From the Voice of the People to the People of the Voice
Occupy LA at City Hall. Photo: Carol Cheh.
Now that several weeks have passed since the forced closure of Occupy LA’s site at Los Angeles City Hall, I’ve been thinking of various theoretical frameworks to talk about what happened there, and especially the part artists played in it. Time creates a different perspective. The rush of events and above all, sounds—the talking, the shouting, the chanting—have died down into a haunting silence. I especially heard this silence the last two times I walked near the now barricaded, DMZ-style site. Talking and silence played their various roles during the occupation, and strangely still resonate. The protesters’ phrases and demands have echoed around the globe, and though the silence that once surrounded the constellation of issues they addressed has receded from sight, the ghost of silence never disappears.
The physicality of City Hall made Occupy LA resonate differently from Occupy Wall Street. The building’s iconic 1920’s streamlined classicism radiates a certain kind of utopian civic spirit. It has both grandeur and human scale. For 35 years the tallest building in Los Angeles, the panopticonic tower disappears from sight when you are beside the building. The Occupy encampments snuggled around it on the east and west sides (sometimes known as the political and party sides), while the mostly unoccupied north side entrance often served as a stage for performances. With its promise of justice and civic action alongside its embodiment of power and wealth, it was a vital alternate to the ubiquitous image of Wall Street beamed around the world.
A Brave New World (remix)
Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1505–15.
Ghostly reflections of Hieronymus Bosch, Dante’s Inferno, and “Dawn of the Dead” interchangeably drifted through my mind when I first entered the tent city of Occupy Los Angeles in late October of 2011. The terrain of people was bare, raw, gritty, and utterly public. I am an artist and a mediator. I chose to show up on site frequently over the next month offering engagement and conflict transformation skills to support their capacity to perform expressions of public outcry at our culture’s out-of-control social inequity. These are my reflections.
Each Occupy location across the country and around the globe has emphasized two interdependent strategies: externally, to publicly protest chronic and insidious social inequities, and internally, to develop sustainable governance and strategies for arriving at consensus amongst all participants. On November 14, 2011, the 59th day of peaceful occupation by Occupy Wall Street in New York City, everyone at that camp was forcefully evicted and a library of a thousand books was violently demolished by local police. One book was left behind, A Brave New World/Revisited by Aldous Huxley (1958), in which he expounds in essay form on the potential demise of democracy. Brave, indeed.
Occupy a Living Wage
Signs created by LA artists in response to the controversy over the 2011 MOCA Gala, choreographed by Marina Abramović.
Since Occupy came to LA, I have been present for many beautiful, challenging, inspiring, joyful, frustrating, and moving events. I have visited Occupy encampments in both my immediate and professional communities. I have initiated a drive to provide Occupiers with blankets, washed LA City Hall with Mother Art (an action initiated by Tucker Neel), read “A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible” aloud at an Occupy LACMA action, talked endlessly with friends who participated in the notorious 2011 MOCA Gala, and spent the first hours of my thirtieth birthday watching friends get arrested on Ustream feeds while telling another, on the phone, to get away from the LRAD she described standing next to. The event that I want to discuss most, however, is the creation of a union, or something like it, to address what is obviously a very failed system.
I’m not even sure the problem is systemic, but as Sara Wookey’s letter addressing the equity controversy at the MOCA Gala points out, there is definitely a problem. Since there is plenty of literature on the event and its aftermath, I will not recap it for you, but it was directly after a protest of that Gala that a few LA artists began to organize towards a local art union. (Note that as a group, we are not yet sure of the terminology we want to use in naming ourselves, but for the purposes of this essay, I will use the term “union.”) The group has had three meetings and plans to continue them. I cannot speak for the others who have come together to form this affiliation, but I will detail why I feel very strongly about its necessity and why Occupy is the perfect catalyst for it.
In our meetings there have been two major issues that I believe will shape the form of the organization: compensation equity and mutual aid.
Dirt and Blankets
Fence art at Greenham Common Peace Camp, 1980s. Photo by Sigrid Møller, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
As I write this, it is almost four weeks since the raid on Occupy LA. I readily admit I was attached to the encampment—although I was a non-resident Occupier, I valued the site as a physical marker of not only my dissatisfaction with the status quo but also of the fact that a number of people believe things can actually change. “There it is,” said people walking, driving, riding, flying by the hundreds of tents pitched around City Hall from October 1 to November 30. Here resided the discontent, the protest, the idea. If you missed it one day, you could come back the next.
Embodiment is a concept that’s very important to my art practice and, subsequently, the way I live my life. I move between materiality and the relational, sometimes within a collaborative social practice, and other times when making objects. Language is always present in some way.
The space of protest is distinctive, with some objectives that are vastly different than those of art. However, many artists in Los Angeles and across the country have engaged with the Occupy movement not just as activists but as artists. I was compelled to do so because my art training has sensitized me to the need for any new vision to acknowledge the body.
What’s distinctive about Occupy in its first stages is that it brings the vulnerability of bodies to the fore in such a way that it becomes harder to look away. Occupy is an example of activism that brings the domestic into the space of the political or, rather, acknowledges that it’s been there all the time. Sometimes, for instance in the case of housing issues, this strategy of address seems natural. Around other issues, however, it’s effective not because it’s thematically directly linked, but rather its implication of protesters’ bodies in a durational fashion creates a sense of urgency and crisis.
#OccupyOccupyArt21
EXERCISE YOUR RIGHTS!
On the first night of #occupyLA, about an hour after the General Assembly, an individual in red jogging attire began running laps around the camp. Signs were attached to their garments that read, “RUN WITH ME AGAINST GREED.” I was talking about something with a few comrades when we saw this moonlit athlete go by two or three times. After the third lap we decided to join. The jogger was very friendly and clearly excited about our participation. Our running constituency slowly grew with each additional lap, meanwhile other occupiers cheered us on as we ran past. Some lined up along our path with their hands out to give us high-fives as we ran by, which was extremely encouraging. People were shouting, “Exercise your rights!”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/parlance/6203474989/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/parlance/6203990894/in/photostream/
. . .
(24) pajama revolution
Mikal Czech
(2011)
Keywords: experimental music, experimental performance, dance, pajamas, sitting around, passive aggression, protest, occupation, occupyLA, occupyWallStreet, occupyEverything
Duration: whatever you can afford minutes
# of Performers: the more the merrier
Materials / Instrumentation / Performers
your body, pajamas, blog posts, articles, videos, facebook
Score / Notes
spend your morning, afternoon, evening, or/and late nite in your pajamas
reading articles and blog posts, or/and watching videos
related to the occupy movement
http://uploaddownloadperform.net/MikalCzech/PajamaRevolution
. . .
(23) Violin Concerto in Occupy-minor (for Jen Karmin)
Mikal Czech
(2011)
– playlist for a gentle revolution
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CEACCC216893517
http://uploaddownloadperform.net/MikalCzech/ViolinConcertoInOccupyMinor
. . .
Octupy Los Angeles
Octupy puppet graphic by Janet Owen Driggs.
On November 20, 2011, a giant octopus puppet floated up the Spring Street steps of Los Angeles City Hall. Held and maneuvered by over 40 protestors, this was the first public performance of Octupy Los Angeles, a project initiated by Performing Public Space which brings together octopus imagery, the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the current Occupy movement. The puppet also performed more recently as part of Occupy the Rose Parade. Here, Teresa Carmody interviews Owen Driggs of Performing Public Space about making the puppet, animal imagery, the role of the artist-protestor, and how to make your own giant Octupy puppet.
Teresa Carmody: Why an octopus? Why now?
Owen Driggs: We first organized the octopus as a visual metaphor to help clarify the obfuscating actions of globalized monopolies—we wanted to make the corporate tentacles visible by literally winding them around the columns of L.A.’s City Hall. As the project got underway though, a second driver emerged: the relevance of the octopus—an infinitely graceful creature with an apparently distributed consciousness. So the octopus also stands as a visual metaphor for thinking about leaderless (leaderful) organization. We’d like to explore the latter idea more fully in the future, but for now the former is absorbing our attention, so I’ll answer primarily in relation to “making the corporate tentacles visible.”
For at least the past two centuries, cartoonists and writers have used octopuses to expose the workings of empire, fascism, communism, and monopoly capitalism, among others. The tentacles offer an excellent vehicle by which to describe the pervasive reach, multitudinous activity and insidious grasp of power striving for dictatorship. There is something important in the metaphor too about the alien (by which I mean the inhuman and inhumane) nature of such power operations.
More recently the metaphor has been rejuvenated by its relevance to contemporary conditions. The enormous breadth and reach of the Koch family’s right-wing network for example, coupled with their secrecy, and a fortuitous shared ‘och’ sound, has rendered “the Kochtopus” a popular study. Tony Carrk’s April 2011 study illuminates many of the brothers’ tentacles, while Zina Saunders’ 2011 animation offers a visual. A 2009 Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” His words spawned vampire squid imagery, spreadingly but particularly in relation to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). A recent example: On December 12 OWS people wore giant squid outfits to march in solidarity with their west coast counterparts during an action to close the ports titled “Day Without Goldman Sachs.”
We Are
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For this piece, I re-read everything posted to my Facebook and Twitter accounts from September 21 (the first day I became aware of Occupy Wall Street) to October 1, leading up to the Occupation here in LA. I transcribed every video and clipped bits from every article, keeping any sentence that included a collective pronoun like: they, we, us, or our, including contractions let’s and/or we’ve, etc. That piece was around 25,000 words so I edited it down here to only all the collective pronouns.
For a primer on conceptual writing, see UbuWeb’s Anthology of Conceptual Writing.
Mathew Timmons’ books include CREDIT, The New Poetics, and Sound Noise. He is the publisher and editor of Insert Press and Blanc Press in Los Angeles.
Radical Receptivities
ARLA: Resonate! Receive!, performance detail, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 2011. Photo: Jean-Paul Leonard.
I. ARLA & OLA
To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically… Understanding and interpreting what the ear transmits to the brain is a process developing from instantaneous survival reactions to ideas that drive consciousness.
– Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005)
Elana Mann and Juliana Snapper began investigating receptivity as part of a four-woman group called ARLA (a mobile acronym for Audile Receptives Los Angeles or A Ripe Little Archive…), a Los Angeles-based collective they founded in the spring of 2011 with Vera Brunner-Sung and Kristen Smiarowski. The collective came together with a shared interest in exploring and expanding the active listening strategies developed by the composer Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros, an American composer and improviser central to the development of post-war electronic art music, originated social technologies around sound known as “Deep Listening” and “Sonic Awareness.” ARLA began meeting to discuss readings and to perform both Oliveros’ work and their own experimental scores, in living rooms and open spaces throughout Los Angeles.
ARLA’s decision to bring their work to Occupy Los Angeles (OLA) took shape while they prepared their first public performance for the Getty Museum in October 2011. That first performance engaged groups of mixed ages to investigate sound perception and sonic memory. Participants donned connective ponchos and lifted huge ears into the air for Listening Parades. Part spectacle, part sound scavenger hunt, the parades snaked across the vistas and gardens of the Getty, then regrouped for vocal interplay and dialogue about the experience. Related actions were performed at OLA, but took on different stakes within the highly charged environment of Los Angeles City Hall, the location of the OLA encampment until the November 30 eviction.
Human Pyramids and the Capitalist System
Performance led by Robby Herbst at Occupy LA, in which human pyramids depict class dynamics. The project was inspired by Herbst’s archival family photos and a 1911 diagram produced by Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) called “Pyramid for the Capitalist System.” Photo: Lisa Anne Auerbach.
Growing up in suburban Westchester County, I was at home in America’s Middle Class, surrounded congenially there by its Upper Class. My parents, both supportive members of New York’s teachers’ union, moved out of the Bronx in the 1960s and set up a nice life for us in the city’s northern suburbs. We held on to the past through my mom’s Bronx accent and a collection of photographs put together by her father, whom I never met. He’s in many of the photos, which depict beach acrobats. The photos were taken at Coney Island, but most are from Orchard Beach in the Bronx. There he worked out with a group of men and women, performing stunts in their free time.
My grandfather was a cobbler specializing in arch supports. That trade and his hobby were distant from me. As members of the middle class my parents’ labor was in the classroom, not in a workshop, and their hobbies were discrete, taking place inside gyms—or in clothes more modest than swim trunks on a sunny beach.
One set of photos stand out in my grandfather’s collection. The memory of his party affiliation is murky, but there he is near my grandmother in a photograph of the Hungarian Socialist League’s Yorkville Branch and the Young Workers Athletic Club (YWAC).
Occupying Art
At the edge of the Occupy LA encampment, at City Hall. Photo: Carol Cheh.
As I write this, I am nearing the end of a battery of holiday get-togethers. These affairs tend to be filled with people that you only see once a year—relatives both close and distant, old family friends, childhood acquaintances. We gather around parties and shared meals and try to find some common ground for conversation. Yesterday I found myself chatting with a worker’s comp lawyer and a former corporate ladder climber, now turned zen gardener. Corporate politics and the machinations of the economy were hot topics.
I briefly touched on my life in “the art world,” which always brings faraway gazes touched with unfamiliarity and, sometimes, a bit of envy. As the art person, I’m always the odd woman out at gatherings like this. My world is perceived as a luxury/fantasy world that doesn’t interconnect in meaningful ways with the worlds of business, finance, law, the military—worlds inhabited by the majority of people in our society. In America, the art world is, for the most part, its own bubble—filled with specific people, who have a specific shared passion, and speak a specific language. Like queer people and people with eccentric hobbies, we have to find each other in order to survive, in order to perpetuate our way of life.
Having been deeply involved in the art world for the past 10 years, I’ve become acutely aware of the segregation of “art” and “life” in this country. Somewhere along the line—most likely amidst the loud noise of a relentless capitalist engine that promotes a severe work ethic and a concomitant valuation of economic competition and material rewards—American appreciation for the arts has been diminished to the point of near invisibility. Unlike many nations whose histories significantly predate the industrial revolution, Americans have never considered the arts an integral part of daily, ordinary life. At best, it’s a nice luxury that we can afford when times are good. At worst, it’s something that freaks and weirdos do, and of course, it’s first on the chopping block when times get tough.
