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

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Second Order Change

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.

Two Sectors, One Vision

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.

Slaying the Beast: Occupy as a Civil Society Strategy

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.

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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:

• Develop inter-sectional cultural projects from the perspective of communities of color, those most affected by global crisis,
• Use these cultural projects to build momentum for a sustained movement, and
• Precipitate action from cultural projects.

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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Artists, writers, critics, and curators will gather at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYU, on September 23rd, 2011 for a day-long series of presentations on the political implications of socially engaged art.  Expected presenters include: Alternate ROOTS, Appalshop, Common Room, Cybermohalla Ensemble, Decolonizing Architecture, Jeremy Deller, Darren O’Donnell, Laura Flanders, Theaster Gates, Hou Hanru, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Shannon Jackson, Long March Project, Alan W. Moore, My Barbarian, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), Ted Purves, Gerald Raunig, Navin Rawanchaikul, Katerina Šedá, Chemi Rosado Seijo, Andreas Siekmann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ultra-red, United Indian Health Services, Urban Bush Women, Voina, Dan S. Wang, WochenKlausur, and Women on Waves.  Tickets to the Creative Time Summit are still available, and attendees will get a preview of Living As Form, which opens to the public the following day.

The chosen site for Living As Form is the 15,000 square-foot Essex Street Market building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the building will serve as a base for the three-week long show.  The archival exhibition will be housed here, as well as the artists in residence.  Creative Time is commissioning nine new works by Bik Van der Pol, Carolina Caycedo, MadeIn Company presented by the Long March Project, Megawords, OurGoods, Surasi Kusolwong, Superflex, Temporary Services, and Time/Bank (Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle).  These commissions range from performances to public interventions and installations, not all of which will be on site at the Essex Street Market building.  The projects will explore topics including public shrines and ceremonies, mind/body consciousness, the dynamics of power, vertical development and air rights, and alternative economies.  Some participating artists also served as curatorial advisors.

Living As Form culminates with a book, published by Creative Time Books and distributed by MIT Press, due out in January of 2012.  Contributors include Brian Holmes, Claire Bishop, and several other theorists offering context to the key examples of works, methodologies, conditions, and variations within the attempt to bring cultural skills to the arena of social change.

Join Groundswell at the Creative Time Summit this September!

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The Israeli interior ministry recently authorized construction to begin on Jerusalem’s Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance despite protestations that its siting will violate the historic Ma’man Allah, or the Mamilla Cemetery.  Palestinian families whose ancestors are buried there have joined with archaeologists, academics, and artists, including Jewish allies, to voice opposition to the plan.  These more recent objections illuminate an ongoing struggle to protect the cemetery, as well as the museum’s troubled past.

Ma’man Allah (Mamilla Cemetery) is a centuries-old site that, until its expropriation in 1948, was in regular use, interring the remains of some of the region’s longest Muslim family lineages.  Islamic saints and scholars are buried there, including Edward Said‘s relatives, and so when the plans for the museum were first announced in 2002, the opposition’s rejoinder came swiftly.  Those who mobilized against breaking ground turned up the public pressure, staging press conferences to gain international attention, and ultimately bringing the issue to the United Nations.  A concurrent legal strategy was brought in Israeli courts, which succeeded in getting the excavation suspended in 2006, but two years later the Supreme Court sided with the government and resumed the project, after which remains from the graveyard were moved to the perimeter of the site.

Following this political turmoil, in early 2010 the first architect commissioned to design the building, Frank Gehry, left the project.  The official reason given was that he was committed to too many projects at the time and needed to scale back.  However, at the time of his withdrawal, it came to light that the Wiesenthal Center was far from its $200 million fundraising goal, and a more plausible explanation is that the star architect worried the project wouldn’t come to fruition.  More, his proposal was met with mixed reviews, and its ambivalent reception no doubt factored with the negative press against his continued involvement.

Without Gehry, the project pressed on, commissioning a new design by Chyutin Architects for $150 million less than the original plan. In June of 2011, the new building was approved, and after an accelerated permitting process, construction was approved the following month.  The Chyutin building will be a drastic departure from Gehry’s proposal, and, as the Jerusalem Post reports, will include an amphitheater, exhibit halls, classrooms, a stone plaza and a parking lot.  Artinfo reports the far more conservative design prompted the interior ministry to comment that:

the project presents architecture that is modest and thoughtful, and contributes to the creation of a public space that is fitting for the area on a local and urban level.

Of course, it’s what is beneath the building that is at issue, and the ministry’s fanfare only adds insult to injury to those whose ancestors are being relocated.  Democracy NOW! interviewed one such descendant, Columbia University professor and author Rashid Khalidi, who recounts the Wiesenthal Center’s official line – that no graves were being disturbed – in the video below.

Ma’man Allah has already once been built over in the past, to accommodate a municipal parking lot during the 1960s, and this figured into the interior ministry’s decision to rubber stamp the museum’s second proposal. Khalidi’s account of that time period conflicts with that of the Wiesenthal Center’s founder, who has claimed that the parking lot construction met with no resistance.  Then, as now, Khalidi claims, the difference in protections offered to Arab and Jewish heritage sites could not be more pronounced, a view that is substantiated by his co-interviewee Michael Ratner, the current president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner notes that of Israel’s 136 protected cultural sites, not one was Muslim or Christian until at least 2008.

Khalidi and Ratner speak of the erasure of Arab and Palestinian histories from West Jerusalem in their interview, and they express regret that the Wiesenthal Center is implicated in achieving such a goal.  The U.S.-based organization has established other sites in Los Angeles and New York.  That an institution with as laudable a mission as the Wiesenthal Center has met with such conflict is a deep irony matched only by the notion that a museum of tolerance could be built on top of the graves of the displaced and dispossessed.

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The current economic crisis has turned attention toward volunteerism – as resources dry up, or are prevented from being distributed, companies turn would-be paid jobs into volunteer internships, and art/design firms increasingly offer their services to organizations trying valiantly to remedy the more dramatic symptoms of capitalism.  These troubling and ambivalent dynamics are familiar to cultural producers, especially those whose work (like Groundswell’s) has been a labor of love.

Frank Chimero’s Design Won’t Save the World

Sacrificial labor is a seeming requirement of the cultural economy as currently configured.  We’re required to work for free, or, as is sometimes worse, for ourselves, which requires all the more dedication, time, and labor, especially when workers collectively self-manage.  Too often do radical democratic projects suffer from making this sacrifice.  Can this kind of work be maintained, especially where it’s an act of solidarity?

We tend to think about pro-bono work as an expression of solidarity.  The sacrifice involved is supposed to be a gesture, a show of willingness to collaborate at whatever cost, or, more materially, a small scale way of redistributing resources.  However, just as internships are said to lead to a steady job, the sacrifice made in pro-bono work is itself salable – in other words, the work functions as marketing, self-promotion disguised as a good deed.  Business experts themselves would agree with this claim; they’ve penned advice columns to this effect, advocating altruism as both a bolsterer of business and a pacifier of dissatisfied employees.

Characterizing pro-bono work as sacrificial labor begs the question, how is it like other service work?   Because their sacrifice begets more gainful work, by and large, pro-bono workers aren’t subject to the same precarity as other service workers, as this kind of work is typically a required component of highly gainful employment.  Indeed, the form their work takes – and thus their alienation from it – is remarkably different, from the knowledges required to the very way their bodies move while on the job.  But, following the Carrotworkers’ Collective, it nonetheless qualifies.

Taking up the topic of service work – especially as an act of charity – in the context of architecture, the editors of Scapegoat Journal’s latest edition take these claims a step further.

The charity acts of designers, artists, and architects are, they claim, a neoliberal stand-in for for the state – where once the services being rendered were publicly provided, contemporary austerity measures have forced delivery onto the chance firm with the time and resources to spend on such a project.  More, the charity act disguises a defense of the ivory tower in sheep’s clothing, as it can permit so-called experts to guard their knowledge (and ignore the participants’ knowledge), and whitewashes the issue without treating its source.  Scapegoat’s response is to examine the problematic of service:

How can we develop new models for self-management and mutual aid that move beyond unidirectional forms of service as clientelism and dependency? How can we think through service provision beyond the state? How can we privilege voluntary association and ethical reciprocity rather than volunteerism? How can new approaches to training and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge be radically re-organized? How has the rise of the populist Right coincided with mechanisms of gentrification and the ideologies of the so-called ‘creative city?’ How can we counter the predominance of economic metaphors in our attempts to articulate values and commitments? How could design services work in solidarity with the labour of extraction, construction, and maintenance?

However critical, the editors are no cynics, and these questions lead in productive directions – to Brazil, for example, to explore Usina’s city-making project.  Done in collaboration with popular movements and the first Labour Party administration, the area’s self-managed participatory mutual aid housing policy gives us good reason for hope, if not the satisfaction of all-out success.

Print and digital editions of Scapegoat are available directly from the editors, or from Groundswell’s store.

Disclosure: Groundswell likes Scapegoat, in ideas and in person.

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Highlights from this issue include:

• DEBORAH ROOT Power itself is a kind of magic, in that it involves the manipulation of appearances [1996]
• JANNA GRAHAM + CHERYL L’HIRONDELLE + CANDICE HOPKINS Radio was the bridge between what I do and what exists on the reserve [2004]
• AYANNA BLACK + BELL HOOKS To experience solidarity we must have a community of interest [1990]
• SARA DIAMOND Subversion from within can be an important tactic, but is it really possible? [1986]
• RACHEL GORMAN Disaggregating the political category “disabled artist” [2007]

Join Groundswell at the launch party, tomorrow evening, at Toronto’s Feminist Art Gallery (FAG).

Disclosure: Fuse Magazine’s new editor, Gina Badger, is a friend and fellow art worker.

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Love the Future / Free Ai Weiwei, is a cardboard sculpture of the Chinese artist, located on the border of Toronto’s central Chinatown, Alexandra Park (one of the cities oldest housing projects), and the eclectic Kensington Market. With all of these geographical considerations in mind, Martindale hopes to explore what it means for a North American artist to express solidarity with a Chinese dissident and fellow artist. The sunflower seeds at the base of the sculpture are a reference to Ai’s recent work at London’s Tate Gallery, the popularity of which has made the seeds an icon of his struggle. Throughout, the gallery has been transformed into an information center, sharing Ai Weiwei’s story and updates about his condition. Martindale’s creative response pushed artists and activists alike to consider further options for pressing for Ai’s release, and still functions as a criticism of the crackdown on dissenting artists and activists within China and elsewhere.

Courtesy Whippersnapper Gallery

The cardboard used in the sculpture was sourced from nearby streets, following Martindale’s commitment to using local and reclaimed materials, and during this show, he will return to those streets to create site-specific works using the materials he finds there.

Below is the full exhibition essay, which can also be downloaded here.  Please note that the text was written prior to Ai’s release, and has not been updated.

It seems almost too prescient that a detained artist’s name would be a homophone to a phrase that, translated to English, means “Love the future.” It’s especially apropos of an artist so in love with Modernism as is Ai Weiwei, that a deep belief in progress and reason, those stalwarts of Western, Romantic tradition, would undergird his work, and give it the political edge for which he is renown.

During the course of this exhibition, Ai Weiwei will enter a fourth month of detention if he is not released. The artist was disappeared from Beijing’s international airport April 3, 2011. A frenzy of speculation ensued and coupled with global media attention during the weeks that followed.

Almost immediately, pleas for his release were made by the artist’s family, and allegations were made that he was being tortured by Chinese police for his supposed connection to the uprisings of the Arab Spring. China’s concern that pro-democracy protests would inspire action at home seems to have inspired moves by authorities in various and contradictory directions. A statue of Confucius appeared in Tienanmen Square in January, cater-corner from the portrait of Mao Zedong, seemingly as a concession to the popularity of the 2,500-year old philosopher’s teachings on ethics and harmony amidst such rapid national changes. Meanwhile, dozens of intellectuals were arrested for being on the wrong side of the ideological line; activists, lawyers, bloggers, artists, and more went missing, the result of a roundup that many say is the most severe since the reaction to the 1989 student demonstrations. In the weeks before Ai’s detention, the artist kept a running tally of the more prominent arrests on his Twitter feed.

Confucius statue in Tiananmen-Square, Courtesy AFP/Getty Images

Like Ai, Confucius suddenly and inexplicably disappeared one day in April, and in both instances, accusations of censorship circulated. Rumor had it that the statue of Confucius had simply been moved inside the National Museum, in front of which he once stood, but those familiar with Ai’s work and his antagonistic relationship to China’s government were inclined to think that his arrest was China’s way of silencing a longtime critic.

In the days that followed his disappearance, the inconsistency of China’s official line added to fears that Ai was being targeted for his politics. Xinhua, the government-run news agency, first broke the story that the artist was in custody. The brief mentioned the grounds for arrest – vaguely described as economic crimes – and cited unidentified police investigators. Within minutes, the story had been taken down without explanation. This announcement came and went without word of when he would be charged, let alone released.

It was five weeks before Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, was permitted a short visit. Under intense supervision, she gleaned from their conversation that Ai was being held under residential surveillance somewhere outside Beijing, and reported this to the media.

Perhaps due to international attention to the case, charges were finally announced by Chinese officials two weeks later. The official line is that Ai Weiwei is being held under suspicion of economic crimes related to his company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd. (FAKE), specifically avoiding payment of what is described as a “huge amount” of taxes. FAKE is also accused of intentionally destroying accounting records, and other criminal acts.

Without formal charges or any other legal recourse, Ai’s wife has been the only person to have addressed her husband’s tax evasion charges directly:

He’s not the company’s legally-designated representative, nor is he the chief executive. So even if the company is accused of these crimes, Ai Weiwei should not be detained.

Elsewhere, cultural institutions and workers have offered as equally mixed a response – some avoid any show support for the imprisoned artist, and others offer public statements that call for his release. Petitions have made the rounds, some gathering hundreds of thousands of signatories. A boycott of Chinese cultural production has been called as well. Institutions with ongoing or upcoming Chinese shows have fumbled for a suitable explanation for not joining the boycott, or at least using their position to highlight Ai’s situation. The most popular and unfortunate of these have come from the Milwaukee Art Museum and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, whose heads both issued statements saying with the utmost sobriety, “we don’t do politics.”

This is unsurprising, perhaps, for an art world so familiar with radical posturing and yet quick to purge or marginalize its more political elements. These efforts have made no attempt to reconcile the sameness of their strategy with the ineffectiveness of past attempts, or with the realities of their own contexts. Okwui Enwezor, the Director of Haus Der Kunst in Munich, writes in Artforum (appropriately enough) that

these petitions shared the easy illusion of the universal ideal of freedom of expression—willfully ignoring the fact that censorship is an occupational hazard that all dissenting and radical forms of art must face, whether under liberal or illiberal political systems. . . Is there no other type of pressure that could be brought to bear . . . than a meek petition or sign?

Enwezor describes an “imaginative deficit” in the dominant art world reaction to Ai’s arrest, and it has indeed been lacking in many ways – it’s telling that the only official mention of Ai at the recent Venice Biannale was a souvenir offered by one of his European dealers. Those museum heads who aspire to be apolitical would have a much better argument if their refusal was at all concerned with the lack of creative response. Protesting the shoddiness of the protest, in other words, would be far more constructive than their nihilistic, business-as-usual approach.

As it stands, however, both the abstainers and the critics like Enwezor willingly occlude the more creative efforts to show solidarity. Artist/activists have mobilized worldwide, across scales that range from the intimate to the global, and have assembled forms of protest that emphasize its aesthetic value.

Protests on Ai’s behalf follow a decade or older trend of artists restaging everything from second wave feminist movement protests to the film Dog Day Afternoon, and, understandably, have taken the form of his likeness, or have been a reenactment of his work. Some such reenactments have originated within the art world, artist/activists joined with curator Steven Holmes, Creative Time and others to create a distributed performance of Ai’s Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs to mark the second week of his imprisonment.

Even more work has been done outside of institutions altogether. F.A.T. (Free Art Technology) has made use of Ai’s Studies of Perspective series with a web browser extension that permits users to superimpose the artist’s now-infamous middle finger over any website of their choosing. The group has also made 3D-style glasses that bring the same effect into nondigital spaces. Stencil artists in Hong Kong have tested the waters by painting images of Ai’s face on sidewalks and buildings, and some have faced legal consequences for their work. Projection artists have made his face visible in public spaces. Geandy Pavo’s Nemesis-Ai Weiwei: The Elusiveness of Being, for example, was staged in New York City, and Cpak Ming, who projected an image asking “Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei?” onto the People’s Liberation Army barracks in Hong Kong.

Courtesy Whippersnapper Gallery

By using his likeness, these protests build on the work the artist has done to make his name and image synonymous with Chinese dissent, and when these actions replicate Ai or his work in other contexts, their participants and creators don’t only inquire where is Ai Weiwei, but also ask when is his plight relevant. Asking about his whereabouts may be an indirect way of demanding his release – the question tells that the asker knows vaguely his location and disposition, and is more a point of highlighting his absence – but reenactments of his work propose that Ai is more than the person in jail, and that China is dealing with a distributed opponent. These broader dimensions of protest necessarily involve many players, and the cross-pollination that occurs while bringing Ai across spatial and temporal registers permits us to consider more efficacious deployments of political power because of (rather than in spite of) the seeming anachronism; it’s a strategic reification that engenders subversion.

It’s here where the power of Martindale’s work lies. Love the Future Free Ai Weiwei is an unapologetic call for the artist’s release. The work, a sculpture of Ai made of found cardboard, transposes the artist, dislocating him physically and chronologically. The installation places a figure of Ai within a North American community that has direct ties to China, and which has used its own dislocation to call for an end to Communist rule. While others may inquire where the artist is, here we can find him in unexpected surroundings – not memorialized, but, in a nod to those pro-democracy activists who consider Ai to be an actual god, trans-substantiated into cardboard, and posed, Christ-like, in the gallery window. Sunflower seeds, which have become an icon of Ai’s work since he installed 100 million hand-painted porcelain replicas on the floor of London’s Tate Modern, appear at his feet.

The choice of a common, even democratic medium like cardboard, alludes to Ai’s omnipresence and the strength of solidarity networks that seek the Chinese art star’s release. The cardboard was sourced from nearby streets, following Martindale’s commitment to using local and reclaimed materials, and given this, it might be possible to find Made in China labels on parts of the sculpture.

At this intimate level, what are likely the biggest questions that Martindale wants to pose are brought to the fore. Located at the edge of Toronto’s central Chinatown, a neighbourhood housing the largest Chinese diaspora in North America, the work inhabits a space on the border with both Alexandra Park, one of the cities oldest housing projects, and the eclectic Kensington Market. What translation occurs on this border? This text and others are offered in both Chinese and English, but Love the Future Free Ai Weiwei proposes that it isn’t a linguistic concern alone. Most things and ideas that cross the boundaries between socially demarcated spaces take on new meaning and, in turn, shape the environment into which they enter. This kind of translation is like that of speech and text insofar as it requires the listener to think abstractly about the experience that is being communicated. Translating Ai Weiwei’s plight might add a layer of abstraction, as all translations betray their original context to some degree as they aspire to enter another, but this work requires that abstraction of anyone attempting to read it. Equal access abstraction – such is the nature of translating on a border.

These communicative shifts are a part of Martindale’s wider practice. Questions about how and when we protest, as well as proposals for constituting better ways of being together in the world are the threads that Martindale weaves. With Love the Future Free Ai Weiwei, he does so in order to push those in art who would do politics without considering its trappings, permit ways of thinking about those trappings, and broaden the spectrum of possibilities for pressing for Ai’s release.

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Invisible-5 (2006) investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, in California’s San Fernando Valley, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

LANDSAT Image of the San Fernando Valley, facing north towards Pacoima, showing the perimeter of the North Hollywood (Area 1) groundwater contamination Superfund zone. North Hollywood is one of four areas of groundwater contamination within the San Fernando Valley Basin, and consists of two parts, the North Hollywood Operable Unit (OU) and the Burbank OU.

I-5 is an important pathway for residents, migrants, shippers, and more, as well as the nonhuman life that copes with its impact.  The high speed artery connects Los Angeles with San Francisco, and is an Intermodal Corridor of Economic Significance, to use the state’s term, codified under California law as a vital resource for national and international trade.  Given the high traffic along the route, and the industries that call it home, the lenght of I-5 is highly contaminated with pollutants.

Often, there is little to see, smell, or taste of the mostly invisible pollutants: benzene and perchlorate in the water, dioxin and PM2.5 in the air. For residents along the I-5 corridor, often these manifest as just a hazy sky, a faint odor, or the sense that something tastes different about the water. . . And the movement of traffic along the I-5 itself creates a river of moving air, where sprayed pesticides mix with diesel emissions, creating a moving stream dense with small particulate matter.

The work takes the form of four CDs, downloadable as MP3s, to guide the listener along the highway landscape as though they were on a museum audio tour. Mixing elements of critical tourism, sonic experiment, audio documentary, and investigative journalism, Invisible-5 is a collaboration between three artists and two organizations. The collaborators on Invisible-5 are artists Amy Balkin and Kim Stringfellow, audio lead Tim Halbur, and organizations Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, and Pond: Art, activism, and ideas.

Invisible-5 was included in the exhibition JUST SPACE(S) at LACE, Los Angeles in fall 2007, organized by Ava Bromberg and Nicholas Brown, and in Citizen Artists Making Emphatic Arguments at Casa de Tunel, Tijuana, in 2008.

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You’ll hear from members of Infernal Noise Brigade about the efficacy of this kind of protest (and why they decided to disband), from Brass Liberation Orchestra players about their Left-unity mission, their Bad Hotel intervention, and more.

The documentary is a great expository and thinks through some of the sticky issues that have been raised in numerous HONK! Festival workshops, like militancy, cultural appropriation, and the role of public joy in protest. New listeners and longtime participants alike should take a listen.

Via: Mail. Thanks, Dashal!

Disclosure: I help(ed) to organize HONK! Festival mentioned above and in the piece, along with Groundswell guest blogger Susie Husted.

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