Screening Program:
24 February – 3 March 2007
Film: The Yes Men
The film follows Andy and Mike (the Yes Men) from their beginnings with GWBush.com, and on to their tasteless parody of the WTO’s website. Some visitors fail to notice that the site is a fake, and send Mike and Andy speaking invitations meant for the real WTO.
The group uses pranks and trickery to operate in a society governed by mass media. The Yes Men may be dubbed a satire, a parody, an intervention and a blurring – all aimed at those who misuse their positions of power . Thus far they have impersonated public figures and famous institutions, including President Bush, the World Trade Organization and Dow Chemical Corporation.
6 March – 10 March 2007
Film: B.L.O. Nightly News
In a form of subversive media terrorism, Barbie Liberation Organization (B.L.O) operatives purchased talking Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, both of which were programmed to speak crude cultural clichés. The dolls were then taken to the BLO headquarters where ”corrective surgery” was performed: switching the dolls’ voice boxes. The dolls were then placed back on the store shelves in a process of reverse shoplifting—”shopgiving.” In the format of a nightly news program, this witty and satiric video documents the activities of the Barbie Liberation Organization, including the ”corrective surgery” procedure and the ”shopgiving” actions. The tape functions as witness and instruction manual on culture jamming—an interference strategy used by guerrilla art and media activists to expose and undermine the logic and domination of corporate-controlled media and capitalist culture.
13 March – 17 March 2007
Film: Czech Dream
It’s a few minutes before 10 a.m. and there are more than 3000 people jostling on a remote parking lot. Many of them are clutching plastic bags in their hands; some of them are armed with trolley bags. Assistants are handing out plastic cups and the moderator on the illuminated stage urges the people to have a drink from the near-by water tankers. The ”hyper-anthem” of CZECH DREAM rings out once again from the speakers: ”Try to see as a child, many things will seem wild...” Suddenly the managers of the hypermarket rush out on the stage, greet their customers and briskly cut the glittering ribbon. The escort removes the metal barriers and the crowd starts moving. They still have 300 metres to reach the hypermarket. People start running... A moment later, the fastest of them are struck dumb: the hypermarket that they have reached is nothing but a huge film decoration... Documentary hyper-comedy CZECH DREAM is a feature film about a hypermarket that has never existed. CZECH DREAM documents the largest consumer hoax the Czech Republic has ever seen. Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak, two of Eastern Europe’s most promising young documentary filmmakers, set out to explore the psychological and manipulative powers of consumerism by creating an ad campaign for something that didn’t exist.
20 March – 24 March 2007
It’s Not My Memory Of It: Three Recollected Documents
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne create video pieces addressing documentation and the impact of political violence. Their projects explore the use of documents, photographs, texts, objects, the body, and physical structures to reflect and generate the vision of the future. In addition they engage in the bureaucracy of clandestine organization and of memory.
It’s Not My Memory of It is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the tape addresses the expansion and intensification of secrecy practices in the current climate of heightened security. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979. A CIA film -recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992 - documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor.
Images pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 are the source of a concluding reflection on the role of documents in the constitution of the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.
It’s Not My Memory of It is conceived and produced by The Speculative Archive. The Archive works with existing collections of historical records to produce new documents. The Archive was founded by Meltzer and Thorne in 1999.
27 March – 31 March 2007
The Marching Plague
Filmed on location in Stornoway, Scotland, Critical Art Ensemble’s film Marching Plague presents a powerful critique of UK-US bioweapons research and addresses the paranoia surrounding bioterrorism. It centres on the recreation of secret sea trials conducted by the UK government in the 1950s.
The film’s ultimate aim is to address and dispel some of the public’s fear of ”bioterrorism”, which has been greatly exaggerated since 9/11. It tries to convey a more reasoned perspective on the level of risk to the public and the desirability of germ warfare weapons, than is usually presented in more ”sensational” fiction or even in television docu-dramas. Bioweapons experts and artists, including Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, join Steve Kurtz, Steve Barnes and Lucia Sommer of Critical Art Ensemble to discuss bioterrorism, the culture of fear and artistic censorship.
3 April – 7 April 2007
Films by Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose
Yossi and Itamar started working as an artistic pair during the settlers’ struggle to prevent the disengagement. They went to the Gaza settlements where they satirically documented the battle. Their films combine documentary and satire, and they have been previously screened in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Following their interest in such a mode of creation and collaboration, they decided to drop out of the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, work independently as an artistic duo, and develop the docu-satirical style.
They work in tandem independently and are committed to low-budget production and continuous creation, free of the support of cinema schools and art encouragement funds.
10 April – 14 April 2007
Film: Border Crossing Services
The European Union member states’ restrictive immigration regulations mean that there is almost no chance to legally migrate to the EU and reside in a member state. For those who want to enter, making use of border crossing services is often the only possibility for penetrating “Fortress Europe.”
The goal of the project “Border Crossing Services” (“Dienstleistung: Fluchthilfe”) is to redefine and highlight the positive aspects of terms such as “smuggler” or ”trafficker” which have been given a negative connotation through the dominant medial discourse. Based on conversations carried out in Germany and Austria with immigrants and persons involved in the political left, the basic theme was separated into four sections for analysis and critique: “Who is allowed to migrate?,” “Celebrating and excluding,” “About border crossing services” and “Against racism” – all confronting the hegemonic model for representation of “border crossing services” and migration. Directors/Producers: Oliver Ressler, Martin Krenn
17 April – 21 April 2007
Film: The Pie’s the Limit
A video featuring the Biotic Baking Brigade and the Global Pastry Uprising and a cornucopia of political pie-throwings. The movie has interviews with underground pie-tossers, and a corporate media analysis of their actions. Most delicious of all, of course, is the video footage of San Francisco’s Mayor Willie Brown, Robert Shapiro (CEO of Monsanto), economist Milton Friedman, Kenneth Derr (CEO of Chevron), Renato Ruggiero (Chief of the World Trade Organization) and Bill Gates getting pied in the face! Easily the funniest political video you’ll ever see.
24 April – 28 April 2007
Film: Sonic Outlaws
The film is about what happened when Californian band, Negativland, used samples from a U2 song and released the single in 1991, as a joke. U2’s label, Island Records, charged Negativland with copyright and trademark infringement for the appropriation of the letter U and the number 2, even though U2 had in turn borrowed its name from the Central Intelligence Agency. Sonic Outlaws covers some of the same territory while also expanding upon the ideas behind Negativland’s guerilla recording tactics. Guerilla is indeed the word, since these and other appropriation artists see themselves as engaged in real warfare, declared by the commercial airwaves, and entertainment industry. Director/Producer: Craig Baldwin
The exhibition ”Free Radicals” features contemporary and historical projects created by individual artists as well as by artist/activist collectives that breach the boundaries of art and cross into other fields. The exhibition embraces a wide range of work, striving to point in the general direction in which contemporary artistic autonomy is headed and wherein it is shaped, as well as the possibilities it opens up for art when it strives to operate within society. At the same time, the exhibition sets out to propose a historical reading of the various projects as part of a broader artistic phenomenon that forms an alternative to the bourgeois history of art.
Historiographers write history as a sequence of events set in motion by prominent individuals (political and military leaders), thus recycling the capitalist logic of the individual as expressed in the history of art: the artist as lone genius. This narrative undercuts the significance of the group and of collective work, which underlie the artistic or political creative process.
”Free Radicals” proposes a reading of the works as integrated within the history of art and as a new direction for art which resumes an active role in the society and context within which it is created. The exhibition focuses on projects that transgress the boundaries of art’s autonomy to such fields as economy, politics, sociology, science, etc.
In Western democracies art is granted an autonomy whereby the artist is allowed a broad freedom of action. Thus, it is the product of an ideology, and cannot be regarded as exempted from politics.1 Western culture has created an artist who is above the society in which he lives. This separation, which defines the artist in socio-historical and economic terms, was founded on the aforementioned myth of the artist as a genius operating in isolation. It emerged concurrent to the formation of the democratic nation-state (as conceived in Western Europe, and in some respects – in Israel as well) and parallel to the evolution of capitalist consumer society (as manifested in the United States).
The autonomy enjoyed by Western art practices leads, in most cases, to a preoccupation with intra-artistic issues often dissociated from its social environment. It has enabled the artist a virtually unlimited freedom, but at the same time neutering art’s subversive elements that could potentially undermine political or economic systems. One ought to consider the development of art’s autonomy in the context of the regulation of power between government and citizen in Western society. The paradox of freedom, if you will, in Western society lies in the fact that in order to gain freedom - the right to work, to welfare, to freedom of movement, etc., the citizen must give up considerable parts of his freedom, subordinating himself to social regulations and government control. The citizen is registered and followed in practically all aspects of his life. From this point of view it is interesting to examine the freedom granted to the arts in Western culture. In it, art is neutered of its subversive element, of its absolute freedom, the very freedom capable of undermining society’s foundations, in exchange for an almost total freedom as pertains to engagement with the self, self-freedom, and personal freedom of expression.
In Israel the art field’s autonomy is preserved as well, and the state finances art, even when it is incongruent with the national ideology. Putting aside the size of its budget for the time being, one might say that Israel has a vested interest in financing ”Israeli art” and disseminating it worldwide. Here too, artistic freedom is marketed as an ideological tool for Israeli propaganda, enhancing Israel’s image as ”the only democracy in the Middle East.” To wit, art serves a certain state need; thus, supporting it is worthwhile.2 The inherent paradox in artistic autonomy is preserved here as well: an illusion of freedom from ideology which serves an ideology.
A different reading of artistic autonomy may draw on the idea of the ”state of emergency” or ”state of exception” as formulated by Giorgio Agamben.3 According to this reading one may perceive art as operating in a sphere where the law is suspended. Artists are allowed to say and do much more than practitioners in other sectors in society, even in time of emergency – they are allowed, so long as their art does not undermine the real social, capitalistic or national structure, so long as it preserves the artist’s professional one-dimensionality as someone who engages solely in art, and does not venture into other fields.
Concurrent with art that upholds its autonomous position, an alternative has always existed, which rejects art’s market economy or does not take part in it. In recent years this field has become a strong current rendering the act of trespassing into a mode of action. Trespassing, by essence, invokes a counter-reaction by the law, the state and society. Playing against the law, the provocative act and its counteract are the thread linking the projects together in the current exhibition. The different included projects illustrate how the field of political art – in a post-political era, an era underlain by a dichotomous world view between culture and fundamentalism,4 Christianity and Islam, good and bad – has transformed into a field where the way to have influence is via playing with and around the law; by adopting tactics of terror, spectacle, plagiarism. If we adopt the description of Western society as the society of the spectacle, as conceived by Guy Debord, a society that has replaced reality with representation, social relations with consumerism, a society that is in a post-political era, then the way to act and influence it is much more radical. In order not to become a part of the culture industry, not to produce ever more images of objection that may be abducted by advertising firms, one must adopt other tactics, conscious of the difficulty in creating an alternative in a society that embraces any objection to the hegemony, thus neutering it. This is the place of the artist as an amateur, as someone who rejects the fixed definitions of professionalization in capitalist society. It is the place of the artist as a fundamentalist, not by virtue of religious faith, but as one who truly believes. It is the place of the artist as a perpetrator, a vandal, a thief. The artist embraces all his definitions that threaten order in capitalist society only to generate interference, intervention, or spectacle.
It is interesting to survey the cultural-political establishment’s confrontation with artistic practice when it is incongruent with the goals in whose name the art’s autonomy is granted. In the USSR, the way to manage art and artistic creation was via tight control and penalization. Thus, although during the first years of its inception the various avant-garde currents were considered desirable since they shared the idea of the artist’s commitment to proletarian causes, during the 1930s all artistic work incompatible with the criteria of Socialist Realism was banned. In the West, confrontation by the avant-garde and overtly political artists that undermined the capitalistic, bourgeois or national hegemony was treated differently. Its celebrated freedom was co-opted by government as an expression of the West’s moral superiority and freedom of expression. Dually, various avant-garde concepts were commandeered by the media and industry, and became commodities, a brand of freedom and originality, thus ensuring that these ideas would be emptied of their contents, leaving but an external shell, the revolutionary trend without its revolutionary potential.
After the fall of the Communist Bloc and during the 1990s, a sharper transition occurred in the market economy toward globalization. The global economy created a global consumerist market in which the culture industry exists alongside other industries. Symbols of political radicalism or resistance have become the protagonists of advertising campaigns, and virtually any aspect of Western culture has become part of consumer culture. As early as the 1960s, the Situationists had already described reality in capitalist society as one that transforms any experience or activity into a commodity. They tried to conceive new tools with which to confront consumerist reality, underlain by the realization that in a world where exposure to visual images is so vast, art must rethink its tools. Their influence is discernible to date, and it is based on the concept of trespassing – penetration into forbidden territory, territory intended neither for the artist nor for the citizen, in order to generate provocation or change of meaning. Trespassing is a device that invokes counter responses which expose the borders of the trespassed territory.
A reconsideration of politically committed art and activism in the reality of the global capitalist economy alters the perception of art’s autonomy in Western society. The artistic establishment raises questions about art’s economic profitability within the global market, whereas artists strive to re-define the limits of their autonomy by adopting new tactics. Criticism however, comes also from a whole cultural field unrepresented in the art market since it is not engaged in the production of negotiable cultural commodities – whether due to ideological choice or constraints of the everyday. This cultural field has now become more relevant than ever, subverting the boundaries of the artistic field and artistic autonomy. Technological developments, especially in the field of global communications, allow these cultural phenomena to deviate from their local frameworks and become global phenomena existing outside the market’s centers of power, and their impact strays from the boundaries of the community in which they emerge. The tools adopted by the Situationists and other avant-garde groups since the 1960s form the basis for this activity, reinstating previous tactics into our current reality where they are ever more pertinent.
The new conception of artistic autonomy which develops gradually from the diverse practices implemented by groups of artists and activists is not founded on the principle of the lone, isolated artist, but rather on the collaborative, the collective and the dialogical. It is not an autonomy that exploits art to engage in politics, economy, science, and social concerns. It is a not focused on the creation of social distinctions between the artist and their surroundings, but rather on allowing for the artist’s active participation in their environment, and thus rendering their commitment to the society in which they live a practical matter. Under the rubric of “art”, artists are free to undermine political, economic, journalistic, scientific and technological thought and production processes. Their autonomy is shaped by activist cells, by working groups within the ”body” of global politics and economy, and within global networks. These often operate like viruses that disrupt the smooth, silent flow of capital, at times taking advantage of its loopholes. Their scope ranges from introductions of theoretical and practical models for economic-political alternatives to vandalism and hacking. Art’s freedom, whose value has been preserved as a heritage, enables ”making” politics, economy, science; not in the service of capital or nationality, rather in order to propose models for social change.
The exhibition features cultural creations whos tactics combine humor, media exploitation, invasion, hacking, parasitism, seizure of public space, manipulation of visual language, virus dissemination, theft of information, copyright violation, etc. Loose knit organizations operate alongside established collectives, the definitions of whose practice greatly deviate from the limits of art’s autonomy as we know it. The work they produce takes place on the streets, indoors, on the Internet, in schools, in the public sphere, inside corporate computer systems. Thus, alongside introducing evolving alternative models of art, the hidden interests that allow the capitalist artistic autonomy are revealed.
The exhibition spaces of the Israeli Center for Digital Art will transform into an open learning commons for the duration of the exhibition. They will host projects, lectures, workshops, films, and texts which have in common the manipulation of artistic autonomy in order to cross the boundaries of artistic fields and in order to make politics, economy, scientific research - to steal from the supermarket, buy votes, and so on.
The exhibition spans contemporary and historical, international and local, artistic and activists - projects all focused on active intervention in society. The major concern linking all the works is their relationship to the law and the law’s response. In the absence of a central authority, as represented by the church in previous centuries, the bureaucracy of the law takes the place of divinity. Bureaucratic law – and, in this context, governments’ emergency measures as well – is intended to regulate social relations. Rebelling against the law, by undermining its authority and exploiting the privileges it grants, form the basis for the actions performed by the artists participating in the current exhibition. As a social phenomenon, it is interesting what can be learned from an exploration of different attitudes in varying societies to the legal system and to the ability to make ”shortcuts” around legal liabilities. Israel, characterized by a culture of ”cutting corners” as far as bureaucratic procedures are concerned, is often associated with a different legal tradition, not based on a set of rules and bureaucratic regulations. Judaism has created rules which were not intended to regulate the social relations within a political entity and its citizenry, but rather to define the boundaries of the tribe, the ethnic group, as a minority itself.5 Judaism, as a religion that has always operated from a position of seclusion, the position of the Homo Sacer, maintains an ambivalent attitude to the law of the State, thus having revolutionary and oppositional potential inherent in it. How does it happen, then, that in Israel of all places, the State is so rarely questioned, that artists produce such scarce radical activity, such little subversion of bureaucracy or questioning of the law?!
Notes
1. The autonomy of Western art is customarily regarded as the opposite of the engaged political art of the Soviet bloc and the Communist countries, as manifested in Socialist Realism in the USSR. The artist’s freedom is perceived as total liberation from political commitment, as opposed to art in the USSR which was subjected to state control and was regarded in the West as a propagandist tool. Western democracy, in avoiding direct intervention and tight control, has always blurred the propagandist dimension of cultural creation. Nevertheless, as maintained by Max Kozloff in Art Forum in May 1973 (”American Painting During the Cold War”), modern art, and especially Abstract Expressionism, perceived as apolitical, the majority of whose practitioners displayed leftist political inclinations, expressed the period rhetoric of American superiority by representing its self-confidence, painterly freedom, genius expressed in unfettered gesture, and created consummate symbols of freedom. Kozloff describes how the CIA, which acknowledged the propagandist power of these artifacts, started ”exporting” them worldwide via the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art as commodity in the struggle for American dominance against the communist threat. See http://64.241.242.253/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_9_41/ai_101779145.
2. In this context it is interesting to examine the wording of the agreement signed by an artist with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when they are granted support for travel abroad. The artist is defined as service provider, and the state – as the recipient.
3. Giorgio Agamben maintains that the state of emergency has, in the second half of the 20th century, and especially after 9/11, become the prevalent form of government in many Western democracies. This state of exception is one where emergency decrees erode the democratic structure, giving the authorities increased power. These decrees are intended to protect the social structure against a permanent external threat. The result is a self-nourishing system and an interest to preserve the constant existence of a threat in order to justify the state of emergency and hence the transfer of authority. See: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
4. Slavoj Žižek distinguishes between belief as part of culture and fundamentalism: ”…What is a ’cultural lifestyle’ if not that every December in every house there is a Christmas tree – although none of us believes in Santa Claus? Perhaps, then, ’culture’ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without ’taking them seriously.’ Isn’t this why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as ’barbarians,’ as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs?” See: Slavoj Žižek, ”Passion: Regular or Decaf?” In These Times, vol. 28, iss. 09, 27 Feb. 2004, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/146/passion_regular_or_decaf/.
5. Ibid.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
