Once upon a time (in the 1980s & ’90s) there was a sticker and a T-shirt that said “Corporate Rock Still Sucks” (also the slogan of SST records). The first time he was on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine (1992), Kurt Cobain made a hand scrawled T-shirt with the words, “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” This act gestured toward the difficulty of trying to stay independent in our society with all of the contradictions and seductions of corporate culture. These days I’m becoming increasingly confused about my/our (independent cultural producers) relationships to corporations. The cooptation of anything cool or resistant into visual advertising has been going on for decades. Although that can be frustrating, I find it less confusing than the recent crop of branded “community” and “space” making which seem to function a bit differently than the creation of advertising images. What I am talking about are the numerous, branded initiatives that offer people participatory and social experiences. Levi’s offers free filmmaking, photo, and printmaking workshops, Van’s hosts shows with some great musical acts, Urban Outfitters and Levi’s have a touring DIY bike shop, and Converse even has “a community based recording studio” (their words). Part of the ideals of independent and DIY culture is both access to the tools/means of production and to free spaces for creativity and communication. Are these corporate ventures really giving us a gift? Or are these poison gifts—and at what cost and to whom—since we know corporations main goals are their bottom lines?
Last October, Ben Sisaro, wrote an article in the New York Times entitled “Looking To A Sneaker for A Band’s Big Break,” that articulates well how this is working in the music industry. Here are a few quotes from the article:
“And while a generation ago these arrangements [with corporations] would have carried a stigma for the artists, branding deals are now as common in rock as guitars…Converse’s studio, called Converse Rubber Tracks, is the brainchild of Geoff Cottrill, the company’s chief marketing officer…After applying online, bands deemed dedicated and needy enough will be able to record whatever they want there…Converse says it will have no influence on the music, the artists will keep ownership rights, and, as with many brand-as-patron projects, the songs aren’t intended to be used in ads. Mr. Cottrill said the company wants to “give back” to its loyal customers, but of course the enterprise is not purely altruistic. The idea is that helping new bands will build good will for the brand (and generate future sales) and also give Converse an advantage over all the other companies out there competing for young eyeballs…Mr. Cottrill suggested that the long-term success of Rubber Tracks would depend less on whether the bands that record there go on to fame and fortune than on the extent to which they keep Converse in their heart. ‘Let’s say over the next five years we put 1,000 artists through here, and one becomes the next Radiohead,’ he said. ‘They’re going to have all the big brands chasing them to sponsor their tour. But the 999 artists who don’t make it, the ones who tend to get forgotten about, they’ll never forget us.’”
So what are we to make of BMW Guggenheim Lab which describes itself as:
“…The theme of the Lab’s first two-year cycle is Confronting Comfort—exploring notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility…Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the Lab is conceived to inspire public discourse in cities around the world …The public is invited to attend and to participate in free programs and experiments at the Lab…”
Many friends and respected colleagues are participating in the space and providing worthwhile content. (I’m not sure if content providers/artists get paid or not.) This brand identification with artists and ideas is slightly different from the Converse example in that many of the participating cultural producers could neither afford, nor may even desire a luxury car (while many of them do sport Van’s, Converse, and Levi’s as do I.) BMW does share with Converse their appreciation for artistic expression, in their press release, they write: “The BMW Group guarantees absolute creative freedom in all the cultural activities it is involved in—as this is just as essential for groundbreaking artistic work as it is for major innovations in a successful business.” The claims of interest in “environmental and social responsibility” coming from a luxury car company are part of the larger trend in greenwashing that we have seen by many polluting companies over the past several years. It is doubtful that an urban future based on individual luxury car ownership is a sustainable vision.
Regardless of experimental explorations of future sustainable practices, both companies, it seems, have recently been engaging in less than sustainable labor practices. The Teamsters have been protesting BMW and the Guggenheim has been proliferating itself across the globe, but using questionable labor practices. Yet programming at the Lab includes a showing of the film The Take, about worker control in Argentina, as well as workshops and tours of worker controlled local businesses. In an article in The Art Newspaper, Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim is quoted as saying, “…BMW’s sponsorship affords the museum ‘the luxury of intellectual opportunity’.” (Wait, does he mean luxury cars afford us intellectual opportunities?) After watching The Take and learning how to set up a worker owned cooperative, it seems like a luxurious intellectual opportunity for the workers of both BMW and Guggenheim to occupy their workplaces and run them themselves! (Just expressing my experimental sustainable vision.)
So does this participation by so many committed folks in a BMW-branded venue imply that corporate culture no longer sucks? Or just sucks less? Or is just another venue to express ideas in? Or there are no alternatives? If it was only the BMW Lab or even in a car dealership would they feel the same way? Or is there something about the Guggenheim brand that makes it better? (For those who have art CVs, it seems a worthwhile line to add.) Most argue that it is a way to reach new audiences with their critical and radical ideas. This may be true, but I remain confused about other impacts of expressing, creating, and distributing in branded spaces (including on social media).
Some of us try to avoid putting corporate, processed, food in our bodies but easily take a big swig of corporate culture if it’s “free” and giving us a “gift”—that free gift at this point being space for our social relations both virtual and physical from Facebook to the BMW Lab. Food seems to be the only area that it’s still okay to be a purist about in both critique and consumption habits. I read an article in the Village Voice recently about small batch whiskey distillers in Brooklyn. One maker said, “…for the most part, people have only been exposed to corporate whiskey.” It felt like a statement that a late-80s punk musician might say about rock. I’ve been in many conversations where “corporate organics” are derided over the local or the small. Yet when it comes to culture, we can participate in the factory farm organics version while the small batch, locally-based producers continue to lose their spaces and struggle to survive. Increasingly, many of us are committed to going out of our way to know our food sources but throw our hands in the air in defeat when trying to deal with how culture and cultural capital work.
True, I myself have been a bit compromised lately, and corporate culture is readily available, just like processed food. These questions I have are as much about my life and habits as about larger social conditions. This is about what my milieu is ready to accept and ready to reject—it is a moment that I am trying to make sense of. But sometimes it feels like our lives are so complicated and full of contradictions that we can’t even critique astro-turf cultural manifestations when they allow space for grass roots voices without being written off as anachronistic or too idealistic.
I am not ready to give up critique of corporate culture or domination of our everyday lives. Over the past ten years, I am increasingly surprised by the amount of conversations I have had in which this (private corporate encroachment on all aspects of life) is seen as a done deal: “Why even bother thinking about it? Might as well make the best of it and use it to our advantage.” I get that argument, but I’m unclear about if that “taking advantage” part is truly possible. There is also a strain of thought and cultural production that would rather challenge those posing the critiques than challenge the dominant powers. There is an activist saying that is frequently repeated: “We are great at pointing out what we don’t like, but not good at proposing solutions.” In these examples of corporations as branded sponsors of community spaces, it is exactly our proposals toward some solutions (opening independent spaces, creating a vibrant self-motivated culture, etc.) that get co-opted, not our practices of critiquing the status quo. So are we to assume that corporate culture doesn’t suck because it is giving us access to things we once started and now can’t afford to maintain: bike shops, print shops, recording studios, experimental art spaces, etc? But what happens when the marketers have moved on to the next marketing methodology and we are left without their infrastructure, or ours?
Dara Greenwald is a media artist, organizer, curator, and writer. She edited (with Josh MacPhee) the publication Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now (Ak Press/Exit Art, 2010) which came out of an exhibit of the same name. Other collaborative projects include Spectres of Liberty, United Victorian Workers, Pink Bloque, and the Interference Archive. Her videos have screened widely including at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts/SF, the Liverpool Bienniele/UK, Eyebeam/NY, Videolisboa/Portugal, & the Aurora Picture Show/Houston. Her writing has appeared in Proximity, the Brooklyn Rail, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Affinities, and Realizing the Impossible (AK Press, 2007). Documentation and more info at www.daragreenwald.com
One of the biggest critiques being made of the Occupy movement is that it has no demands. If, however, we take the standpoint that Occupy functions in an interventionist mode—if we see it as an Occupy moment rather than an Occupy movement–we see that its refusal to issue demands is part of the beauty of it. In fact, the making of any demands at this point in the intervention would be too thin of a kind of social change for this political moment.
To make a demand would suggest that the current problem is merely a content problem. Of course, there are lots of content problems that Occupy points to—the expanding wealth of the top 1% vs the 99%, the bank bailouts, the environment, foreclosures, etc. While these surface aspects are most certainly the stuff of the problem, there exists what we at the Design Studio would call the second order problem. There are first order problems (things you can get at directly) and second order problems (things you CAN’T get at directly). For example, altering conditions within a given established relationship can be a first order change, while changing the very nature of the relationship would be a second order change. That is the level we see Occupy working at.
The second order problem here is one of distance, form, and what Erin Manning and Brian Massumi refer to as the relational field between the state and market sectors. Currently, little to no distance exists between what we might call government (or the state sector) and the market (or private sector.) Examples of this include privately owned charter schools for public school students, corporations being granted the right of (expensive) free speech, the burgeoning number of private military companies employed by the U.S. armed forces, and perhaps most tellingly, the enormous public bailout of private banks.
Without any distance between these two sectors and their functions, there can be no checks and balances. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson is helpful here, with his concept of “double description.” When two parties are in relationship, he says, it is important not to fall into the trap of ascribing to either of the parties in the relationship any individual characteristic that is actually half of the larger, active relational pattern. (For example, we can’t accurately describe the Democrats or Republicans except in their relationship to each other.) He made the analogy between double description–holding onto both parties’ descriptions of the situation simultaneously–as doing something akin to what happens in binocular vision, with the distance between the two eyes producing the slight but significant difference in input that allows the brain to then construct a sense of depth.
Thinking about this in relation to the current state of non-distance between the state and private sectors, we see that the collapse produces a Cyclops of sorts. Take the example of the bank buyout. Was the almost $1 trillion bailout critical for the ultimate well-being and solvency of the U.S. government? An answer of yes certainly points to a one-eyed (or at least one-headed) beast. An answer of no, however, just means that the public and private sectors are so closely wedded as to make the public sector believe that its livelihood was based on the success of the private sector. In either case, we do not have much evidence of two distinct powers with the ability to have checks and balances.
With its monocular vision, the much-privatized public sector has a crisis of identity. Now that it’s bought into the private sector’s vision of the good life—primarily based on accumulation of private wealth and property—there isn’t much reason for it to exist. Each traditional role it gives up (public schooling, public safety, public health, even public property), makes it less relevant. Its former strengths—protecting people’s rights, protecting the environment, providing health care to the poor, etc,–are now seen as market inefficiencies, things the Cyclops can do without. So what we have is a complete triumph of the private sector over the idea and description of the good life, and even the purpose of the state sector itself. This is readily visible in the many calls for shrinking the government and getting it out of the way of business, which is currently expected to be the best purveyor of all things good.
As we speak, the public sector has abandoned any desire or responsibility to privilege or protect the common or the vulnerable. It is in hearty compliance with the idea that what is good for the private sector is in the best interest of all. Conveniently, both political parties are in compliance with the collapse of the state and market sectors into one. Their differences are around priorities within and between the collapsed sectors as best. At this point we will get resistance from both parties and the private sector for a public sector with a logic and function that privileges humanity and life over neoliberalism.
So, why no demand? There’s no one within this sectoral collapse to legitimately make a demand of. Let’s not make demands to a collapsed privatized public sector. But we can start to pose the larger question. For those of us in the work of promoting social justice, we have to make this relational problem visible to the “99%” who are on the downside of it. To hold open a space of occupation without demands is to force us to recognize that underlying and feeding all the first order content problems is a more significant second order problem, to do with form and distance. To address the relationship between these sectors will be difficult, but we are now at a time when it is critical. (On the bright side, if we successfully slay the Cyclops, many of the first order solutions will readily follow!)
Past shining a harsh light on the collapsed relationship between the private and public sectors (and the dominance of the private sector), Occupy can help us imagine a new public sector that has a distinct vision of the good life—one that values the 99%, protects public speech and protest, and supports public property that is actually usable by the public. Imagining a public sector that has its own sturdy view seems difficult, never mind insisting on one. But this is where the interesting change can happen!
For more on the importance of independent sectors, see social threefolding on Wikipedia. Or go deeper with Nicanor Perlas on the issue here.
Kenneth Bailey is a principal at the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI). This article can be downloaded as a PDF from DS4SI’s website.
Favianna Rodriguez writes at the Just Seeds blog, “The fact that its even acceptable for us to critique capitalism in mainstream conversations and in mainstream media, opens many doors for activists, artists, and for the entire social justice sector overall. I find it inspiring that this movement has at its core, a thriving arts and culture component.”
Poster by Favianna Rodriguez
Rodriquez feels that the artist’s main role in the movement is to visually represent solidarity to create unity among the 99% of the nation and the world. A poster by her published in the Occupied Wall Street Journal is one of many that circulating on the Internet at blogs such as Just Seeds, and available for high-quality downloading and re-printing.
Published today in the actual Wall Street Journal, is a piece about the cultural expression of the Occupy movement through art titled, “Protesters Hone the Art of a Movement.” The author Pia Catton highlights a curated poetry anthology inspired by the spontaneous spoken-word and jam sessions held in the evenings at Zuccotti Park.
The movement has exploded with catchy and poignant slogans. On-site screen printing of t-shirts and placards is one manifestation of the way slogans and graphic design are reproduced and disseminated immediately, just like on the Internet. Catton observes, “The graphic design produced at this table, which is manned by at least three people at any given time, combines the look of street art, revolutionary imagery and a sense of irony…”
These slogans and symbols that effectively communicate this moment of a global movement are also rapidly being turned into primary source material for historical institutions like the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the New York Historical Society, who have sent staff to the Occupy encampments in New York and DC to scoop up fliers, placards, posters, and leaflets. “This is part of the museum’s long tradition of documenting how Americans participate in the life of the nation,” the Smithsonian said in a statement.
The movement itself is an ever-changing cultural expression. The various memes of the protests began with “We are the 99%” and “Occupy [insert place/idea here].” Groups of immigrants and Indigenous people challenge the idea of occupation of colonized land and have taken up the counter-meme “Unoccupy,” which can most pervasively be seen in New Mexico. On the exclusion of Indigenous and people of color, radio show host Tiokasin Ghosthorse said, “Given the historical occupation of the United States on Indigenous land, it hurt inside to hear that word.” Palesitne solidarity activists rallied around the slogan “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine.” Spin-offs such as “Occupennial” are meant to aggregate all of the various terms and relate the movement to a place and time, the United States’ own Arab Spring of 2011.
But the importance of the art of the 99% is that it indicates a visceral cultural expression of the need for alternative systems. Favianna Rodriguez reminds artists of the three main challenges to take up in solidarity with the protesters world-wide:
The activists leading the global awakening of the 99% know the value of cultural transformation for a lasting movement. Summarizing this feeling is a statement by activist Mande Henk about the People’s Library in Zuccotti Park, “Stories are incredibly important for helping people to understand the world, and so this is a place to come to understand the world.” That place is also in every Wall Street, Main Street, and town square where people have joined together to create an alternative to capitalism and the global crises.
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