Today, another SOHO highlight!
Beatrix Zobl, my indefatigable curator-collaborator helped me make the acquaintance of Margit Appel, an activist for what they call Grundeinkommen, or a basic income. And today Margit and a crew from the self-organized, grassroots group with which she works, Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen (the Round Table for Basic Income), came by for nearly a full day of collaborative text-writing, prop material production, public dissemination, and then an evening review/evaluation/discussion session. The whole thing was an experiment, none of the activists being art identified or trained. But open-minded, willing to try something new, and even a bit anxious for a fresh group and public exercise. They have spent most of their time and energies 'til now focused on conferences, panel discussions, studying policy, and the like. No creative public action.
So we got together and riffed on the various rationales for a basic income.
We talked, and wrote, together:
Then we put the text into visual form, via lo-tech methods and by hand. In other words, we had a little drawing party, with photocopying, folding, and tearing, too.
The natural next step: dissemination, on the streets.
And after that, a little break for food and rest, and then regrouping for review, evaluation, debriefing. All in all, a very useful exercise for all. For the Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen, a lesson in fast, cheap, practical group creativity, and perhaps more to the point, experimenting with a new way to relate to each other, a different way to collaborate. (Up 'til this event, the group's activities have mostly been about conferences and policy.) This, I told them, is one simple way the group can cultivate itself as a culture.
So there have at least three kind of intense things happening while I've been in Austria. One was the sudden disappearance and subsequent discovery of the drowned artist-organizer Barbara Pitschmann, who had some role in organizing the art events happening in Linz a couple of weeks ago. Another is the violent attack that took place in a Sikh temple, setting off unrest in Punjab. But the thing I've been following with most interest remains the upcoming European Parliament elections.
This pic is of the same line of FPÖ posters I blogged on more than a week ago. I've noticed that as the June 7 election approaches, their posters are getting increasingly defaced. Here's what they're looking like now. So, clearly, somebody is not having any of the FPÖ crap.
This polemical work is beautiful, wouldn't you say! Stefan Nussbaumer did the lovely cloud form stencil and I cut the wording. Visitors remarked on the fin de siecle/Jugendstil flavor of the lettering. I cannot deny it; you still see this stylized lettering all over Vienna. After being here so many times, I seem to be absorbing the style.
In between talking to the visiting tour groups, tracking down wifi spots, and entertaining Louisa, Beatrix Zobl’s charming eight year-old, I’ve been generating stuff, too. Here’s a stencil I made as a ‘fine art’ insert for the twenty issues of AREA#8 that I brought along. I’m asking for 2€. Yes, that means I’m selling these issues of AREA#8. All proceeds go to AREA! Really, think of it like this. I’m asking for 2€ for the print, and they get the issue of AREA free. A lot of my friends in Vienna know about AREA, and for them it is an important window into action in not only Chicago, but the US as a whole.
The funny part of this story is that I was so proud of myself for translating the Leninist-Lennon line ‘imagine no religion’ into perfect German: Stell dir vor, keine Religion. And then in the transfer from writing to stencil I dropped the ‘e’ from keine, resulting in a bad translation. Understandable, but broken. And this, again, is why we printers always need a proofreader....
Chris Arendt, our visiting antiwar vet, and Stefan Nussbaumer, an artist and SOHO webmaster, have become our resident art cell, making stuff with the spray paint and stencil material supplied by SOHO. This poster/print/stencil for was made with elements contributed by Stefan, Chris, and a graphic from Just Seeds. Pretty great!
I like having academics and intellectuals make easy, immediate art. Their discomfort can be palpable. Monika Mokre and Elisabeth Mayerhofer, social scientists and theorists of so-called creative industries, joined me for an evening yesterday. We started off in the Zobl/Schneider SOHO space, just down the street from my space, discussing the various aspects of work in Austria, Europe, and the US that remain de- or under-politicized. The discussion was had while surrounded by fotos and material artifacts that came out of the Zobl/Schneider Berndorf project, which was a multi-year investigation into the culture and milieu of a single manufacturing company in Berndorf, Austria.
Then we moved over to my space to continue talking but also do a little hands on work. To draw or write while conversing. It took a bit for the Monika and Elisabeth to get in the comfort zone, but once there, we made a few text fragment flyers more than suitable for photocopying.
Here is a pic of Elisabeth wielding a broad-tipped sharpie. Notice the skillfully handled cigarette.
Outside the MuseumsQuartier there is an info kiosk designed to drum up interest in the upcoming European Parliament elections. You would think that this display of packaged chicken should be enough to get people to care.
But one of the two young people manning the booth tells me that the voting rate is down around 20%.
Until May 31 I will be working in this space at Neulerchenfelder Strasse 8, first floor, in the 16th District of Vienna. Amos Kennedy will be there with me, and there are some interesting art projects on the second and third floors, too.
My cellphone in Austria is 43.650.9504732.
Upon boarding my outbound flight to Europe I grabbed a copy of the International Herald Tribune from the newspaper cart. One of stories below the fold was about the upcoming European Parliament elections and how they haven’t caught the interest of the regular citizenry in nations across Europe. The report noted the baffling gap between the hotly contested domestic elections and the largely ignored European Parliament elections, in country after country—baffling precisely because the European Parliament is the only elected body with the power to shape European Union rules. These rules trump many laws passed by national parliments and legislatures, including in all-important areas such as agricultural trade policies.
The election in Austria is coming up very soon, the first week of June, I think. And so the campaigns are going strong, but according to the article and to folks I’ve asked in Vienna, not many people are paying attention. At least, not many in comparison to the national elections. The article said that the lack of mainstream attention gives the more extreme elements an advantage, in that those wings of the political spectrum that can muster committed activists and base voting blocs gain an outsize influence.
And so it seems that might be the case in Austria, where the extreme wing includes the FPO, a hard-right nationalist party that gained worldwide notoriety a few years ago after they dressed up a xenophobic platform for mass appeal and some unforeseen electoral success followed. I’ve seen FPO posters along the Gürtel beside those of SPO/Social Democrats and the OVP/Christian Democrats. I must say, even dressed up, by American standards some of their campaign rhetoric stands clearly beyond the pale. I take it as promising that this racist poster was defaced.
Justseeds in Milwaukee: Collectivism in a Culture Machine
Dan S. Wang
The artists of Justseeds were born of a particular time. Ranging in age from mid-twenties to late thirties, they identify with the broad-based movements from the last decade and a half, for which there is no single accurately descriptive name, and which emerged out of demands for an egalitarian social order, a radically decreased role for private capital, greater environmental responsibility globally, and which, in anticipation of brute US military aggression in late 2002, grew to include a clear antiwar message.† In the wake of the Obama victory, right wing discredit, and the collapse of the world’s financial machinery, zombie forms litter the social and political landscape, solving no problems but wreaking damage.‡ The work of imagining future possibilities, now more than ever, requires self-directed experiments in autonomous action and voluntary association. To Justseeds and other political artists coming after the New Left, anarchism gains in promise.
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Radical culture evolves continually, even while associated political expressions wax and wane over the decades. The work of creating culture and cultures—meaning respectively, the production of value-laden symbols, images, narratives, and representations, and the work of applying imaginative values and visions to our lived experience and lifeways—ensures that the work of radical change always continues at the cellular level of small groups, grassroots organizations, and site-specific work, no matter the possibilities for broad, movement-based political action. Moreover, the work of small groups in local initiatives, focused efforts, and/or of organizing around specific causes, forms the ocean of decentralized action and experimentation out of which flow social tides that inform, catalyze, and periodically renew mass political movements. Precisely because it is interpersonal in scale, cellular action is where individual sovereignty meets the demands of the group, where individually embodied minds pool energies and perspectives for common cause, and where group structures take individual personalities most fully into account. The terrain of struggle I speak of includes the task of creating different relations between persons, finding shared thought processes, and enlarging one’s sense of self by indentifying with the collective. And as a collective, Justseeds, a group now numbering just over twenty artists, belongs to a radical tradition of small groups who produce culture (representations) and a culture (values- and visions-informed lifeways).
Justseeds works in two spheres or modes. The best known and constantly visible sphere is that of the distro. As a distro, Justseeds is a retail webstore and an example of economic democracy in action. Following its transformation from an enterprise belonging to a single person to an artist-run collective going on several years ago, as a distro Justseeds is a machine. Along with the website and the physical space from which the inventory is distributed, the art worker-owners and their activity as creative and responsible individuals constitute the machine’s parts. With roles set but not unchanging, the machine is organized to favor stability but allows for tweaks and new ideas. The stock of output is constantly refreshed with new offerings, and it operates along a steady path demanding ready maintainance but little experimentation. In this sphere, Justseeds is a successful retail store, and a reliable and autonomous dissemination port for activist messages, political graphics, and related news. It is also a machine for enabling livelihoods, and a self-sustaining revenue generator for the group.
The other sphere and mode—in its infancy compared to the long-running distro—is that of the social experiment. Here we have an open-ended project, a search for insight and inspiration from within the collective, a sharing of labors at the level of dreams and possibilities, as well as material production. The social experiment sphere is where faith gets put to the test, far beyond the sometimes prosaic trust governing the handling of money and earned time. This is where the abstract struggles of program and ideology meet the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of personality and personal history. Unmoored from the website, the nature of this sphere is less definite, formally open, and only periodically visible. Attitudes and moods inform this mode as much as learning and argument, opening important roles for conviviality, comradeship, and personal affections. And yet, it remains the work of Justseeds, meaning, even in an experimental mode graphic work figures importantly for these artists. The collaborative installation Which Side Are We On? is to date the most ambitious material product of the experiment mode, and for the duration of the week-long install, became the medium through which the fifteen available members of Justseeds found and sharpened their common identity, collaborative subgroupings, social strength, and faith in each other.
The machine creates culture, the experiment creates a culture.
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How can artist collectives, on a very concrete, material, and temporally-bound level, actually think and create as one? Obviously, there is no single answer. As experienced facilitators know, even the most carefully structured group process may blow up in a moment, given a sharp turn of attitude or mood. Similarly, outwardly unstructured situations can turn into bonding experiences, orchestrated actions, and highly efficient expressions of group will, sometimes surprisingly quickly. Such is the irregularity of collectivism, not for random factors, but rather for collective consciousness being essentially immanent and context-dependent.
Every positive example will be conditional necessarily, because collective consciousnesses always emerge in highly contingent forms and cannot be reduced to formulae. In coming from their dispersed home cities to assemble in Milwaukee, devise and commit to a single concept that reserves considerable room for individual detail, and pool energies to fully occupy the Union Art Gallery—a cavernous and difficult exhibition space that always demands a measure of improvisation—Justseeds offers just such a positive example. Part exercise, part journey, the group emerges strengthened, confident, united, and humbled in the knowledge that giving up a degree of control normally assumed in an individual practice can, with one’s collaborators, return something no single person could have imagined, much less realized.
There it is, before our eyes: an argument for the complexity, the richness, the density, and above all, the real, achieveable possibility of a collective imagination made concrete.
†The term that the corporate press attached to elements of this movement following the spectacularized 1999 actions against the WTO in the Seattle, anti-globalization, is not only a misnomer, but in some profound respects Orwellian. The various critical dimensions of less familiar non-Western resistant social phenomena are typically tagged with neologisms that fashion a logic out of thin air, such as ‘Islamofascism.’
‡I first learned of sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theory of zombie categories in the glossary compiled by Continental Drift Zagreb. In recent news, we hear much about zombies in relation to the so-called toxic assests bedeviling the American banking system. The artists of Justseeds were born in the seventies and early eighties, when the zombie cocktail dominated in the category of, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, ‘whatever fucks you up.’
