http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/ en-us 2011-03-17T13:50:14-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/003251.php To add your name to this list of signatories, please visit: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/gulflabor For more information: http://gulflabor.wordpress.com/ March 17, 2011 To: Richard Armstrong, Director Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation 1071 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10128 We, the undersigned, are writing to... rene 2011-03-17T13:50:14-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/003145.php Sao Paulo is Burning: The Spectre of Politics at the Biennial “The 29th Sao Paulo Biennial is anchored in the idea that it is impossible to separate art and politics.” In view of the events of the past 48 hours,... rene 2010-09-27T22:10:00-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/003101.php From our friends at pad.ma 10 Theses on the Archive April 2010, Beirut. 1. Don’t Wait for the Archive To not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many... rene 2010-05-26T11:08:22-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/003059.php "New Left-Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribe’s 'The Port Huron Project' and the Politics of Reenactment" by Paige Sarlin The journal October sent a questionnaire to artists, critics, and art historians in the summer of 2007. The central question, and the one they reprinted on the cover of the issue that contained all the responses, was: “In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led inva sion and occupation of Iraq?” The questionnaire and the published responses served as an answer to the lack of attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghani stan that had marked the journal during the previous three years.1 A journal other than October might never have felt the need to address contemporary political conditions. But this journal had been founded with a strident state ment of purpose. In 1978, the editors claimed the cultural arena as a site for political action, one in which philosophical and aesthetic questions were not pre-given but rather crucially important, with potential political conse quences. Seen in that light, their gesture to justify and remedy an absence of cultural attention to the Iraq War simultaneously appears particularly signifi cant. In one part of the questionnaire, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, the author, asked if the absence of the draft explained the difference between the char acter of the protests against the war in Vietnam and the protests against the war in Iraq.2 This question invoked a range of criticisms within the responses (including a criticism from me, as a member of the group 16Beaver).3 And so in the introduction to the special issue, Buchloh and coeditor Rachel Churner devoted a small section to defending themselves from the various objections and qualifications that were raised about their use of the comparison with Vietnam. They argued that the analogy that they drew upon was intended to “encourage action” through raising a generational question: What is it that we are doing that is different and how can the awareness of this differ ence be productive?4 Mark Tribe’s “The Port Huron Project” was cited in a footnote in this section, serving as an example of “how protest informs intel lectual history and how significantly we have internalized the intellectual paradigms from that generation.”5 Tribe’s project both served as proof of the influence of historic protests on cultural producers and simultaneously validated Buchloh and Churner’s use of the historical comparison in their questionnaire and analysis of the responses to the war in Iraq (figured as the “absence” of a mass movement). But what, one might ask, is the relation of “The Port Huron Project” to the history that it reenacts? And, more signifi cant, what is at stake in the comparison of the contemporary response to the war and the left-wing political activity of the late 1960s that October and vari ous other cultural institutions have invoked and explored over the last year, which was the fortieth anniversary of 1968? Tribe’s project gives a blank form to the differences and the similarities between then and now, assuming a form of resonance and significance that the project then re-produces and amplifies. Without questioning the utility of the comparison, Tribe’s project works to elaborate itself not in relation to the specificity of the past or the present, but somewhere in between, in relation to this structure of analogy. In this way, the project shares with October’s questionnaire and special issue a lack of clarity about the specific ideological and political character of the social movements of the 1960s (and the American left more broadly). “The Port Huron Project” gestures toward a general sense of the politically radi cal character of the historical period that accompanied the escalation of the American war in Vietnam and the marked increase in the level of class and social justice struggles in the United States and on a global scale. This use of analogy trades on the association with this “radical” history, but it sidesteps the myriad of difficult questions that generic references to protest, the New Left, or social movements of the 1960s could raise with respect to the con temporary antiwar movement. October’s questionnaire comes tantalizingly close to the question that Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin asked in their 1972 film Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (FR, 1972): What role can artists and intellectuals play in building a movement to stop the war?6 It seems that any formulation that seeks to oppose or respond to the Iraq War must inevitably confront a comparison with Vietnam and the antiwar movement that that war engen dered. But the ubiquity of the analogy highlights the need to consider how this deployment of history fits into a left-wing political project with respect to the war. The recent spate of art projects that use historical reenactment to consider the resonances between the 1960s and the present and the num ber of retrospectives and exhibitions that investigate and commemorate the political activism of the New Left could all be seen as participating in this “response.”7 In this essay, I read the invocation of the protest movements of the 1960s as a form of what Walter Benjamin termed “left-wing melan choly,” a response to the war in Iraq that treats the apparent absence of an antiwar movement in an oblique manner. More than simply an update, this new “left-wing melancholy”—or, as I term it, New Left-wing melancholy— fetishizes the history of the New Left as a way of avoiding addressing the present. Looking to the past, the practice of reenactment has the potential to generate a new relation to the present, to wrench us into a more proactive relation to the on-going crisis of military occupation and brutality. But Tribe’s reenactments are exemplary of how the reproduction of history can substitute for an analysis of specific histories. In the case of Tribe, the reproduction of a form of protest through the staging of speeches erases the politics and labor of organizing and movement building and in doing so points to a particular relation to history, one that is explained by Michel Foucault’s concept of the archive. The cultural left, as represented by October and various other galleries and museums, has embraced the reenactment and the structure of historical analogy to ’68 as a form of “political” engagement or response to the U.S. military and police actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This form of historical analogy perpetuates an image of the New Left that obscures the specific his tories of the social movements of the 1960s and the relation to the history of the left that the New Left sought to establish. As a result, the reference to the past functions to forestall an examination of the very real challenges to build ing a contemporary movement, some of which stem from the inheritances of the New Left and its rejection of previous modes of class-based analysis, but many of which derive from the varied developments in the world and on the left in the intervening years since 1968. On his website, Tribe describes “The Port Huron Project” as “a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s.”8 Tribe’s choice of title and this short description lay bare the cen tral mechanism of decontextualization that grounds his “project.” Under the rubric of reenactment, Tribe’s project involves a process of selection, perfor mance, documentation, and distribution of these speeches. Video documen tation is the primary form that this project takes; but the website is integral to the work, organizing the materials that define the project in terms of its production and its circulation. This focus on the mediated and re-mediated aspects of culture continues Tribe’s engagement with new media and forms of networking that began with his role in the cofounding in 1996 of Rhizome. org, a web-based resource for artists. Thus far in the series, six protest speeches have been reenacted: Coretta Scott King’s April 1968 speech at an antiwar demonstration in New York City, Howard Zinn’s speech about civil disobedi ence delivered on Boston Common in 1971, Paul Potter’s April 1965 speech at an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., César Chávez’s speech at a demonstration in Los Angeles in 1971, Angela Davis’s speech delivered at a 1969 Black Panther rally in Oakland, California, and Stokely Carmichael’s speech in front of the United Nations in 1967 as part of a national mobili zation against the Vietnam War. In the material provided on his website, Tribe is quite explicit about the elements that constitute a reenactment for this project: a location, a speech, a performer, invited guests, and the presence of cameras and various other recording devices. The events are advertised through news articles, emails, and other networks (the project has a My-Space page as well as now being supported and promoted by Creative Time, an arts organization in New York that orchestrates large-scale public events and exhibitions). As a result, audiences of varying sizes attend the events and are featured prominently in the documentation of the events. Available on Tribe’s website as well as on YouTube, and distributed via DVD, the videos of these events have also been installed in galleries and on large-scale video screens—for example, in Times Square.9 The title of Tribe’s “project” is taken from the Port Huron Statement, a document written in 1962 by members of Students for a Democratic Society, a group of American student activists who were working collectively to cre ate a new formation on the left, a student movement that would break with historical modes of organizing and analysis.10 The publication of the state ment was the announcement of this project, a call to bring into being a new student movement. The Port Huron Statement offered both an analysis of the past and an articulation of a range of convictions. In the document, the authors asserted that both the act of writing and the document they produced were part of “the search for truly democratic alternatives to the present.” The collective authors were more committed to “experiments” than traditional methods of organizing and analysis. The Port Huron Statement was a public utterance, the performance of a break with the Old Left as well as an attempt to bring something else into being. The “New Left” is thus a contested term as well as a fiercely fought transformation. It signals the emergence of a group of young radicals and activists who believed that the poor and the students, not the workers, were capable of transforming society. The document, the publication of which is often cited as one of the founding moments of the New Left, called for and attempted to perform this break.11 The New Left became the umbrella term for the emergence of new groups of radicals who aimed at transforming society as well as relations, analyses, and strategies as a whole on the left. The New Left can thus be contextualized as an historical designa­tion. But the movements that were lumped under this label were never singu lar nor homogenous, and even SDS, the organization that developed out of the conference that produced this document, was itself characterized by a set of debates and divisions, all of which have been documented and scrutinized by various critics.12 ayreen 2010-03-05T06:44:43-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002889.php Re: Committee to Investigate the April 10th Occupation of the New School To help push along the inquiry into the facts concerning the occupation of 65 Fifth Avenue on April 10th 2009, we are offering clear and direct responses to... rene 2009-05-18T21:00:40-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002797.php This is the first text from a document written by some of those involved in the occupation of the New School. The entire document can be found at the following link: http://www.sduk.us/pdf/ns_occupation.pdf ANTI-DEMOCRATIC REFLECTIONS ON THE RECENT NEW SCHOOL OCCUPATION We are of course disappointed with the occupation’s end: a shameful side-door exit in the middle of the night and an even more shameful declaration of “victory” on a measly slip of paper listing “demands met.” To us, that which has been heralded as “victory” is in every way the death of the occupation – representative both of the loss of our space itself as well as our capitulation to the liberal forces that sought to destroy the occupation from the beginning. Nevertheless, we had held our ground for 32 hours against police and security attacks and flagrantly broke laws while cops confusedly looked on; most importantly, we proved that occupations are possible in New York City, the fucking death metropolis center of capital’s hate. This was a precedent that we hope will inspire others to escalate their actions in the occupations we hope to see in the near future. It is toward these future occupations that we look as we put together this list of lessons and thoughts on the December 2008 New School occupation, in the certainty that what began at the New School is not over, despite the return of most participants to their private lives and despite the pathetic and misleading declarations of victory. Occupation is a means without an end - a practice that we can constantly renew and expand. And, as always, the event belongs to those who fight, not to those who want to control it. rene 2009-02-05T07:27:47-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002791.php Queer Activists Ask Filmmaker to Withdraw from Tel Aviv Festival by QUIT! ( quitpalestine [at] yahoo.com ) The global movement for divestment and boycott of Israel is growing. A San Francisco queer activist group has launched a campaign to pressure... rene 2009-01-30T17:24:40-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002747.php http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/an-open-letter-on-the-2008-kandinsky-prize/ An Open Letter on the 2008 Kandinsky Prize We admit it upfront: we don't care much for the artist Alexei Belyaev (Guintovt), and we don't care about him. His art is beyond the pale of criticism, and we have... rene 2008-12-09T10:21:24-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002558.php As the summary below states, this doesn't mean the ordeal is over--the justice dept. can still appeal, and there are the huge legal bills to deal with. BUT this is great news nonetheless. While there is still an abundance of... ayreen 2008-04-22T09:41:56-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002302.php You Can’t Anticipate Explosions Jacques Ranciere/Chto delat ------------------------------------------------------ "Journalisms:" or "Our Correspondent:" or "?" The title and mission of this collective project is a work in progress. But the general idea is that we cannot be in all places at all times. So those who would like to can write a "report" or "editorial" or "correspondence" to share experiences for the benefit of others. To take part, send submission or for more information please write to journalisms@16beavergroup.org or post online: http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/contact.php ------------------------------------------------------ 'You Can’t Anticipate Explosions' is a part of a larger discussion/debate pertaining to the Avant-garde initiated by Chto delat, more of which can be found on their website and their latest issue: http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=17&id=177&Itemid=179 Magun: The question we would like to discuss with you today is the connection between aesthetics and politics. Is there a specific type of art that would be both productive and relevant to the contemporary political and cultural situation? Our hypothesis is that the avant-garde – both as a phenomenon and a notion - could be important for us today. This view comes out of our historical situation, which was shaped by the constitutive moment of perestroika. As democratic mobilization challenged the authoritarian and corrupt power of the Soviet state, there was a major revival of interest in both Western modernism (not just Kafka and Joyce, but also Pollock, etc.) and the Soviet avant-garde art of the 1920-30s; what seemed important was the conjunction of this type of art with political emancipation. What do you think? Is the avant-garde is still usable as a notion? Ranciére: What strikes me is precisely that your relation to avant-gardist art was mediated through the democratic aspirations of the time of the perestroika. This means that it took its relevance in a certain present as a thing of the past. The question is: what thing and what past exactly? It seems to me that there are two concepts of avant-garde art and of its political effect. There is the idea of avant-garde art as an art intentionally designed to create new forms of life. Such was the art of the Russian futurists and constructivists, the art of El Lissitsky , Rodtchenko and their likes. They were people who really had a project to change the world, using certain materials and certain forms. Avant-garde art, in that way, was destined to create a new fabric of common sensible life, erasing the very difference between the artistic sphere and the political sphere. When you mention Kafka, Joyce or Pollock, it is not the same at all. What they have in common with the former is the rejection of standard representational art. But they did not want to create new forms of life, they did not want to merge art and politics. In this case, the political effect of art is something like what you mentioned: a transformation of our ways of feeling and thinking, the construction of a new sensorium. But this new sensorium is not the consequence of a desire to create new forms of collective experience. Instead it is the very break between the contexts in which Joyce or Kafka created and the context in which you read them that gave them their “political” relevance. So, I would say, first, that the idea of the avant-garde entails two different things, two different ideas of the connection between the artistic and the political, second, that the concept of the avant-garde that you had in mind at that time was a retrospective construction. As a matter of fact, avant-gardism and modernism as they are used in contemporary debates are retrospective constructions that are supposed to allow us to have it both ways: to have both the collective impulse and aspiration to a new life and the separating effect of the aesthetic break. Vilensky: Still, maybe we can start by positing some generic features of the avant-garde. For example, what immediately springs to mind is the principle of sublation of art into life. Then, of course, there is the direct connection with political struggle, and the idea that art should and must change the world, on different levels. Then, there is also a very interesting idea, and a very complicated one, coming from Adorno, namely that art should keep its own non-identity. To me, this means that the avant-garde is not about some tangible object of art, it’s always about the composition of different things. For example, Malevich was not just about pictures. Actually most of his paintings were sketches for large-scale public art projects. So I think that avant-garde is based on the rejection of fetishization into objects that are bought and sold; its main goal is to supply the subject with instruments for self-knowledge and self-realization through aesthetic experience. Magun: Maybe the definition of such features could help us to draw a line between the avant-garde and modernism? Because modernism uses innovative, non-representative techniques to sublimate art as such, to make an absolute work of art that would contain the entire world. The avant-garde uses the same techniques to do the opposite: to break up art, to explode art into life, achieving a kind of a Hegelian end of art. So, modernism would mean “life absorbed into art,” and avant-gardism “art absorbed into life.” rene 2007-09-21T12:10:19-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002181.php Dear Friends, I hope this letter finds you well. I wanted to share with you my personal reflections on the recent evictions of an incredible occupied building in Copenhagen called Ungdomshuset (The Youth House). My emotions about this are still... ayreen 2007-03-06T02:14:21-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002161.php Franco Berardi (Bifo) -- Sensitivity to the rhizome ------------------------------------------------------ "Journalisms:" or "Our Correspondent:" or "?" The title and mission of this collective project is a work in progress. But the general idea is that we cannot be in all places... ayreen 2007-02-13T01:36:36-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/002015.php GDR -- 12 notes from an evening in hell or, no wonder new york is dying?: notes on the recent passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 ------------------------------------------------------ "Journalisms:" or "Our Correspondent:" or "?" The title and mission of... rene 2006-10-05T21:33:41-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001939.php Yet another day of bombing all over the place. In the mountain here, we were subject to about three different bombing runs: 1 to continue destroying the Beirut to Damascus road; another to destroy the cell phone antennas; and... rene 2006-07-15T22:08:39-05:00 http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001913.php Shareholders invite us in and hold their breath http://www.revbilly.com/blog/?p=292 The showdown at the shareholders meeting of Victoria’s Secret (parent company: LimitedBrands, owned mostly by the Wexner family of Columbus, Ohio) was JUST GREAT! ForestEthics is trying to stop the clear-cutting... rene 2006-06-07T12:20:35-05:00