many
people look to artists and curators as creative forces. While it is true that the
artist is the driving force of the art, within society creativity must navigate and
150
find a place where it can shine. Creators confront their philosophical place
within the art world every day. They must justify why their opinions matter,
and why the work and ideas they choose to advance means something.
Their appreciation of creativity—and finding an avenue to advance their
own creative vision—can be the difference between an obscure painter and
a Picasso.
Consider for a moment, Stephen King. Now one of the most
well-known writers in the country, his first novel, Carrie, was thrown out
by every publisher in the business. It wasn’t until King thought that he
had exhausted his options that someone finally picked up the book. Look
where he is now! King is not alone. Madeline L’Engle, J.K. Rowling, even
the collection of McArthur fellows (genius grant recipients) reached their
success thanks to the vision of their reviewers. Their creativity could only
flourish through the creative actualization provided by society, through their
publishers, curators, and evaluators.
In a similar fashion, you possess the opportunity to give voice
to new forms of creativity. The most spectacular successes are rooted in
something vastly different from the commonplace. In this way, you too
can discover a phenomenon. But discovery requires stepping outside of
your comfort zone and looking around. Be a force that fosters creativity,
not merely mediocrity. Challenge society and speak to something not seen
before. If your creative vision surpasses others, always try again in a new
way.

Use any and all internal and external resources:

Throughout life we all face great challenges and we each have the
opportunity, every day, to take the next step toward realizing our full
potential. In my own life, I have been diagnosed with learning disabilities
and attention deficit disorder, I have struggled in school and in jobs, and
have benefitted greatly from the support of others who have nourished
and enriched my experiences and potential. Writing teachers and centers,
151
 college counselors, and mentors have stood by me through thousands
of hours and have helped me when I needed it most. At one of these
moments, my father offered, “You know I would go to the moon for
you.” Knowing that he was there for me, that I was not alone, made a
huge difference. I smiled and replied, “No Dad, if you get a chance to
go to the Moon, you let me go!” In a course I took at Stanford, “The
Psychology of Peak Performance,” taught by Dr. Jeffery Wildfogel, he
emphasized the importance of knowing and using, “any and all internal
and external resources.” Knowing that you can call upon others, and
furthermore actually enlisting them to help you explore and achieve your
goals, is a fundamental part of the creative process. You never know how
far you can go, until you truly leverage your resources. I have had the
opportunity to spend a day with astronauts and the Space Shuttle Mission
Director for the Hubble Space Telescope Repair Mission; to participate
in the daily planning meetings to guide Mars Rovers and conduct an
Astronaut Robot Mission Simulator field study at the Mars Yard at the Jet
Propulsion Lab; and to collaborate with Elizabeth Streb’s Lab for Action
Mechanics SLAM in advancing radical choreography, flying across virtual
lunar landscapes in front of thousands.

Here, I have attempted to provide you with a set of tools to hone your skills,
tools you can use to further your success in life. While remembering your
definition of success, knowing your approach to space, seizing opportunity,
taking responsibility, unleashing creativity, and using any and all internal and
external resources may prove to be invaluable to you, if they are not, throw
them out. They are not rules, but rather tools. Remember that. Everyone
will offer you advice. Keep the wisdom in mind, test it, synthesize it, and
work with it. But always remember that not only are you still in the driver’s
seat, you are the driver. Pursue your work free of anyone’s expectations
except your own. In this way you will achieve your ever-evolving idea of
success.
152
 Art is invariably subjective. Yet we often approach the field as
though there were a right and a wrong. Recognizing the limitation of the
rule-makers, and even sidestepping them, will give you the opportunity to
break free of expectation. Remember each of the tools in your toolbox, and
allow them to build up your creative vision. Whether you work within our
notions of reality or transcend these, trust yourself and stay committed.

NOTES

1. Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson, Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life
(Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004). Found on Harvard Business School Working Knowledge http://
hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3966.html.

Winslow Burleson is an Assistant Professor of Human Computer Interaction in the School

of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University.
He is the Founding Director of the Motivational Environments research group, and author
of over 50 scientific publications, including “best paper” at AIED 2009, and 10 patents. He
received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, working with the Affective Computing and Life
Long Kindergarten research groups, and the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard
Business School on creativity research. He is a Kavli Fellow and serves on NAE, NAS, and
NSF committees. He has a BA in Biophysics from Rice University and an MSE in Mechanical
Engineering from Stanford University, where he taught product design, creativity, and visual
thinking. He has worked at IBM Research, NASA-SETI Institute, the Space Telescope Science
Institute, and UNICEF. Supporters of his research include NSF, NASA-JPL, Deutsche Telekom,
iRobot, LEGO, Microsoft and Motorola.

153
 Sofija Grandakovska

Lightness of the Dissident, Brightness of the Critical

Mind

Who is “the dissident” and what is his message?

This text has no intention of hurting anyone, or for that matter evoking
any religious, national, ideological, emotional, or other like insults. This text
intends to speak about the openness and resonance of the intellectual’s
critical mind, of the artist and the cultural worker, as seen through the prism
of the dissident’s narrative, and his credibility, which is positioned without
the institutional matrix of power of his native land. Amongst other things,
this text intends to speak also about that which valorizes the critically-
theoretical activities of the dissident—namely, that he stands, always,
markedly at the vanguard of his time, and the time of his actions.
Throughout life we may acquire, but we may also lose each
professionally gained status, as seen from an institutional standpoint. A loss
of status may occur, too, due to ideological reasons that could serve as the
basis of a political platform looking for a way to launch its ascertained profile
of knowledge, which in turn, would shape the state’s citizenship, its youth,
and with that, its present, while such a strategy of knowledge would remain
in accordance with the needs of the given timeframe. The key moment
which gives birth to the dissident is the very antagonism existing between:
a) mechanical knowledge, as imposed criteria, and b) creative and creating
knowledge, as a result of an evaluation of the first bureaucratic one, and a
participation in all that would come with a future, therefore, taking action
as a humanistic goal. Hence, through these attributes of knowledge, now
154
freed from the ideological matrix of a political party structure in a given time,
the creator of a “different kind” of knowledge is positioned—the dissident,
as a so-called “outlaw” from the conventional system, yet he is launched
in the so-called zenith of a space as another space itself—an alternative
to the production of critical and creative thinking. Thus so, the dissident
always brings forth new ideas, begets a new, open concept, and strives for
a way out of the outdated forms of the system’s knowledge. The dissident
is the harbinger of the thirst for new knowledge, which represents a new
ark, a new path, a new horizon, a new alternative for a more comfortable,
nicer, and more humane world. In such a world, knowledge of and about
the world is never a stasis, or a bland political platform; rather, it is a spiritus
movens which strives, always, to beget new ways of reaching a higher level
of being.
Dissidence, in its most elemental sense, refers to the semiotics of
disagreement. On that note, it positions itself as a stepping-away from the
official byline. The dissident represents the intellectual immigrant from the
ideological matrix and the official ideologically-religious truth. Thus, he opens
up his sphere of influence as a form of thirst, which, in turn, represents more
than a simple lucidity in the openness of the spirit towards truth, knowledge,
other-ness, alternative-ness as the highest possible category. Consequently,
the dissident and the resonance of his critical mind become a permanent
opportunity to fight with the ideological, the political, and the religious. This
binary creates an open conflict, whence there are only—enemies.1 Along
those lines, the dissident, due to the fact that he stands without the official
line of the absolute, or the totalitarian truth of a given political or religious
system, is placed within the category of: enemy.
On the other hand, the dissident does not believe that there is an
absolute knowledge, given in the format of permanence, lodged within a
specific historical context. Henceforth, the contents of knowledge as an
archetype must be enriched with new forms of knowledge and meaning,
since all things are changeable, and with that, each one may end in any
155
 given moment. This is why critical insight, a position of distancing oneself
through the power of creative thought as the only possible “way out” from
the absolute of things—since a certain institutional format that belongs in
the hands of certain governance launches it as an irreversible truth—is more
than needed.
The discourse of the dissident positions itself on the liberation of his
thoughts from any time-bound political “avant-garde” of the system,
whilst at the same time, for him, representing the greatest source of critical
insight. Far from it, that the dissident represents “the avant-garde.” That is
precisely why this text chooses to speak about the resonance of the critical
mind of the dissident. Thus, here, in this text, relying on the example of the
archetypal values as a constant given, while also employing well-known
cultural symbols, we are to develop their fullness into the possibility of
attaining a multiplicity in value, and with that, a new semiotic relevance as
seen in the context of the message and the contemporary times: dancing
in accordance with the rules of the critical mind—and not according to the
rules of the institutions of power, controlled by the bureaucracy discourse.
This way, the intellectual, the artist embracing creative thinking, the one
who can never be satisfied with the imposed forms of knowledge, since they
are a surrogacy, decides to step outside the mechanized product as offered
by the political authorities, voices his thoughts against it, with a resounding
NO, thus marks his own position, one “without the institutions’ claim,”
that is, a dissident’s position, with the aim of producing new knowledge.
Dissident’s impetus for taking such a stance—throughout which the
archetypal constant exhibits fullness and expressiveness through new forms,
which do not subjugate or alter its contextual value—is quite simple: since
the dissident believes that each repetition of the historical narrative, as seen
through the old formats, would mean its reversion into a parody.
What would then be the alternative? What would be the possibility of
the new format, through which the critical mind could nurture its distance
from the absolutes of the institutions of governance, and with that, too,
156
nurture the constant (archetypal) context by acquiring new knowledge that
in turn would produce new forms of contextual value for the cultural and
humanistic advancement as its common goal?

The Noble Savage, the first dissidents and the thirst for knowledge
In the beginning, there were the heavens and the earth (Genesis, 1).
God created them, and ever since then, man has been trying to reconcile
them—through his wish for knowledge. But something else also happened
and ever since then this is how things stand. History has run its course,
the dissidents have grown in number. If we are to examine the history of
Eurocentric culture and the foundations behind its creation, we are certain
to come across a foundational story from Old Hebrew Literature, which
discusses man’s understanding of good and evil. Within the context of our
subject matter, involving the dissident’s narrative, this story points towards
the semiotics of the first banishment:

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good
and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree
of life and eat, and live forever.” (Genesis 3, 22-23)

The reason for addressing this Old Testament literary pre-text does
not stem from a desire to dig deep into mythically-historic reality, rather
to point towards an example of the archetypal constant that is tied to the
dissident’s narrative. With that, to point towards the constant through the
law of repetitiveness in culture, which carries, in its foundation, that is,
maintains, the ancient Hebrew religious-ideological discourse. Its “leftover”
exhibits active and recognizable forms throughout history, almost with no
interruptions, up until the contemporary debate over: slave, master, emperor,
pope, monarch, president, prime minister, member of parliament, guard
at the ministries in the government, and so forth. This “leftover” points
towards a visible presence of the archetype of power within the apparatuses
of institutionalized power targeting the banished, the dissident, the content
and the message of the critically-theoretical thought. This built-in matrix of
157
 activity, as exerted through these various and multifarious representatives
of the system’s regimes of power, from all man-times, without a doubt has
caused and does cause each subsequent example of dissidence in history,
and with that, it reveals the bond of the religious-ideological structure with
the opposition of the power of knowledge, of the critically-theoretical, of the
dissident.
Along those lines, it is not that difficult to recognize the dissident-
character of the biblical parents who had tasted from the apple of knowing/
knowledge, the only thing that they were forbidden to taste, by God. Thus,
they became dissidents and were de-localized from the imaginary Eden, a
banishment equal to a punishment, an exile due to the thirst of knowledge
and understanding, standing against the premise “And God envisioned man
according to his image.” Showcasing difference, exemplifying otherness,
through a thirst for knowledge, which stands apart from the so-called
“official” one, defines not only the dissident’s narrative, but also the dissident’s
character of knowledge, different from the divine (envisioned concept of God),
as an absolute, irreversible archetypal model. The archetype’s most significant
characteristic is its constancy, its irreversibility, its permanence. Henceforth,
the historic examples of the ideologically-religious system, without a doubt,
point towards a presence of the archetypal constant, its multiplication, as
well as a maintaining of such a mechanical productivity, first and foremost
within the framework of a tribal community, then a cultural community, a
nation, a people, a state. Thus, by maintaining the archetypal constant in
the expression of such a power, the ideological concept only changes the
format through which its imperialist goal of keeping the community together
is realized. Thus, the concept of the dissident becomes a “taboo,” and the
concept of the “master” (each man-time gives it a different moniker: God,
priest, healing man, emperor, prime minister, institution, etc.) remains as “the
totem” of the highest value of knowledge and knowing, acting as the focal
point for all knowledge and knowing in the world.
Let us digress a bit. If primitive thoughts are constituted around the
158
formats of myth, magic, and ritual, whence power lies in the repetition of
things so as to achieve some sort of good in the most elemental (existential)
sense, later on in the development of human thought, through the
formation of a religious system as a perfected system of understanding and
experiencing the world, repetitiveness is not lost, rather speech gains its
discourse, now labeled as theology. Theological truth begs an absoluteness.
Absoluteness contains power. Power implies governance. Hence,
governance is always tied to an ambition for power over a collective, a
larger group, people, nation, state. Would it be excessive, here and now, to
talk of the foundations of political discourse and its constitutive (archetypal)
value for the repetitiveness of the absolute truth? Should we be talking of
its formation due to the effectuality of the possibility of reconstructing the
primitive thought, its primitive religious speech, and its essential connectivity
with the future which followed it, after man exited the stage of the noble
savage and its nomadic phase, thus starting to become a sedentary, cultural,
national (et al.) being, set within the framework of a certain collective,
beginning, with time, to attain his master, ruler, king, statesman, up to its
most contemporary incarnations? That is all for the ideal of the theological
foundation of politics.
Now let’s return to the wish for knowledge and the wish for new
kinds of knowing. Doesn’t the primitive knowing of the world, as expressed
through the wish of the primitive consciousness to make its life easier, and
to understand the changes around it, in the earliest existential sense of
things, imply a wish for knowledge and a stepping-out of the system of its
ignorance? Doesn’t the shift from magic to religion imply another such form,
which points towards, historically, man’s consciousness containing thirst for
new knowledge, yet this same wish is tied to the primitive consciousness of
self-knowing? To make a long story short, we position the rhetorical concept
as a possible premise for the wish for knowing and new knowing: isn’t the
intellectual’s mind anything else but a beautiful example of a highly developed
consciousness of a self, and an example that does not belong in such a
159
 dynamics since it possesses knowledge of the Other? Is it the highest form in
the evolution of the noble savage, who once, through a visual experiencing
of the world, as primary, carried the same such thirst for the secret of
knowledge that the critical mind speaks of today? Of the evolution’s power
of knowledge. And, if we are discussing the wish as a system which is open
towards knowing that is different from the wish as a system of maintaining
a sameness, then we could speak of the eternal aspect of things, as seen
through two different formats: on the one hand, the irreversibility of the
wish for new knowledge, whilst on the other, the irreversibility of the wish
to control knowledge. Thus, the primary form of the archetypal constant
allows for a kind of cosmic valorization, since it positions itself towards the
dynamics of the mind and the theoretical capacity of the spirit. It belongs
to the dissident. The secondary form of the archetypal constant allows for a
satiation of the thirst towards higher knowledge; while, maintaining a form
which has been accredited by the institutional, politically-religious system of
a state.
In the beginning of the world, there is the battle, there is antagonism.
Since the world is paradoxical, and with that, entirely impossible to solve,
the fight remains, the archetype of the noble savage persists as an example
which showcases the fact that the wish to change things which are
limiting, to act within the framework of the wish to change things through
knowledge which brings meaning to the future and its progress, exists,
luckily, from a humanistic and aesthetic point of view. And, since the world
is a true paradox, the critical mind does not choose any politically-religious
mentor in the quest to explain the truth about itself and the world. The
critical mind, simply, does not share a “kinship” with the “fallen angels”
on Earth or with their earthly theology as an institutionalized décor. On the
other hand, the wish of the system to remain within those closed frames of
knowledge, points towards a fear of critical thought, since the dissident’s
narrative is not only open to its self-knowing, but also towards sensing the
Other. The stance of institutionalized governance is never in sync with the
160
stance of the power of critical thought. Due to the fact that the former
is shifty, time-bound, whilst the latter strives towards a solution, creates,
moves, constantly seeking out a solution for man and mankind.
It is apparent that within both narratives, the dissident’s and the
ruler’s, there is a wish, as a movable force with the willingness “to do
something.” But, this wish develops and valorizes itself in two different
directions: the first one, the wish of the dissident is a wish for knowledge
and a critical stance towards reality, so as to change that which controls,
terrorizes, manipulates, saddens. Whilst, in the other, the wish is a thirst
for control, that is, in a sense, for castration of all that is critical, creative,
moving, vanguard, thus controlling the change so that it does not happen
through the sanctity of knowledge as an act which enlightens. The
enlightening power is easily curable. Critical thought is a content which
broadens the perspective. The institutionalized one stands against the
depth of the former, through a power that manifests itself as ideologically-
religious, which in fact is a denial of its inferior position in front of the
unpredictability of the path which follows and which may lead certainly
outside and far from the gates of the institution. One story cancels the
other, yet both are permanently bound through the various forms of the
wish for knowledge. Here, we can find constituted the center of the source
of the world’s paradoxical nature.

Alternate space and freedom

The experience of the biblical ancestors exhibits a form of primacy.
Before them there was no experience which could have served as an
educational primer. The experience of knowing, here, finds its bearings in
the Edenic understanding of things. On the other hand, the incentive for
new knowledge does not point solely towards a lucid experience for each
future dissident, rather towards a repetitive experience serving as a praxis.
The lucidity of the first human couple (Adam-Eve) cannot lie only in their
disobedience of God, or within the realm of man’s ignorance, as can be
161
 found in the theological rendition behind the exile of the biblical couple.2
The lucidity lies in the truth of disobedience—it is a wish for knowledge to
understand(…), to choose between(…), to give meaning different from the
one God had envisioned as an “absolute consensus” between man and
Him, and according to that consensus, man would have no other choice.
But, within this “pact,” still, the ur-couple points towards a willingness not
to participate.
Although, of the act undertaken by the first human couple which
represents a kind of humanist action, we cannot speak about it as a rational
act, still, in accordance with archeo-poetics, there is something called a cry, a
call, an evocation, an invocation,3 a dynamics which stems from the internal
spheres of man’s irrational and discursive understanding of the world, but
one which leads towards an act of choice. Literary-historical examples point
towards an understanding that such a primitive knowing of the world does
not take away the strength of choice in the early man. The intellect is an
abstraction too, and an abstraction is a kind of knowledge. The intellect is
movement. The intellect is change. The intellect is an image. The intellect is
a word. The intellect is, also, a choice. A choice implies freedom. Freedom is
knowledge. Choice is, also, wisdom. But wisdom is also an ability to adapt
to the conditions of freedom as a choice. Is the mind, the one close to the
act of differentiating things, but also feeling about them, even the one
close to (ideological) punishment as a feeling, capable of allowing the self
to remain entrenched within the framework of the ideologically-religious
moment of subjugation? Then, such a mind is not a critical mind (for it has
lost its sense of differentiating things, and with that, the ability to valorize
them); it is neither wise (since the reality produced by the ideologically-
religious system disavows critical and theoretical activity), nor is its free,
so that it can produce and learn in such a “freedom.” Why the alternative
then? Since it, unlike the ideologically-religious system, which is the so-
called official one, always remains its own, as its own alternative of the
mind as a space-home. And this space is not a physical one. That is why it
162
is always more free. That is why critical thinking is tied to the abstract, the
creative (as opposed to the schematized and imposed ideology), and that is
why critical thinking is always on the lookout for solutions, for ways out of
bestiality. True critical thinking cannot be ordered; no government can order
critical thinking. Such an alternative space is in fact the sacred place of the
dissident. Space, land, homeland, the heavens…without the mediation of
a politically-religious mentor. These very attributes constitute and establish
the alternative spaces of the dissident as a sacred space.
Surviving within such a space is no easy task. I do believe that each
of us who have embraced the scientific, the critically creative call as our lives’
“calling,” carry within us at least some of the resonance of the Odyssian
metaphor. Research asks for “alone time,” for “thinking time,” for “knowing
time;” it asks of us to give up so much, often times to choose a painstakingly
uncertain path. But most of all, it asks us to show a sense of seriousness. And
that, in turn, implies a solitary atmosphere. But there is a dialogue that requests
a second side: one that will hear, evaluate, learn, respond, say things. However,
the scientist is not a monk, who is thought of as a solitary figure praying for
the multitude; but then again science is a heightened reality, one where each
occurrence is different from those in everydayness. Science is shared with the
collective. Which is why the world is into results. The world is interested in
new knowledge. Knowledge is always interested in an open dialogue with
the world, and one which does require a good deal of seriousness. Thus,
the world is not just a small or an extended metaphor. It is not just one
people or the science of one people. Henceforth, the world is interested also
in the dissident. And the dissident is interested in the world, that is to say, the
world in whose name he fights—against mechanized ideological knowledge.
That is exactly why he enters, consciously, into a bind with the repressiveness
of ideologically-political knowledge, since to the dissident, the meaning of
and the need for knowledge are to be found without the framework of the
national and state discourse of one’s birth-land, as he sees this path as the only
one possible to valorize and partake on the critical and the creative thought,
163
 as a sacred thought, as a pure defense against ideological absolutism. Along
those lines, we should nurture knowledge. Along those lines, we should
educate the young. To fight for the knowledge they believe in, to expand
on the knowledge they believe could indeed change the world, to nurture
knowledge as a sacred space which can never become an ideological space.
And, indeed, this is a battle worth fighting. When such a sacred space is
fortified as a beacon of knowledge, then the meaning behind knowledge as
a driving force loses its power to move the world onwards. The sacred space
of knowledge is not one that should be invented. It stands just on the outside
of the conventional, the repressive, the local, the political. Taking up root in
such a sacred space is equal to taking up a definitive position within the active
and productive space of knowledge. This is the dissident’s alternative. Since
it is the only alternative for a new world. A new world, always, is imprinted
on the palms of the young, which is why it is they who should take the first
steps, bravely and proudly, of such a dissident’s alternative. The young are
the world’s keepers. The young mind will win over and will win again and
anew the world, surrendering itself to the beauty of the creative and critical
thought and expanding its knowledge through such thought.

The Knightly attribute of the Dissident

Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-1996), in one of his talks, dedicated to the
theme of return, says:

In the school for theatrical technicians, we were shown a world of values which
did not have to be bound by the everyday and socially-acceptable values, such as a
comfortable life, owning material possessions, money, a good job. We were shown
that things can sometimes be realized through that other, so-called higher world. I
do not know if it is a higher one, but it certainly is a different one.4

Emanating the respect towards the personal and professional

legacy of the famed director, we do appreciate the fact that he did not
refer to the world of resurrection in its religious sense, let alone referencing
the political world as one of a higher order. Politics has simply no interest
for that other and varied world, a world which is interested in examining
164
the essence of man’s destiny and humanistic queries. A world which is
interested in the freedom of the spirit. A world of the justice of the creative
mind of the artist, the dissident. A world about the justice towards the
critically-theoretical mind.
Henceforth, the old biblical tale again comes in contact with the
archetypal foundation of the religiously-political concept of standing in
obedience in front of it, as if in front of God. Thus, God from the Old Testament
is an unforgiving God, who punishes mercilessly due to a disobedient behavior
in front of his ascertained principles about the “Tree of Knowledge.” He
punishes freedom whist allowing it. According to the theological exegesis,
“the fall” is an act which exemplifies man’s weakness. Politics, on the other
hand, through its absolutist principle punishes the dissident because of its
critical mind, which in turn represents a threat to the system, since the critical
mind is a force that rises over any political strategy, and leads towards another,
higher world, which is most definitely different, and which thinks without the
closed institutionalized system of strategic activities and produced values of
the regime.
In such a position, what does the world of the dissident look like? Is
it a punished world, a condemned world, a world in whose direction fingers
are pointed, so as to mark its visibility, thus to point out what punishment
looks like, and with that forgetting the fact that each act of finger-pointing
is an act of indecency? Politics initiates and creates victims which are not it.
It is a systemic replacement of a victim, or rather a replacement of the true
victim by its simulacrum. The profile is an image. An image is a simulacrum
of the real show. Just like the case with God. Just like the dissident. The
image, in a semiotic sense, only references the truth. It is not what we see,
but rather it points towards that which we cannot see. Just like God. Just like
the dissident.
The image of the dissident seemingly does not share anything
in common with the irreversible literary character of the sad knight by
Miguel de Servantes, Don Quixote, but together, they share a bond with
165
 understanding and shaping man and the world, henceforth, with the
clash with the world, through a specific kind of struggle, and not just a
mechanized feistiness. They are lone individuals. They do not belong to
any social club. They are heroes, and their greatness is tragic when placed
against the wide spectrum of social, un-mythologized events. They are
individuals entrenched in reality and they are irreparable individuals faced
towards the future. They are exalted. Both are knights of the pure idea for
a search and the fight to acknowledge the idea for a better world. And
that world is indeed different, another.
What does that other world mean for a critical mind? What does
that clash, that disagreement between the intellectual and the government,
between the criticism of the intellectual’s mind and the official ideological
truth, mean? It definitely implies a position of antagonism, an open-combat
field.

The Archetype and its constants: the Dissident

There isn’t a time without its dissidents. There isn’t a state or for that
matter a society that does not record the appearance of a dissident. The
examples from the past that are tied to the destiny of the dissident and
which stem from the countries that were under the former protection of
the communist regime, are examples which address the discourse of terror:
exile, job bereavement, imprisonment, mental institutions, banishment,
and not seldom, real death. Thus, the presence of the dissident is not an
imagined reality, neither is it an idea. He is a reality, and as such deserves to
be treated as a discourse.
What does the profile of the dissident contain, as an archetypal
constant? First and foremost, the dissident problematizes the question of
knowledge. He, representing the so-called “underground or grey I” within
the frameworks of a given social system, confronts himself with the same
system, through his struggle for de-politicizing knowledge and allowing
for its insatiability. On that note, public political knowledge is determined
166
and mechanized, and as such produces pressure. The dissident wishes to
maintain the purity of the critical mind which cannot be found within the
realm of the ideologically-imperialist thought of the state. Along those lines,
the dissident represents the micro world, which as a result of its struggle
with the “big world,” is almost always marginalized—alone, as a knight,
in its limitless field of its resonant mind, without the institutionalized and
official system that possesses the power to act and control the process of
the idea and its realization. Thus, the intent for creation of the ideologue-
author remains present in the cookie-cutter production of values, and the
overtly ambitious application of the profile of the collective cookie-cutter. I
am here referring to the Balkans. I am referring to Europe, too. I am referring
to the world as well. Since there are empires everywhere. Since there are
dissidents everywhere.
Preventing the artist from actively thinking and engaging, and with
that from living peacefully, on the behalf of the official ideological program,
understands that he is not just mechanically de-located, but also placed in
a colonized position, and with that in a position which asks of something
else, an alternative place for its artistic and critical spirit, the only thing it
cannot relinquish. (I am not, with this, referring to the hypocrisy of those
dissidents who stopped being dissidents, thus relinquishing their critical
stance by throwing themselves in the hands of the new regime!) On the
other hand, requesting one’s alternative space also implies an escape from
the imperialist discourse of ideology. Therefore, a field for the multiplication
of discourses is created, that is, a creation of a new discourse and new
meanings through the discourse of the dissident.
Which then would be the alternative space for the dissident to
choose as its niche? I am convinced that we would not point towards
anything new, if we pointed out that the dissident remains in pursuit of a
re-location to another space, mostly outside its homeland, and with that,
pursuing the right of personal happiness without the ideological matrix of
its land. Such a de-localization of the dissident implies a diligent protection
167
 of his ethics: the critical, healthy, and last but not least, the humanist
dimension of the creative, artistic, and critical mind.
Today, I am not quite certain that the alternative space of the
dissident should always imply exile, but am personally convinced that his
alternative space will always remain to be “his room,” which in turn, needs
not be localized within his land, or for that matter de-localized without. More
and more, I become convinced that whence the dissident is, hence it travels,
on the same path and in the same place with the critical and the artistic
thought of knowledge, of intellect and the wish for a nicer, and with that,
free-er world.
Although present day is a time of individuality, the notion should
not be assumed that it is a time when critical thinking is active. Also, I do
not believe that our actual historic time is a time of individuals-dissidents,
alike those we recognize in the names of some of the greatest minds from
the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, which became
the leading intellectual force of all of the world’s science;5 also, the artists
from the age of the Russian Avant-garde who created through the format
of the samizdat;6 and, lastly, let us remind ourselves of the dissidence of
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) in his homeland.7 Bakhtin spent the better part
of his life creating and living under an assumed name so that he might not
be prevented from creating that which the world today could have only
dreamt about if it had not existed, to covet his chronoscope, his dialogism,
and in the end, the Bakhtin-Dostoyevsky hero. Should we remind ourselves
of the other names which had consciously chosen to belong to the dissident
“caste”? Luckily, there is no more Siberia, as a place for the “irresolute
intellectuals.” There is no more Goli Otok,8 as a place whence few returned.
Otherwise there would have been so much more sadness in recollecting and
retelling of history.
I am not certain if today dissidence is active in the format that the
previous examples discuss. I am interested in the attributes of dissidence
we can speak of today. Dissidence is not just an exile, dissidence is not just
168
an imprisonment. Dissidence implies also an impenetrability of institutions
for the young, the student, the future intellectual, and the hopeful future
leader’s mind, due to the impossibility of the state to hold on to the great
intellectual capacity of the young man, strategically, as the finest capital for
the future of his country and his people. When discussing this narrative in
conjunction with my country, then definitely, for me, the most worrisome
form would be “the brain drain.” Each dissidence, in its own way, is a sad
act, and for me, this type of dissidence is one of the saddest ones. That
way, the political discourse produces another kind of dissidence, due to a
negligence of the research potential of the creatively critical engagement
undertaking by the young mind. All this entails a powerful message, a
message which young minds are to spread outside the gateways of such
an ideological strategy: never to stop believing in the power of new
thinking, in the power of art, since this is the only way the young have
to protect the critical thought, that is, by sharing it with the world, by
nurturing its being. Only thus can the young, by trusting and investing in
the power of knowledge, continue to believe in the world’s progress and
in its change. Believing in knowledge, in its new forms and its production,
is a force greater than any ideological strategy set to produce mechanized
knowledge.
Once, not that long ago, I too was a dissident within my own
country. It happened so, since I was recognized with The Best Young
Scientist of the Year Award, in the area of the literary sciences, given by the
highest institution for science and art MASA (The Macedonian Academy of
Sciences and Arts) in my homeland, and in accordance with international
arbitration, while the State University bequeathed me with a special plaque,
due to my affirmation of the University as the recipient of this “Vita Pop-
Jordanova” Award, given for the first time in my research area. I was never
allowed to take the assigned job post,9 “created” in my honor, at the State
University, since the position was given to someone else. Then, openly,
in front of all of Macedonia’s public, in front of the Government of the
169
 Republic of Macedonia, the then President, in front of MASA and all the
scientific and educational institutions in my country, I voiced the following
question: what is that which opens the doors, and what is that which
closes the gates for the young, for the young scientists and artists in the
Republic of Macedonia? This in turn, taught me that hypocrisy, nepotism,
and damaging bureaucracy are deeply entrenched in my country, and that
it is they who, although not as often, give birth to the dissident within my
own country, while they bear no connection whatsoever with the power of
knowledge. With that, being a dissident within my own country, a country
I have never forsaken, I sought to do the work I had already firmly believed
in, ever so diligently—the power of knowledge outside of political control
and decision-making. I did not have a real opponent. The only opponents
I ever had were the unworthy ones, disinterested in producing knowledge,
only looking to court the politicians. But they have never held an interest
for me, since that is a world where I, and the thirst for new knowledge,
find no home. With that, my work is no longer my own. It stops being
my own property the moment it shakes hands with the world, to whom
it belongs.
The essence of dissidence allows for a wide spectrum of meanings
which conjoin in the following: to withstand the desire to be obedient and
to have a politically-religious surrogate as a mentor. To remain within the
desire to change and maintain a critical stance towards reality. This implies
an asceticism. Asceticism is always bound to loneliness. The dissident is
always alone, but not necessarily lonesome. His only empire is the critical
and artistic thought which is open to mankind, and which looks after
mankind. The dissident is a kind of apologue. It is more than politics, more
than religion, more than a nation; it is so much more, and more than all of
these things together.

170
Epilogue
They say wish is the essence of the world. They say there are good, but
also bad wishes. I have one good wish. I wish the world were struck by
the lightening of new knowledge. I wish it were nicer. I wish it were more
humane. I wish there were more dissidents. Real ones. How about you?

NOTES

1. Gill Anidžar, Jevrejin, Arapin [Jew, Arab] (Belgrade: Beogradski krug, 2006), 56.
2. St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Belgrade, 2001), 346-7.
3. Marcel Mauss, On Prayer (New York/Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2003), 43-
55.
4. Danusia Stoc, ed., Kieslowski on Kieslowski (London: Faber and Faber, 1993; as quoted in
the translated edition, Beograd: Hinaki, 2002), 41.
5. N. Berdyaev, N. Onufriyevich Lossky, P. Alexandrovich Florensky, P. Evdokimov, etc.
6. For example, Vladimir Kazakov.
7. Siberia and six years exile in Kazahstan.
8. Prison camp, opened in 1949, well-known as “Hell in the Adriatic,” a place for mental
and physical torture and suffer of the “non obedient.”
9. It was a national recognition given for the first time for this purpose from the then
Government of Republic of Macedonia, according the Governmental decision in May 2006,
signed by then President of the Government Professor Dr. Vlado Buckovski. This National
Award was bequeathed to me due to my recognition as The Best Young Scientist of the Year
(2006) and recipient of Vita Pop-Jordanova Award from Macedonian Academy of Sciences and
Arts. The purpose of this Governmental decision was to promote a long term goal and aimed
to start a new tradition: in the future each award winner of this highest recognition according
international classification (Vita Popo Jordanova Award) was to work at the University in
Republic of Macedonia. Apart of this goal, this “case” became a scandal with no precedence,
and the former President of the Government dedicated two texts for my “dissident question.”
Please, see: V. Buckovski, “When knowledge is a handicap,” Vreme n.1265 (4 January, 2008)
and n.1276 (18 January 2008), Skopje.

Sofija Grandakovska, academic, theorist, and poet,  engages in interdisciplinary studies in

comparative literature and visual semiotics. She is the author of the scholarly books Discourse
of the Prayer (2008) and The Portrait of the Image (2010), and the two books of poetry The
Eighth Day (2005) and The Burning Sun (2009). Currently, doc. dr. Grandakovska works as
Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social and Humanities Research “Euro-Balkan,” Republic
of Macedonia, where she teaches cultural and political theory.

171
 Cover Image Credits

Front cover, top row, left to right:

Group Performance by The House of Natural Fiber, a New Media art laboratory based in
Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2009

Installation of Antmaster by Gil Kuno at Freewaves Hollywould Festival, October 2008

Artists working on view at Recess, Grand Street, NYC, 2009

Aydan Murtezaoglu & Bülent Sangar, UNEMPLOYED EMPLOYEES – i found you a new job!,
installation at Tanas, Berlin, 2009

Back cover, top row, left to right:

JUMP, artists initiated event, Shanghai, 2009, artist: Hu Yun

Mark Tribe, The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008, DeFremery Park, Oakland,
2008, photo by Nick Davis

Borna Sammak, Best Buy, installation view of video exhibition at Best Buy, New York, October
2009, photo by Art Fag City

free size, curated by Logan Bay for apexart Franchise 2010, Samaedam, Bang Khun Thian,
Thailand, held at Sinudom Silk Screen Factory

172
Front cover, bottom row, left to right:

Discussion led by Stephen Wright at apexart, March 2004

Vetevendosja, Attack with color of the UNMIK Building, Prishtina, Kosovo, 2006

Image from the project The School of Panamerican Unrest, by Pablo Helguera, Villa Ukika,
Chile, 2003

The Most Curatorial Biennial of the Universe on display at apexart, July 2007

Back cover, bottom row, left to right:

Einblick in das Ordinariat Erweiterter malerischer Raum, Prof. Daniel Richter, Rundgang 2008
at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, photo by Lisa Rastl

Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid, Obsession, video, 2008

Allen Ruppersberg, Wallpaper from The New Five Foot Shelf, Dia Projects, 2004, image source:
Dia Art Foundation Artists Web Projects

Seb Patane, Chariot, Fool, Emperor, Force, Installation view, 2009, image courtesy Maureen
Paley, London

173
“Alternative thinking is the creation of mental space sufficient for imagining the expansion

apexart
of the realm of the humane.” - Robert Atkins (San Francisco, CA)

“It’s no secret that the art industry collectively suffers from a cultivated form of Attention
Playing by the Rules:
Deficit Disorder. … The notion of the time-out—time to analyze, to think, to inquire and
reflect—is essential to any dynamic enterprise.” - Julie Ault (New York, NY)
Alternative Thinking/
“Everything that exists and everything that emerges is almost automatically seen by us under Alternative Spaces
the perspective of its impending decline and disappearance.” - Boris Groys (New York, NY)

Playing by the Rules

“Never stop believing in the power of new thinking, in the power of art, since this is the only Robert Atkins Boris Groys
way the young have to protect the critical thought, that is, by sharing it with the world, by
nurturing its being.” - Sofija Grandakovska (Skopje, Macedonia) Julie Ault Marina Grzinic
“Critical thinking, including unfettered creative expression, are vital cultural values; artists René Block Pablo Helguera
and contemporary art play essential roles in both testing and strengthening these values.”
- Irene Tsatsos (Los Angeles, CA) Winslow Burleson Naeem Mohaiemen
“The only way to stop the normalized amnesia of neoliberal global capitalism is actually Biljana Ciric Raphael Rubinstein
to interrupt the logic of the norm. This interruption is what characterizes the alternative
radical practice.” - Marina Grzinic (Ljubljana, Slovenia) Renaud Ego Irene Tsatsos
Sofija Grandakovska

Rand / Kouris

edited with a preface by Steven Rand

Curatorial Studies/Art History and an introduction by Heather Kouris

published by apexart
ISBN: 978-1-933347-43-1 apexart