PDF

Questionnaire: In What Ways Have Artists, Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded
to the U.S.-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?

Author(s): Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rachel Churner, Zainab Bahrani, Judith Barry,
Christopher Bedford, Claire Bishop, Susan Buck-Morss, Critical Art Ensemble, T. J.
Demos, Rosalyn Deutsche, Okwui Enwezor, Hannah Feldman, Harrell Fletcher, Coco Fusco,
Liam Gillick, Mark Godfrey, Tim Griffin, Jennifer R. Gross, Hans Haacke, Rachel Haidu,
David Joselit, Silvia Kolbowski, Carin Kuoni, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Pamela M. Lee, Simon
Leung, Lucy R. Lippard...
Source: October, Vol. 123 (Winter, 2008), pp. 3-184
Published by: The MIT Press
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Introduction
The contributions to this issue of October respond to a questionnaire formu-

lated by Benjamin Buchloh; revised and edited by the editors of October', and then
circulated to a number of artists, writers, academics (both faculty and graduate
students), curators, and critics in June 2007. Rather than addressing intellectuals,
academics, or scientists at large, we felt we should address those with whom the
editors of October could claim to be linked by professional categories. We asked how
they would begin to evaluate and explain the seeming absence of visible opposi-
tion to the Iraq War during the past four - now almost five - years within the
milieu of cultural producers working in the sphere of contemporary visual culture.
This is not to suggest that there is no opposition to the Iraq War; on the con-
trary, when polled during the past year, the majority of Americans, after initially
offering support, now appear to be against it. But this opposition does not seem
to have manifested itself with the same vigor, defiance, and public visibility a
other antiwar movements in which public intellectuals (e.g., artists and acade-
mics) played significant roles, specifically those against the Vietnam War and
Reagan's interventions in Central America. Alexander Cockburn's recent essay in
the New Left Review concisely expressed a viewpoint similar to the one from which
we had conceived this questionnaire: "To say the anti-war movement is dead
would be an overstatement, but not by a large margin. Compared to kindred
movements in the 1960s and early 1970s ... it is certainly inert."1 Even more
recently, after our questionnaire and its responses had been completed, an Open
Letter by Alumni and Alumnae of the Class of 1967, addressed to Harvard's newly
elected President Drew Faust, noted the absence of any oppositional culture at the
university and posed questions similar to ours.2 Yet rather than focusing on the
milieu of cultural production, the Alumni Letter attempted to clarify why the
1. Alexander Cockburn, "Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement?," New Left Review 4
(July/ August 2007), p. 29.
2. See Laurence H. M. Holland, Alums Protest Student Apathy: Grads criticize 'docile political
behavior of the student body,'" Harvard Crimson, December 4, 2007: "Thirteen members of the Class of
1967 have sent an open letter to University President Drew G. Faust accusing Harvard students of
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 3-8. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 OCTOBER
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Introduction 5
Why now}
Our questions may seem tardy, and several respondents argue that such an
endeavor is too little, too late. But the conflict in Iraq is not over, and neither
should our struggle against it be, even if it is taking on the most modest and in
many ways minor of forms, such as the publication of this poll. The year 2007 was
the deadliest in Iraq yet, and we do not consider these questions, though perhaps
belated, to be irrelevant. Indeed they appear to us all the more valid at this
moment for two reasons: first of all, because the Bush regime shows no signs of
reducing its relentless policies of domination and control in the Middle East.
Second, the questionnaire addresses to some extent the problematics of the more
fundamental transformation of the cultural public sphere in the United States
after the events of 9/11. Even if all American and British occupying forces in Iraq
were to withdraw immediately and totally, the question of why the role of acade-
mics, intellectuals, and artists in the cultural public sphere has been reduced to
anesthesia and amnesia would remain urgent, even if posed in retrospect. In this
regard, it would not be totally dissimilar to the questions once asked with regard
to the rise of totalitarian politics in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Vichy France, or
the Soviet Union under Stalin: why was the academic and cultural intelligentsia so
powerless - with the notable and heroic exceptions of those who became public
opponents and resistance fighters, often paying with their lives? Why was this
intelligentsia for the most part subdued, or just opportunistically silent, when con-
fronted with the sort of encroachment on (and eventual termination of) bourgeois
liberal and democratic principles that we are now increasingly experiencing in
the United States?
The upcoming presidential election was a contributing factor to the urgency
behind this issue, as well as the sense of collective public political impotence that
has only been corroborated by the failures by the newly elected Democratic major-
ity in Congress; so, too, were the 3,893 U.S. military casualties and the 174 British
Armed Forces fatalities (as of Dec. 17, 2007), and the knowledge that by now hun-
dreds of thousands of Iraqis (both armed and unarmed civilians) have been killed
and that the violence continues.4 Two notable exceptions to the general indiffer-
ence, major works by Emily Prince in the United States and Steve McQueen in the
United Kingdom, have recorded (and continue to record) the fact that the vast
majority of the soldiers are in their twenties, and that they are recruited for the
most part from the working classes of the United States and the United Kingdom.
As the increasing particularization of forms and practices of knowledge has led to
the increasing inefficiency of a subject's claims for political self-determination and
participation, so too has our society, with its rigorously enforced class stratifica-
tions, internalized its social divisions. Indeed, it has internalized them to such a
4. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf; http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/
FactSheets/OperationsFactsheets/OperationsInlraqBritishFatalities.htm.
6 OCTOBER
degree that
fundament
almost exclu
ing the con
Lastly, the
ror and sh
economy w -
in 2007. Thi
by common
destruction.
Why Iraq?
In 1967, the Partisan Review printed responses to a questionnaire of its own,

titled "What's Happening to America?"5 The questions were terser than ours, and
more ambitious: in seven short questions, they addressed the economy, the civil
rights movement, and U.S. foreign policy. Although they were informed by a slew
of other concerns, it was the war in Vietnam that spurred the editors to pose such
questions. In a similar manner, the Iraq War stimulated our series of questions.
We are aware that other manifestations of the extreme abandoning of social and
political responsibility over the past four years deserve equal attention: the forsak-
ing of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the genocide in Sudan, the
manifestation of American imperialist politics in Lebanon and Palestine, to name
only a few. Nevertheless, the specificity of the Anglo-American invasion and occu-
pation of Iraq allowed us to question our own failure to respond to and rally
against the political and diplomatic betrayals of fundamental political rights that
it has wrought (including the Patriot Act and the failure to comply with the
Geneva Conventions).
The general assumption is that the rallies and protests in 2003, global in
scope, were modeled in large part on those of the Vietnam era. Yet, as public opin-
ion has become more and more opposed to the war, the demonstrations of that
opinion seem to have stalled; no longer just timid, they have become tepid. It is
not that the street protest itself is no longer viable: the rallies in Burma (Myanmar)
and Pakistan and the riots in the Parisian suburbs, as well as the immigrant
marches that have taken place across the U.S., are proof enough that public demon-
strations are still a vital tactic of resistance.
Nevertheless, precisely because we have observed and participated in these

protests, that experience has generated some of the questions we have formulated.
First of all, how can we even begin to articulate the increasingly manifest ineffi-
cacy of these protest forms in the present, since they seem to be suffocated in a
5. "What's Happening to America?," Partisan Review 34, no. 1 (Winter 1967).
Introduction 7
historically new
War protests, th
and as a result
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hardly receive c
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activism must c
other tactics, o
jects, and the o
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sivity, and the
In fact, one of
learned about an
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Why
Which brings
pare the forms o
Comparing the
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lectual history
paradigms from
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with Vietnam. T
art theory of th
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before? What w
Those who expe
lesbian and gay r
that is not met
encourage actio
plish change.
6. See, for example, Mark Tribe's Port Huron Project, in which actors restage protest speeches from the
late 1960s and early 70s.
8 OCTOBER
In addition
views with
powerful w
Malcolm Tu
presents a k
We thank
engagement.
- Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Rachel Churner

for the Editors
Questionnaire
1. In what ways have artists, academics (faculty, staff, and students), and cultural
institutions (including collectors, dealers, and magazines) responded to the U.S.-
led invasion and occupation of Iraq? Can you offer examples of significant opposi-
tional practices? How would you assess the forms, visibility, and efficacy (or lack
thereof) of opposition?
2. Are there examples of an active counter-public sphere in which protest against

the war in Iraq is conducted with an intensity comparable to the protests orga-
nized during the era of the Vietnam War? What, if anything, demotivates the
current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public cri-
tique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of
the United States against a foreign country? Do you consider the absence of the
draft the sole significant factor?
3. Can we speak of the "professionalization" of the artist (as a highly paid and market-
dependent provider of infotainment) as having reduced or eliminated political
consciousness from cultural production? Have academics and those working in
cultural institutions been subject to similar processes of professionalization, and if
so, what have been the effects of this professionalization? What have been the
political effects of the increasing marginalization of the humanities in American
academic institutions? Do artists and academics still regard cultural production as
a socially and politically communicative, transgressive, or critical activity?
4. Antiwar opposition seems most visible on the Internet, where information is

distributed, money is raised, and demonstrations are organized. How does this
electronic-technological public sphere compare to the public protests of the
Vietnam era, during which agitprop cultural activities were organized through
word of mouth, flyers, and planning meetings, and demonstrations were staged in
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 9-10. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
10 OCTOBER
the streets, i
(Bread and P
(from pamph
5. Does this c
lic political s
with which w
of communic
6. What, if a
opposition to
ZAINAB BAHRANI
The antiwar protests of 2003 were a significant and spectacular internati

show of resistance in the face of state power, but they held the promise o
oppositional force that did not materialize. For those who opposed war, the sh
and-awe campaign produced a sense of futility that defeated dissent, while in
U.S. and U.K., the absence of the military draft meant that most people conti
to live in a dream world of consumer distraction in which they viewed the milita
activities of their governments as distant events, unrelated to their own liv
the U.S., steadfast academics, writers, and artists continue to oppose the war
occupation through their work, and in a public way, but most are not prepare
speak openly. As a result, during the past five years, the majority of acade
voices in the public sphere have not been oppositional; instead they form an i
gral part of a new military-industrial-information complex. Some academics,
as Kanan Makiya and Fouad Ajami, number among the main neocon architect
the war. It was their expertise and knowledge of the "Arab mind" that formed pa
of the intelligence in making the case for war. And like Napoleon in Egypt,
military also had its own artists in tow at the start of the invasion, produ
images from the perspective of victorious Bradley tanks rolling into Baghd
ready to paint murals over Saddam's face and recast the bronze from his sta
into images of American heroes.
In the U.K., the situation is much the same. There is mostly silence, bu
some (such as Anthony Giddens and Martin Amis) have openly supported th
state's increasing surveillance and internment without charge of those who ap
to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin.
One place where there was international public agreement among acade
mics, artists, and cultural institutions was the issue of cultural heritage in I
Lists of monuments, libraries, and historical sites and calls for their protect
were posted on the Web sites of the Archaeological Institute of America and
College Art Association. These institutional public statements may be taken
examples of collective opposition, but they were not necessarily an antiwar p
tion. A large number of the scholars, collectors, and dealers who called for
protection of cultural heritage in the event of war were in favor of war, so the t
positions cannot be conflated. These groups continued to speak out on matte
cultural heritage long after antiwar protests had effectively ended.
In my opinion, the silence of intellectuals is partly a result of the stance (als
promoted by the liberal Left) that being apolitical is correct academic f
Mesopotamian antiquity, seen as global cultural heritage, received attention o
because it is defined as a humanist concern, beyond war. But we can think of
concern the opposite way around. Even if it is not always overtly stated, the call
protecting world heritage is often presented as the enlightened counterposit
to indigenous destruction and neglect, an argument that has certainly been
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 11-13. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Tec
12 OCTOBER
to make the
some academi
ties market in
The case is o
and images to
blackouts nev
and Sadr, or
face? Visual m
would be a m
inclusive publ
images and v
forces of pow
pictures of th
Abu Ghraib,
mony - simil
effectively de
will consent,
ing by the pe
were taken by
ers. Nor do t
visible. Camp
we are neverth
also the case w
Why is this p
undertaken in
know and gli
daily basis? An
bol of triump
statement an
absolute sove
the act of br
longed death
circulates in
torture is ver
it to work as
rumors and fl
A similar sy
sentations ho
population th
applaud as th
Questionnaire: Bahrani 13
new, more accessible media (as I w

before the war, Tony Blair teleph
overwhelming bombardment of w
(e.g., Saddam's capture) leaves littl
thought.
What was also disturbing for many of us in the antiwar movement was the
significant shift in the images of state power in 2001-03. In the U.S., we observed
the abandoning of any pretense of a subtle propaganda of liberal democracy in
favor of an imagery and rhetoric that was clearly more akin to the propaganda of
totalitarian regimes. But the imagery of U.S. power in the New World Order was
nothing new. For example, Bush's performance on the aircraft carrier was a direct
borrowing of Vladimir Putin's appearance as a fighter pilot in the 1999 Chechen
war. Flag waving and military parades, usually the standard fare of the overt propa-
ganda of dictatorship, became common on American streets, and television news
began to display targets, military maps, and the banners of unwavering patrio-
tism. Since this imagery has now become normal on U.S. television screens, it is
difficult to imagine that it will not continue after the next presidential election.
The Left has been waylaid by the promises of liberating technologies, but
the YouTube public sphere encourages a fast-food version of political engage-
ment. An example of this politics bereft of political consciousness is the way in
which the early popular support of the war in the U.S. has now been replaced by a
popular swing toward its opposition. This growth in the antiwar movement is pri-
marily a reaction to the rising numbers of dead American troops. But it is a
movement whose anger is directed at the Bush administration in particular, not at
the neoliberal ideologies of global capital or the Manichean rhetoric that enabled
the waging of war. The Internet as public sphere is also becoming increasingly
monitored not only by the state but by self-appointed censors like Campus Watch,
leading not so much to a marginalization of any real oppositional voices or serious
critique, but to ever more self-censorship and silence. Just as the ideology of
global capital depends upon liberal myths of diversity and inclusion, so too the
idea of an unrestrained multiplicity and reality of visual images, snapshots taken
by people on mobile phones and digital cameras, is not something we can afford
to leave unquestioned. Despite these fast-paced changes, public intellectuals do
continue to speak out, write, and make works of art in acts of resistance and dis-
sent, yet it will require more and more energy and courage to do so, and the
support of a larger network of oppositional voices and groups. The antiwar move-
ment needs to recover the strength and the momentum of 2003, opposing the war
not because of the returning body bags, but because of the fundamental injustice
of the war and continuing occupation of Iraq.
ZAINAB BAHRANI is Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
JUDITH BARRY
Said said . . .
Was it the banging that woke me or just the anxiety of the last few days? We
were out late - Cairo never sleeps - and anyway, that's when the women are more
relaxed, more willing to talk to me and my translators, young women from the
American University in Cairo (AUC). Through the peephole I saw two men,
Western-looking but in army fatigues. Then I heard Hebba, the hotel owner,
yelling a bit angrily because they had woken her up, too, "Get up, your govern-
ment wants you out."
It was late March 2003 and the U.S.-instigated, much-protested-around-the-
world-but-to-no-avail third war in the region was well under way.1 It began soon
after I arrived. A week later, while the rest of the world seemed to settle into an
uneasy acquiescence, there were riots at the AUC that the government could not
quell, even though protesting is illegal. Edward Said had just spoken to an over-
flow crowd, and I had run over to the other campus to hear him, inbetween
mounting a small exhibition of my work at the school to fund my real reason for
being in Cairo: to research women's lives in this so-called Middle East (East of what?
. . . not Asia, not Europe, and so "East"? . . . Near East, Middle East, Far East . . .).
The students were increasingly agitated and for several days they had been burn-
ing U.S. flags in the streets.2 But never mind, right now, I had to leave: so said the
two men whose State Department badges ID'd them as working for culture, not
the military, which didn't explain their choice of camouflage gear - was it leisure
attire? Solidarity with the U.S. soldiers? A new look for cultural workers? Two
hours later I was on the plane as the sun rose over the desert, out of Cairo, off the
project, done for now, but not finished . . . like so many of my projects. For the last
few years I have been trying to get back to Cairo.3 Finally, late last year, I was able
to resume this project.
1. This is the third Gulf War: the first was the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88; the second was between
Iraq and Kuwait, 1990-99; and the third is the current one that began in March 2003 with Operation
Iraqi Freedom.
2. See, for example, Lisa Anderson, "Outrage Worldwide: Demonstrations Trigger Deadly Gunfire:
In Egypt, Muslim Cleric Calls for Holy War in Support of the Iraqi People," Montreal Gazette, March 21,
2003, p. A33.
3. Egypt* and Cairo in particular, occupies a pivotal place in the increasingly delicate series of rela-
tionships (hegemonies) that make up the "Middle East." Not only is Egypt the gateway for much of the
USAID and NGO work in the region, but it has become, arguably, the most stable capital in the area as
civil wars in Beirut and their threat elsewhere and the on-going Israeli/Palestinian conflict plus the dis-
aster that is the U.S. war in Iraq have rendered the surrounding countries even more volatile. While
Mubarak's regime keeps a tight rein on the Muslim Brotherhood, which is illegal, the group now has
88 seats in the 454-seat Parliament. Cairo's official population is around 16 million, with an undocu-
mented population estimated at 2 to 4 million living in shanty-cities beyond the suburbs. Composed of
refugees and people from Upper Egypt, these people are essentially stateless.
Questionnaire: Barry 15
How to respond to this war?

titled in so many ways, my respo
Women's Stories. It is something
demonstrations in New York City
Even before the war broke ou
Cairo Biennale, I noticed that n
dollar with legs"), but that my
here to the many Cairene women
As Said was the among the first
construction of the terms "Oriental" and "Arab" or "Middle Eastern" to describe
the people living in this region is the Occidental discourse's attempted to impose
the hegemony of the West over its many disparate cultures with the aim of specifi-
cally devaluing them for subjugation; hence, not Western is not rational, not
trustworthy, and not capable of self-government, and the specificity of any and all
differences is erased. One antidote to this erasure of difference, as Said argued,
was to employ narrative rather than visual strategies as a means of both empower-
ing local voices in particular places and of representing the complexities of
specific experiences throughout the region. The events post-9/11 have only made
such strategies even more urgent. Now, more than ever, we need to understand
what we are seeing.
If Scheherazade (or more properly, Shahrazad) had to tell 1,001 stories, one
a night, to entertain and simultaneously reeducate and transform an angry
Sultan, how many stories will it take to put a human face on the Middle East? If
Scheherazade's often fantastic tales involved magical beings who could resolve
irresolvable conundrums simply by wishing, I wonder what powers of storytelling
might be brought to bear against the violent spectacle of this continuous war?
Could these stories, in some very small way, do the same? Can the documentary
tradition and artistic license provoke a way of getting at some of the truth in
Wittgenstein's claim that ordinary language is unable to convey the extraordinari-
ness of the world's existence? Documenting what is at the margins of experience,
the stories we tell each other bear witness to how what is subjective and what is
objective in history are always a multiplicity of representations. How can stories of
daily life counter the spectacle? Do the stories we tell each other more accurately
reflect who we are than the facts of our lives? What about the lies we tell ourselves
about ourselves?
In Cairo, I constantly met people with stories to tell; even journalists who
came to interview me told me all about their lives. I couldn't figure out why. It
hadn't happened when I was collecting stories for other iterations of this project -
so why now?4
4. For a description of earlier iterations of this project, see Judith Barry, "Not Reconciled," October
73 (Summer 1995), pp. 55-70. I use an interview methodology to collect stories, which I synthesize
into very short narratives. Then I film them employing actors who tell them in their own language and
in English.
16 OCTOBER
Finally I be
something u
of view, who
ascribable to
of view from
I was liberal
Middle East.
or social stra
might be ab
especially in
vival skills, s
little, since,
get so far wi
I was intrig
women I met; even the Western-born women, married to Cairenes, seemed to
have a difficult time. Not exactly "Oriental" - those discourses were never about
women per se - this terrain is molded by competing points of view where class
and social station are not tolerant of deviance from proscribed mores, and most
5. First Lady Suzanne Mubarak supports the rights of women and children. While there are a
number of reforms to women's rights that are currently being discussed, few have been signed into law.
Women's rights - marriage, divorce, inheritance, employment - conform to Islamic law and not to the
rest of the Egyptian legal system, which is based on the French civil law. In January 2000, the parlia-
ment revised the Personal Status Law to provide women with the opportunity to divorce their hus-
bands without proving mistreatment. During fall 2000, Egyptian courts struck down statutes that pro-
hibited women from obtaining passports, but an earlier law that women could travel without permis-
sion of their husbands was struck down when women obtained the right to divorce their husbands in
return for giving back the dowry (given by the husband's family) and exempting the husband from any
further (future) financial obligations. Previously, women did not have the legal right to demand
divorce. Muslim women are prohibited from marrying Christian men, and non-Muslim women who
marry Muslim men are subject to Islamic law. Men still have the right to obtain divorce easily. The new
law also had a setback for women's rights; women no longer have the right to travel abroad without the
husband's consent. According to a report issued by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in
2002, 35 percent of Egyptian women have been beaten by their husbands. A 2002 study reported by the
All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development found that 47 percent of all homicides
with female victims were cases of "honor killing," in which relatives murder a woman suspected of sexu-
al impropriety, which includes being raped, in order to rid the family name of the perceived slur. The
Egypt Demographic and Health Survey (1997) shows that 97 percent of ever-married women have
been subjected to female circumcision. Ignorance, conservatism, illiteracy, and poverty, among other
things, have been blamed for the persistence of the practice. In 1994, the Minister of Health allowed
its performance in public-sector hospitals, but later issued a ban on female circumcision in 1997.
Despite public initiatives, the practice persists. Women have 9 seats in Parliament, 5 of which were
appointed. The first female judge was appointed in 2003. Unprecedented in Egypt's history, the
Supreme Judicial Council appointed 31 female judges out of 124 female candidates in March 2007.
Thirty of them took legal oath before the Council on April 10, 2007, and one declined her new post.
The new female judges will assume their jobs at the courts of first instance. Human rights and women's
associations welcomed their appointment, while some male judges and Islamist activists objected to
this appointment on the pretext that Islam does not allow women to preside over the judiciary.
However, Egyptian constitution and law do not prohibit women from occupying judicial positions. See
the United Nations Development Programme: http://www.pogar.org/countries/gender.asp?cid=5.
importantly, where Western val

Muslim law are, by definition, in c
When I was first in Egypt sev
woman wearing a headscarf on t
unusual to see a Muslim woman w
areas as so-called Islamization ha
necessarily mean that a woman i
different things, and in one s
street - it functions more like a
and street harassment while allow
perceived immodesty. We consid
shared space. In Egypt, the stre
feel disenfranchised from this s
everyone, especially women, is fair
Today it is not atypical for a w
industry to be veiled on the street
job - which is required by law - an
where, by law, she must submit to
to Cairo I have heard about two d
bly urban myths. The first are w
frequent the Groppi Cafe in dow
the square. The second are wom
hired to publicly harass particula
and many false leads, I have never
As I have continued to interview
have discovered some surprising
will comprise the project will be
briefly describe some of what I
ined. For instance, upper-class wo
as they try to reconcile the con
expectations of their families. Es
feel between their education (wh
independent, and build their ow
including the lack of rights f
patriarchal condition for women
expected of daughters versus son
Should they really marry for lov
fession that requires long hours
marriage or children or both? W
and fit in again? Will they find
them and let them continue to d
Until recently, it was impossib
family's permission if she was unm
18 OCTOBER
permission -
middle class,
forge a diffe
wealthiest fa
invested in th
struct a new
country, som
they need to
many of the
countries, b
demands of t
In fact, weal
dle, working
don't control
far fewer op
them. For the
about them.
"self-fulfillm
of empowerm
more secure in their sense of themselves and much more content with their
choices than the wealthier women. Among these women., I also noticed a stronge
storytelling tradition; they seem to have a parable or allegory for many of th
moments in their lives that resonate with them. Storytelling gives them, as on
woman, Ma'shari, said to me, the power to feel that their life matters and that they
are connected to a larger world, a world that is not outside the family, but whi
includes many families . . . even mine. "You make movies, but we have this and
lives on, as I live on, through how I am remembered by my children and my chi
dren's children, over time."
Many of the undocumented women I interviewed were from upper Egypt.
They came to Cairo because their husbands had too many wives to provide ade
quately for them, and/or because they were abused. In Cairo, they reinvented
themselves and the lives of their children, finding work as street or bazaar ven
dors, stall cleaners, tea girls, or maids. None wanted to marry again. While life was
hard, you could sense how the circumstances presented by a new life in the cit
produced a palpable joy. It reminded me of Arjun Appadurai's notion of how "th
work of the imagination" creates the ability to aspire to a better life. Throug
6. Across all classes, women are the ethical and moral centers of their families and as such wield a
great deal of power within the family. With high unemployment, there are many fewer jobs for men,
especially undocumented men, and as women will work for less money, it is easier for women to gain
employment than men. These women are not embarrassed to be maids, whereas many of their hus-
bands see menial work as demeaning, especially if they were trained for something more skilled. Often
the woman is the only one bringing in any money. When she is the sole earner, then she has more of a
say in how the money is spent and in the other facets of family life as well.
practice - by thinking of ways

Cairo and their lives had chang
these women, I saw this process at
When I began this project sev
not clearly imagine that their f
but they were cautiously hopef
their contradictory expectati
unfolded. They hoped that how
culture with what they wanted
synergy between the specificity
with many of them over the la
would have imagined seven yea
whole is turning extremely con
chart an unknown future. They
sympathetic to their education a
about an interesting career. Mo
accepted because of their forme
ing turned more conservative, n
Islamization of Egyptian society
is only one of the most visible sy
sions and permeates the entire
Western values, how it is being in
exacerbating an already difficult
is being rejected - most still su
ism+democracy - but Western
with them the role of women and
associated with American pop cu
servative personal values. No on
Islamic law. However, everyone
and its potential effects on the
live their lives. Into the contrad
structing their identities, the
should interpret this, looms l
"Now, where can I look?"
I would like to thank the 175 women wh

well as their many friends who helped m
lar thanks to Scott Bailey, Leanne Mella
Langlois Foundation, and especially Mar
JUDITH BARRY is an artist and writer liv

Domus Atrium 2 in Salamanca and will tr
CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD
Since I take seriously the contention that the war on terror, of w

ongoing conflict in Iraq is supposedly a part, is to some small degre
images, where applicable I want to organize my responses to this qu
around what I consider to be a productive intervention into this field
namely the film We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may
(2007) by Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne.
1. Artistic opposition to the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent oc

Iraq cannot be understood apart from the spectacle of the 9/11 terro
since it was those crushing images that helped precipitate military ac
and Afghanistan, and that are still invoked by the Bush administratio
essary - often as a collective image memory - to galvanize support f
Though the conjunction of spectacle, terror, and war has been treat
scholarly press with increasing frequency since the World Trade Cen
the Bay Area collective Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in
of War (2005) remains a touchstone statement. The basis of their arg
now well rehearsed though no less seductive: September 11, as a
media event, constituted an image defeat for the United States. "The
state is obliged," Retort suggests, "to devise an answer to the defeat o
II."1 Thus began a literally genocidal search for righteous images of m
iation iconic (and reproducible) enough to counter the looming shado
of the towers and vivid enough to satisfy public desire for retributio
land security.
The acuity of Retort's analysis is undeniable, but, as Michael Hard
in an evenhanded assessment of the achievements and limitations of Retort's
efforts, for all the analytical alacrity the group marshals throughout this extended
polemic, Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts "do not se
to articulate the living alternative to these horrible powers under which
suffer."2 This is, perhaps, a somewhat fraudulent critique, since Retort's brief
expository, analytical, and polemical: the project does not set out to define or
demonstrate an imagistic alternative to media coverage of the war on terror.
Hardt, however, alludes to one of the very few structural problems with Retor
analysis: the authors display a theoretical mastery of the logic of the spectacle, but
ultimately remain in its thrall. In view of this limitation, the question th
becomes, how can visual artists contest or at least intervene in this violent, dialec-
tical spectacle-war, without assuming a comparable visual language, but also, an
1 . Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in the New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005) , p. 3
2. Michael Hardt, "Incisive Retort: Michael Hardt on Afflicted Powers," Artforum 44, no. 2 (Octo
2005), p. 36.
Questionnaire: Bedford 21
vitally, without relinquishing the b

the documentary model?
The currency of documentary im
the media treatment of 9/11, b
Afghanistan, and by the abhorrent
being brutally executed by maske
visual art to be effective within th
an internal logic that does not oppo
mentary images - always more auth
instead explore counter-commercia
are not aggressively oppositional, b
narrative. This parallel oppositional
content. As Clark has noted, since
find some kind of image answer to t
tion here is that one possible dim
currency can be located in a documen
removed from, the drama and spe
What is called for is an information-
Meltzer and Thome's film We will
ing logic of conventional oppositio
conventions and economies of spec
with the machinery of the mass m
orous alternative documentary mo
sequences, moments of revelation,
immersion, slow observation, and p
One example from Meltzer and Tho
film must suffice in this context. Th
Syria, a simple decision that effectiv
the social conditions in a predomin
lens inflected by the signs of war.
dialectics of image warfare. The fo
timelessness," observes the activitie
and receiving instruction in a mosq
clause in the title of this section
adopted throughout the film; sema
tions contained in We will live to see
"or," it is implied, could be repeated
"A coming of age, or, timelessne
structure, nor is the visual inform
to prove a point. This apparent lack
one to attend with increasing sens
3. "T. J. Clark on Retort's latest publication
22 OCTOBER
which can on
is disarmingly
dren playing
The absence o
track, or the l
could be enlisted to serve the cause of Islamic fundamentalism or American mili-
tary aggression. Its observational neutrality - studiously achieved - is, in effect,

form of passive resistance that very quietly but incessantly proffers a documentary
model that rejects the use of images as divisive, propagandistic weapons.
The film refuses to commit to a thesis or to pursue an argumentative line, and
it refuses spectacle, polemics, didacticism, and conclusions in favor of a subtle bu
ultimately stifling immersion in five situations that offer no explanations, just alter-
native information from which to form new, if indefinite, ever-tractable positions.
3. It may be true to say that contemporary artists are "highly paid . . . market-
dependent provider [s] of infotainment," but equal or even greater blame for th
ascendance and continued currency of the "pretty painting" and benignly decora
tive art that saturates the marketplace must lie with "frontline" art critics writing
for extremely visible trade publications. They typically fail to criticize and even
endorse art that is radically disengaged from the pressing concerns of this histor
cal moment. The result of such a critical practice is a widespread reluctanc
among artists to produce topical, challenging art, because there is no demonstra-
ble evidence that such a practice would be supported by the critics whose positiv
words, as everyone knows, are the first, vital step in establishing the market cur
rency of a young artist. One of the most insidious processes of professionalization
then, can be felt and observed in the circuit of fiscal interests that links active crit-
ics, the trade publications they write for, and the galleries that advertise in thos
pages, and now add to the mix the art fairs and the many related, often sponsore
events to which they are invited. This is not a new problem, but one that is felt
Above and facing page: Julia Meltzer and David Thome. We will live to see these
five pictures of what may come to pass. 2007. Courtesy the a
Questionnaire: Bedford 23
acutely today when the kind of op

not sponsored by the interests and
6. In one of the most prescient an

of the 9/11 terror attacks, cultural cr
events of September 11, 2001, were
visual limits were set." She located
limitation in the uncompromising s
by the media. "For all time," she n
tain bits of debris, certain last view
crowds, certain spectators, certain f
one that has considerable and obviou
contemporary political thought th
rhetoric effectively foregrounds th
as to be effectively incontestable. A
Iraq, the images remain unassailabl
military campaign, and the litany of
Similarly unassailable is the drama
brating the fall of Saddam Husse
nighttime assaults on Baghdad, o
Hussein being led to the gallows. T
truths, but they are powerfully, even
they are viral, extending deep into
lation through a variety of media.
To engage with these images, to
their power and veracity in a relate
oppositional strategy doomed to fa
tary mode should be abandoned w
proximity of the documentary mo
24 OCTOBER
allows artists
vincing, poli
oppositional b
ily legible) ob
often accessin
Meltzer and T
suggested, re
of our under
forcing the v
polarizing tha
accompanyin
the visual limi
Subtending t
mitment to s
or compete w
tion is one ke
critique is com
by focusing on
Bush adminis
If visual art c
by systemati
ment to justi
done by sharin
gies employe
these sources
to the war in
images that g
empowered t
tary view of c
film, and it i
course around
CHRISTOPHER B
County Museum o
CLAIRE BISHOP
Since these six questions turn out to be fourteen, and since I am extrem
skeptical of the value of questionnaires (which tend to privilege rhetorical s
bites), I am going to take stock of their overall direction and reply with on
The questions indicate a frustration with the lack of apparent activism in co
porary art and academia toward U.S. and U.K. military involvement in Iraq.
unable to make an informed comment on U.S. academia, nor do I feel inclined to
speak for my colleagues in U.K. universities; I will only mention that academic
activism can also operate in terms of how and what one chooses to teach to a
younger generation. My reply will be limited to my area of expertise: contempo-
rary art since the 1960s.
I will start with some examples. Two recent biennials have made the Iraq
War the centerpiece of examinations of present-day conflicts: Okwui Enwezor's
2006 Seville Biennial and, less emphatically, Robert Storr's Venice Biennale
(2007). During the Biennale's first month, Thomas Demand showed Yellowcake
(2007), a body of work referencing the U.S. and U.K. governments' false asser-
tions that Saddam Hussein was importing uranium from Niger to develop nuclear
weapons. Earlier this year in Paris, Thomas Hirschhorn showed Concretion-Re
(2007), an installation overloaded with galling images of dismembered body parts
resulting from the Middle Eastern conflicts, all gleaned from commercial Internet
sites. In June, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed Memorial to
the Iraq War, in which twenty-six artists were invited to propose memorials to the
ongoing conflict; the exhibition was supported by film screenings and debates.
Included in the show was Sean Snyder, whose solo exhibition at the Lisson had
recently addressed the use of new photographic technologies in propagandistic
reportage by both the U.S. and jihadi organizations. In the Duveen Galleries at
the Tate Britain, Mark Wallinger installed State Britain (2006), a life-size replica of
Brian Haw's recently illegalized protest against the Iraq War in Parliament Square.
In Manchester this summer, Steve McQueen exhibited For Queen and Country
(2007), a wooden cabinet containing ninety-eight sheets of stamps bearing the
portraits of British military personnel who died in service in Iraq since 2003. The
projects by Wallinger and McQueen in particular are ambitious, chilling, and
deeply affective works of art.
To take this list further requires noting the terms of this questionnaire and
its tendency to overvalorize artistic activism in 1968, while also implying that
protest against Vietnam is directly comparable to protest against Iraq. But artists'
responses to the Vietnam War were part of a wider process of challenging conserv-
ative authority, bolstered by the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, and
the workers' movement, and followed a sustained period of U.S. military interven-
tion in Korea, Indochina, and Central America. To ask questions about con-
temporary art's relationship to the Iraq War without contextualizing this crisis
26 OCTOBER
alongside, oth
sciousness - t
globalization,
camps, spiral
ment of asylu
distorted view
forums for
venues theor
emphasis on p
plays of visua
good example
Dutch Pavilion at Venice to a lecture series and critical reader on issues of secu-
rity, violence, and illegal immigration.
This in turn points to another assumption of the questions, which is that
head-on engagement with topical issues can be both politically effective and* aes-
thetically significant. It seems ironic to find the Guerrilla Art Action Group and
the Living Theatre mentioned in the pages of a journal whose editorial board is
best known for supporting the more obliquely politicized practices of the late
1960s, such as that of Marcel Broodthaers. This brings us to the contradictory ker-
nel of this questionnaire. While it's laudable to ask respondents to identify
examples of oppositional collectives, Web sites, and research-led practices that
form important pockets of cultural and political resistance, such groups do not
produce works of art or academic publications that would usually be recognized
by this journal. These practices seem to have an uncomfortable and overlooked
relationship to the framework of October, which seems torn - as many of us are -
between a respect for direct activism and a desire for complex, multivalent art.
CLAIRE BISHOP is Assistant Professor in History of Art at Warwick University, United Kingdom.
SUSAN BUCK-MORSS
1. As soon as Bush threatened to invade Iraq, faculty immediately went

action as if the 1960s and '70s were still with us; we were ready on campus to
the opposition, but when we looked around, no one was behind us. At Corne
most students ignored faculty demonstrations. A handful participated in th
global peace demonstration on February, 15, 2003 - itself a highly successful v
practice of opposition - but they felt isolated and ineffective. Participation
Internet movements does not compensate for a sense of local insignifica
Alternatively, local demonstrations in the community of Ithaca, New York,
which there were many, achieved no national or global visibility.
I was in Washington, D.C., in spring 2003 for a national demonstration, a
the aesthetic dissonance was striking. Young Americans who participated on t
hot spring day wore the barest of body coverings, displaying pierced navels
ornamental tattoos. They converged with families sponsored by Muslim-Amer
organizations, who arrived by the busload, sedately dressed, children and old
ple, the women with headscarves, and prayer was observed. This polarized vis
display, all of us shouting support for Palestinians, was difficult to imagine as rep
resenting a cohesive movement. Without the counterculture of the 1960s, i
deeply rooted in American folk culture, solidarity among strangers lack
shared medium of expression.
Half a decade later, the situation is not very different. There has been lit
success in bridging the culture gap in order to produce a popular front aga
the government. During the Cold War, there was a porous area of Marxist theo
ical debate where both sides overlapped. We lack a common discourse now. W
are missing the brilliant solidarity work done by the civil rights movement
later, the feminist movement, both of which were capable of uniting diverse socio
economic, racial, and cultural groups around a shared political agenda. That
be a reason the artists have had such a difficult time. There is less of a comm
articulated cause to express in their work, and art by itself cannot work to cr
political solidarity without falling into pedantry.
2. In the 1960s and '70s, before the globalization of capitalist wealth, averag
Americans benefited from U.S. economic hegemony. American students cou
renounce materialism and still survive. The nation exported modern necessi
to the world, grew what it ate, produced the clothes that we wore, including
international style-setter, Levi's, and workers and capitalists had reason to be
they were all in the same national-economy boat. A thousand dollars saved
summer could buy young people a PanAm ticket around the world with unlim
stops, allowing months, sometimes years, of travel in countries where the Americ
dollar was valuable. Travelers got out of the tourist bubble and actually experience
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 27-30. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Tech
28 OCTOBER
other culture
their mobile s
It's hard to
democraticall
rich and poor
lack the luxur
draft, they la
that does not
The absence
being staged a
the scenario w
W. Bush. Mea
stream media,
A U.S. soldier
directed by Ian
armed foreig
terrorized his
need to know
given time or
soldiers them
Saddam's fore
we were about
Qaeda is obses
spectacles lik
and agitprop
3. "Profession
tem to surviv
Netherlands
nothing to ex
PR packaging
suddenly had
ment, self-pr
appear much
flying circuit
funding. Once
them indirec
work gets com
nity, but lose
The most eff
municate to a
series like The
played an imp
Questionnaire: Buck-Morss 29
which has been relentless in its serious

deserves the Nobel Prize. I do not know
that kind of public impact. In terms of
the Dixie Chicks have had more success
industry (which employs hundreds of c
ends up being more progressive than the
4. The global public sphere - not as it

becoming - should be the focus of all o
writers, or activists. Realization of that
religious, and national borders exploite
mics is vital. It needs to go on at the b
are multiple strategies for achieving th
down brick by brick the limits to histo
of dismantling than the wall of silence an
centuries of Muslim history from the
conception of separate civilizations is a ter
tory is evoked to prove the uniquen
groups. Theorists have tried to compensat
ity," but that moves in the wrong dir
separate cultures, all of which should ha
idea of humanity (as experienced by th
same breath, claiming that we own tha
are inhuman - hence deserving of any
Left has been just as guilty of this con
Christian Right.
I get impatient when Western theor
ceptual frames are adequate to analyze
simply that Foucault, or Derrida, or B
They seldom ask, what Chinese theoris
assume that the most advanced thinkers
or New York (although we allow them
confined within the globally extended t
ally incorporated art world.
5. Precisely what political means, and

entail, is up for discussion. The old na
today. In 1968, one could view images
world - Tokyo, Athens, Mexico City, B
spontaneous Utopian moment of global
it mean? How might that spirit be con
out of bounds of U.S. media coverage, an
vately communicated webs of protest an
30 OCTOBER
blogs that pr
global counte
but we are in
Internet, sate
beyond the c
power in the
ment of med
6. When it c
artists who k
video work o
photographic
that reconstr
tion by Elias K
suicide bomb
that have not
scends cultur
There are m
decade of the Iranian Revolution would witness a renaissance of cinema, which
took place despite the Muslim revolutionary government's censorship. While all of
these artists, once discovered, risk the problems of professionalization already
mentioned, they began as locally grounded practitioners who, because they came
from the so-called periphery, had to be aware of global realities at the same time
that they responded to the historical events of their own lived experience. In con-
trast, the greater the power a nation wields in the world, the less capable its
thinkers and artists may be to recognize the provincial naivite of their own beliefs.
Cultural creativity is not something that can be instrumentally orchestrated. So,
instead of the question, What is to be done?, one might want to ask, What is being
done, in places, by people, in media, that we are not yet well positioned to see?
Lastly, effective opposition is hindered by the bogus logic of intellectual
property as the basis of free expression for which academics and artists have been
used as poster children. Maneuvering in the virtual space of spectacle-politics
demands new strategies, new alliances, new financing. Artists and academics are
not alone in trying to figure these out. Oppositional political parties are just as
stymied. Wherever breakthroughs happen, we need to learn from them.
SUSAN BUCK-MORSS is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of
Government at Cornell University, and a member of the graduate fields of German Studies and History
of Art.
CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE
1. a. For the most part with gentle opposition: petitions, letter- writing c
paigns, occasional rallies, teach-ins, books and articles, antiwar art and the
However, the movement does seem to be growing in number. Hopefully, this tren
will continue at an accelerated pace.
b. No, and there won't be any until there is a sustained mass mobiliza
against the war. On a mass scale, people must be willing to risk their bodies
their freedom (go to jail); we have not come to this point yet. It seems that p
do not think (or feel) they have a big enough stake in the war or its outcom
participate in such collective actions.
2. a. No, not that CAE has seen.
b. Because barbarity and violence are too often taken as givens that re
beyond the sphere of individual agency. We should also remember that man
in favor of the war or indifferent to it. Universities in particular are not th
tions of Leftist politics that conservatives make them out to be. Perhaps th
be said of the arts and humanities, but it's difficult to make this assertion in
regard to the sciences, to business, engineering, medical, and law schools, etc.
And let's not forget the nonfaculty bureaucrats that run these institutions - they
tend not to have radical worldviews.
c. It's a major factor, but not the only one. Mortality is not on everyone's
doorstep yet. Casualties have not reached a point where everyone knows someone
who has died, and thus can personally identify with war deaths. The ideology of
individualism is another factor. Global neoliberalism has pretty much destroyed
any personal identification with a public, a citizenry, a common good, a collective
effort, etc. The nonrational embrace of the ideology of individualism leaves peo-
ple alone and weak, so action seems futile. Conversely, the faces of war are just a
collective abstracted mass. This mass has no individuality and thereby offers no
point of identification. Another problem is that the popular media completely
panders to the presidential agenda. Resistance is not visually reproduced and
redistributed in the culture and hence appears small, weak, and of minor impor-
tance. In turn, the feeling of futility is reinforced. There are many more examples.
3. a. It's not so much a matter of consciousness; it's a problem of action. Almost

every artist and academic can offer a reasonable analysis of why the war is happen-
ing and some are willing to explain why it's wrong. Those that have an analysis do
not necessarily act on it, or they believe that critique is the totality of the contri-
bution they can make.
32 OCTOBER
b. Yes. They
status quo (no
c. There are
nated. The sim
level. Most
Constitution
what their b
political envir
d. They seem
gressive" these
4. Organizing
however, the
space. This is
the alternativ
because of th
America by t
5. a. Yes.
b. The tools are not universally accessible. However, those who can access them
are primarily faced with more media noise, more work, and more alienation.
Cutting embodiment out of social and political processes will not yield a Utopian
result. Contemporary ICT [Information and Communications Technology] can
have positive characteristics (mostly practical, such as being used as a tool for the
organization of resistance), but they are a minority.
6. Be more daring and less afraid. Losing a job, being beaten, or going to jail
isn't the worst that can happen.
CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE is a collective of five artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring
the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory.
T.J. DEMOS
The artistic and curatorial responses to the war in Iraq have been immedi-
ate, diverse, and profound. Consider the photographs of "unembedded" Iraqi
photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, which represent a poignant documentary
account of the conflict, one that shows with horrific immediacy its physical vio-
lence and brutality, and does so, strikingly, in a way that dominant media has not,
by depicting both jihadis and the U.S. military in operation. A very different
approach, though equally urgent, is the activist-theoretical practice of the San
Francisco-based collective Retort. In addition to their piercing analysis in Afflicted
Powers of contemporary "military neoliberalism" and the current spectacle of war,
their work has included a recent installation composed of wall-plastered broad-
sheets and a video projection that links the Iraq catastrophe to Nazi atrocities via
an appropriation of Picasso's Guernica, Both examples were featured in Okwui
Enwezor's remarkable 2006 Seville Biennial, which continued the curator's politi-
cal and artistic engagement established in Documenta 11 (2002). As both an
ambitious exhibition and an extensive series of discursive platforms addressing
pressing political topics - from radical theorizations of democracy to considera-
tions of transitional justice in postcolonial states - Documenta 11 must be recog-
nized as an exemplary response: analytic as much as programmatic, activist as
much as aesthetic - to the complex political and subjective conditions of global-
ization's ongoing crisis, which has been cause and consequence of recent U.S.
military invasions.
Other significant curatorial projects of note include Charles Esche and Vasif
Kortun's 2005 Istanbul Biennial. Dedicated to an investigation of the geopolitics
of Turkey's unique border-zone position between the Middle East and Europe,
between traditional Islamic culture and Western secular modernity, it included an
archive by Sean Snyder that catalogued and analyzed images of the U.S. occupa-
tion of Iraq posted on Internet file-sharing sites by amateur photographers
serving in or contracted by the U.S. military. Curator Catherine David has also sys-
tematically and courageously addressed the Middle East in her long-term project
of exhibitions, conferences, and publications called Contemporary Arab Representations',
her most recent installment, The Iraqi Equation, at Berlin's KW Institute in 2006,
offered a platform for the presentation of documentary films and videos, photog-
raphy, lectures, and debates. Similarly, Predrag Pajdic's 2007 exhibition Recognise
at Contemporary Art Platform's temporary space in North London's Finsbury
Park - a largely Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian part of the city - exempli-
fies the current urgency of considering regional reactions - including work by
Emily Jacir, Lamia Joreige, and Wael Shawky - to what is undoubtedly a complex
global restructuring that extends well beyond Iraq.
While no comparable attention in the States has been directed at the Middle
East in general and the war in Iraq in particular, especially in terms of the
34 OCTOBER
internation
European exa
ence, and po
practices tha
(2006) set up
ness on Broo
Iraqi dates th
embargo and
Anastas and
month-long
and a Web si
of the state
artists are also founders of 16Beaver in New York - an inclusive forum for discus-
sions about vital artistic and political topics).
Forgive the long list - nonetheless abbreviated! - but I feel it is necessary to
correct the false impression conveyed between the lines of October's questionnaire
that there are few or no examples of significant oppositional practices today, at
least none comparable to 1960s (potentially idealized?) "agitprop cultural activi-
ties." That is certainly not the case, and as the above instances suggest, there are
plenty of contemporary models that represent nuanced and complex forms of
engagement, whether they be theoretical, analytical, documentary, or aesthetic.
Far from marginalized or invisible, works of these artists are in fact commonly
included in large-scale international exhibitions, which have regularly taken up
pressing political issues over the last few years, as have certain international maga-
zines and journals (for examples, see Documenta 12's remarkable magazine
project) and many online discussion sites (e.g., www.republicart.net, www.rhi-
zome.org, www.nettime.org; for more, see www.16beavergroup.org/links.htm).
My accounting answers to an imperative to avoid certain reductions, partic-
ularly when it comes to a discussion of "political art" or of art "opposed" to the
war in Iraq; as well, it provides a basis upon which to articulate some qualifica-
tions regarding the proposed "effectiveness" of artistic opposition. First, to ask
whether or not art could be "effective" on the level of national and international
politics can only invite its own negative response, bringing about a state of
melancholy disappointment. For if answered in the positive - as is the tendency
of those activists who reduce art to politics- then the obvious danger, beyond
the obvious ones of idealism and naivete, is the instrumentalization of form and
the submission of art to a sociological, bureaucratic assessment, which privileges
reified sloganeering at the service of communicative action. Such strategies may
be potent and even necessary in street protests, but they are less than compelling
when they curtail art's formal creativity, theoretical complexity, indeterminate
meanings, and contemplative possibilities. Of course, art and activism are not
mutually exclusive, and when mobilized within a meaningfully complex form of
life - of the kind that desperately needs to be reinvented today - they might not
Questionnaire: Demos 35
only coexist, but challenge each

tions in provocative ways.
Second, the common setback s
artistic critiques of activism is the
politics. Retaining the solidified
intellectually debilitating, eve
believe the above examples comp
cal space by reconfiguring the s
Jacques Ranciere is intentional:
reconceptualization of art's auto
the determinations of governme
as well autonomy's traditional as
essentialism. Such an insight, in
sion, allowing us to articulate a
sheltered space of the biennial e
moments of oppositional energy
effectiveness. In addition, it help
Walid Raad's, Emily Jacir's, and
paradoxically) political commitm
image world that unleashes un
What results is nonetheless a po
tional without rationalist determin
Third, the examples cited abo
and were chosen to resist the tem
phenomenon or privileged refer
mulation; to the present condit
ularization of war; to the transn
concerning oil; and to the region
importantly the often disavowe
Even while Iraq surely demands
view, to form a global opposition
these interrelated aspects.
But how to assess the efficacy o
engenders indeterminate effect
demands or to desires for instan
effects are not political. Rather
measure art's effectiveness in term
conceptual and formal investigat
basis; to modify aesthetic-politi
desires, expose social exclusion, a
sive developments that sustain
magazine discussions, classroom
modes of disidentification that
36 OCTOBER
in mainstrea
experimental
tual, and to su
only be meas
tic, critical, a
Besides, the
lem. The real
military-ind
brazenly act
movements t
nizations th
Democracy N
form the cur
contrast to a
mobilize pub
which are ac
platforms, n
and internat
While the In
cation," owin
nevertheless
television's s
the biggest o
trates the In
campaign of
exploited the
footage of t
blogs that de
sives of Rash
Lebanese exp
to bypass dom
slant. More
protests, cou
atomized, com
The suggestio
paid and mar
nated politic
fails to take account of the fact that the market can and does in certain cases
reward politically conscious artistic practice - and not necessarily in ways that
immediately neutralizing. Representation by a commercial gallery does not fo
artists to evacuate political consciousness from their work; in fact, many pract
ers are supported by galleries precisely for the shrewd way their art negotiat
politics. It is time to extend some complexity to the market, which is not som
Questionnaire: Demos 37
monolithic force; nor are all com

commercial institutions as comple
mean capitulation; rather, it enta
operating within a market-drive
means seeking ways to nurture s
creative intellectual autonomy wh
T. J. DEMO6, author of the recent book

Department of Art History at University
ROSALYN DEUTSCHE
Three thoughts on war and masculinism:
(a) About seventy years ago, Virginia Woolf received a letter soliciting,
does, opinions on opposition to war. Her response, immortalized in Thre
attributed war to grandiosity, egoism, and vanity and linked it to patr
form of society that the author claimed, borrowing a Freudian term, p
subconscious "infantile fixation." She thereby also linked the political an
chical. "Public and private worlds are inseparably connected," she wro
tyrannies and civilities of one are the tyrannies and civilities of the other."
(b) At a conference on "Women Artists at the Millennium," convened

Linda Nochlin called on us to commit ourselves to feminism in the face of what
she predicted would be a reconsolidation of heroic masculinity in the wake of
9/1 1.1 The launching of the Iraq War and the war on terror proved her right.
(c) In "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" of 1915, Freud described war
as just such a reconsolidation, only he called it a regression to heroism, which he
had earlier associated with the narcissistic ego's (infantile) fantasy of invulnerabil-
ity: "Nothing can happen to me!"
I bring together these feminist and psychoanalytic reflections on war in

response to your request, in questions 4 and 5, that we compare current antiwar
activity to protests against the Vietnam War. I don't think that the failure of protest
to reach the level of the 1970s is due to the rise of the "electronic-technological
public sphere," which, contra Habermas, I regard not as a fall into privacy but as,
among other things, an expansion of political space. Instead of demonizing the
Internet, we would do better to mobilize against the escalating threats to the right
of critical speech that characterize our age of protected democracy, wherever such
speech is exercised. But I've made that argument elsewhere. More important in
the present context is the possibility that the idealization of earlier forms of
protest - and along with it, the paternal demand that younger generations iden-
tify with a supposedly authentic antiwar politics - might be part of, or at least go
hand in hand with, the contemporary regression to heroic masculinity that
Nochlin warned against. For such regression isn't confined to pro-war forces. It
extends to certain sectors of the Left opposition, which use the urgency of the war
situation to legitimize a return to a masculinist political analysis that disavows and
sometimes ridicules the last few decades of feminist interrogations of the political
1 . Thanks to Mignon Nixon for reminding me of Nochlin 's statement.
Questionnaire: Deutsche 39
and of the limits of knowledge. Thi

of a solid foundation - economic an
patory struggle, subjugating all ot
fantasies of security and invulnerab
that cries out for psychoanalytic and
treated as politically expendable. As
are left with no way of understan
Ghraib - except as a by-product ra
hardly surprising, as adherence to
that guarantees total political know
quest that, according to the Italian p
gives rise to war. War, said Fornari
economic, political, and ideological c
nization," in the sense of a defense
answer to question 6, asking how to m
gest that we don't let the imperati
about the specificities of the Iraq War
tion. Capitalist and imperialist socie
but, instead of invoking the war to
psychoanalytic feminism - instead,
another - we should answer Nochlin's call and re-dedicate ourselves to feminism,
articulating economic and other analyses of war and protests against war - street
or otherwise - with the ethical project of what Fornari, following Freud, called
assuming responsibility for our unconscious, an accountability that, to begin with,
acknowledges the reality of unconscious determinants of war.
Art-world opposition to the war might be more effective if, in the wake of
the problematization of the political by feminist and radical-democratic dis-
courses, we rethink the seemingly self-evident category of "activist art," which is
often equated with aesthetic politics, including antiwar politics, and mobilized to
force other kinds of art into its opposing category, quietism. However, once we no
longer use the discourse of political economy to draw the line between the politi-
cal and nonpolitical and the public and private, once we abandon the notion of a
pure politics that exists apart from the aesthetic and the idea that politics has a
proper location - say, the streets - and once we recognize that psychic and subjec-
tive as well as material transformation is a crucial component rather than an
epiphenomenon of social change, the meaning of activist art becomes less certain.
Some activities fall easily within its boundaries: art that takes the Iraq War as
explicit subject matter, art whose messages are directed toward the state, that con-
tinues agitprop traditions, detourns "the spectacle," produces tactical media, or
disrupts what Jacques Ranciere calls "the distribution of the sensible." But art that
doesn't directly comment on the current war isn't necessarily a refuge from the
war, for sometimes this art, unlike much of what is called activist art, challenges
heroic masculinity. Using formal strategies developed within art practice itself -
40 OCTOBER
practices suc
tique, site-sp
and does - as
us out of our
abstract bod
negative hall
that which i
tic capacity f
create an eth
nies, we call
for, as Emm
inherent in [t
ROSALYN DEUT
and Spatial Politi
OKWUI ENWEZOR
1. To the extent that there is anything resembling a critical response to t

U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq on the part of artists, editors, dea
magazines, and faculty and students on college campuses, it has either
muted or largely obscured by a type of antagonistic politics that has succes
put the legitimacy of any critique beyond bounds. Artists and academics h
become even more careful in assuming any kind of principled activist pos
due to fear and, perhaps, political ambivalence. What we see in contemporary
for instance, is a recurring pattern of delegitimation of political content in
Readers of most mainstream art magazines are very much aware of this. In c
campuses, more specifically, art schools, which is the type of college environ
that bears direct relation to my experience as a teacher, there are vestiges o
tique that can be gleaned every now and then, but many of these efforts are
limited, and historically flawed in their reflexivity. Take, for example, exhibitio
or curatorial projects in many college and university galleries; one would
thought that these spaces would at the very least - and without recourse to over
hearsed criticality - provide the fora for the debates surrounding the ext
measures that have propelled the war in Iraq. To my mind, the war has bee
cessfully depoliticized, unwittingly, by the raging success of the art market
the inability of editors to more pointedly include accounts of the war in their e
torial decisions. Collectors, institutions, dealers, and magazines have be
complicit in the silence that has driven important political work from ga
and museums. They have largely bypassed the moral and ethical urgency ar
extreme measures, such as torture, censorship, and the very rationale for in
as having nothing to do with the claims of engaged contemporary practice.
questionnaire is also, to my mind, symptomatic of the broader loss of critical po
tion, because it comes four years too late. Yes, figures like Giorgio Agamb
Retort, and others have been taken up by a small segment of the artistic sp
and students. Yet these have not registered in any sustained way as significant o
sitional practices that have the capacity to challenge our collective powerlessn
the face of the present Manichean discourse of the "war on terror." A numb
artists have touched on the moral, ethical, and political issues surrounding th
War. Coco Fusco has done so, as has Steve McQueen. The parliamentary deb
about his controversial piece Queen and Country, which commemorates Briti
diers killed in the war and proposes to place the face of every single dead s
on a postage stamp, thereby substituting the image of the sovereign with th
the fallen soldiers, brought this work to the public. The success of McQue
piece owes to the fact that it is pointed, concrete, and direct in its response
war. Thomas Hirschhorn has also been a singularly important and visible vo
there is any place to find responses to the war on a broader scale, in a way
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 41-44. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Te
42 OCTOBER
lends visibility
they are happ
2. I have late
become comp
tendency in t
tional obsoles
to the needs
become a ten
discourse is e
in the fundam
centered arou
roles of part
current guis
since it allows
sory ideal of
of a counter-
marginal to t
co-optation. I
public sphere
than the exce
you within th
From museum
endangered t
is so easy to c
There is pre
institutions
Chechnya or
intolerable br
sympathizers
stress that p
University we
Palestine by
with the notio
mative to the
for a counter
World liberat
anti-aparthei
apartheid, for
Samb produce
matter in bu
of ACT UP, G
society organ
Questionnaire: Enwezor 43
intelligence, since one can use the w

its social networks to have maximu
ous publicity. To that end, MoveOn
What we need is not a return of t
action. What is required is a sustain
sured in terms of decades, not merely
with the slow, arduous task of coal
energy of the multitude.
3. The artistic context is as sick as

primitive accumulation, how can a
market makes the decision. It's pa
democracy, and the right to bomb we
18, 1977 paintings become part of
taste in canon formation and myth
who to blame for this. Do I blame c
ingly have gone into the business
professionalization means, then,
another, whether in the kind of ar
sanctioned curriculum professors t
4. One mistake we must not mak

the American or Western context w
ality. The fact that there are no re
world included in the question's fra
events such as Vietnam, is a huge p
should be incorporated here. Again
in this country, the end of the debac
end in Iraq, are mainly based on op
to me, the larger credence goes no
gencies, no matter how nihilistic,
wars of liberation are not negotiate
be in Southeast Asia today.
5. It depends on what our frame

expansive in my own references. T
concerned, it has brought about a "
public political subject." In some ar
to all kinds of radicality, fundame
context of the United States, it has
at the same time obviating others
tools. What we must pay close att
new techniques in the artistic and cul
44 OCTOBER
borrowed fr
ment is a cau
of coalition b
6. Expand it
coalition-bui
the 1950s and
Brazil, India,
darity. As I
book Abstract
recalls a state
1970 Museum
If you are liv

at, either i
Indochina. I
the mornin
tube to a squa
vant and mea
Nearly forty
disinterested
cissism needs to end is to wish for too much.
OKWUI ENWEZOR is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art
Institute. He was the artistic director of the 2nd Seville Biennial of Contemporary Art (200
Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002).
HANNAH FELDMAN
On Being Significant During War
October's six-point questionnaire about "artistic and academic opposition

the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq" came in the first batch of e-m
opened upon arriving in Kassel to see Documenta 12. I begin with this coincid
because it then seemed fitting, if not now also a bit ironic, that I should be a
to address the "demotivation" of artists and intellectuals from assuming posit
of public critique (with the Vietnam War era as a point of comparison) preci
as I set out to glean some sense of "what is to be done?" from the nineteen-million
euro behemoth. For, if this, the self-nominated "most important exhibitio
contemporary art," answered its own historically inflected question at all, it d
in what I perceived to be only the most hermetic, decontextualized, dehist
cized, and self-referential ways imaginable. Given the stakes and the opportunity,
found this deeply disheartening.
All of which is not to say that I found an effective counter or even mu
comfort in the questionnaire or the presumptions upon which it depends. F
starters, I do not agree with the narrative that asserts that while there was o
back then, an ideal and effective public sphere (counter or otherwise), it sim
exists no longer. If we are now, as the questionnaire implies, in a moment wh
the professionalization of the artist and the academic is a fait accompli, then
haps it is time to turn our energies toward thinking what that professionaliz
entails, if not actually demands, in the hope that we might resist or repurpose an
not just resent it. Of principal concern here is the cultural professional's ins
tionally confirmed authority to speak for, assign experience to, and thereb
represent broad swaths of people otherwise explicitly excluded from the priv
of that institution. Certainly, some of these might have found number in
thirty-odd million who marched in protest in the three months leading up t
March 2003 invasion of Iraq and in the weeks following. Their visibility within an
as a public body has no doubt surpassed our own, even as we continue to spea
and for them and, as we do implicitly here, evaluate the efficacy of their protest
the repeated terms of failure and shortcoming. No doubt the current admini
tion finds the pronouncement of our judgment reassuring.
I dwell on this problem of representation because I think it is at the core
the issues October wants to raise regarding the publicity and privacy of oppositio
and so too at the heart of Documenta 12's failure to articulate its propositions mor
visibly - which does not mean more visually. For it is precisely in their consi
tion of questions concerning who gets to represent - not only in the "real" w
but so too in the spaces of the representations we construct as scholars, curat
and other legitimizers of culture - and also which representations "count,"
46 OCTOBER
we can locat
oppose the v
ror" (which
the U.S.-fina
Israeli state,
harassment
of our civil
believe as we
generated by
David Joseli
important ch
late what the
might also ap
1) that the m
the "pictures
fully and cr
subsequently
to the good
tute the mo
opposition ag
States agains
the choir," I
reading acad
opposition f
for by the q
traditionally
upon a cycle
not the plac
which to mar
short term.
There is a vein of thinking current among the fashionable and well-educated

art cognoscenti that, after decades of institutional critique, it is now precisely
to the museum that we must turn as "one of the few remaining public sphere
1 . Most specifically, this comment was made during the question- and-answer segment of a panel
on "Virtualities" chaired by T. J. Demos and Margaret Sundell at the annual CAA conference in New
York on February 16, 2007. If memory serves, Joselit's considerations on this point were also suggested
in the text he contributed to his tremendously effective and provocative collaboration with Gareth
James, Late Night Legal Formalities, at Elizabeth Dee during the week between September 9-16, 2006.
2. This citation, characteristic of a number of post-avant-garde strategies, comes from language
used to describe Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher's ambitious, multiplatformed project concerning
art's possibilities vis-a-vis democratic constructions of identity and their exclusions, Be[com]ing Dutch.
Despite my concerns about the idealized lens through which it views its institutional sponsorship, I do
not mean to dismiss this important project or its principal host, the Netherlands' Van Abbemuseum.
See www.becomingdutch.com.
Questionnaire: Feldman 47
institutions left to us."2 This way of

museum cannot also be what Hanna
appearance," a place wherein ideas m
relationships both agonistic and co
forecloses upon through its premise
just within the institutions that abs
ourselves, and when we do not wor
brated "antagonists," our Pierre Hu
Chans, our Allora and Calzadillas, our
artists and at least some of whom I
blockbusting crowd-pleasers of the fa
a failure to reflect upon the conditi
also ignore alternatives to the strictur
As art historians, curators, and ar
it means to make "visible" - I believe we should also turn our attention to those
disruptions that occur, often without our participation or instigation, beyond the
confines of our field and our professional liabilities. We should do this when we
teach the history of twentieth-century cultural production and when we critique
or celebrate the work of contemporary artists (and we should be careful not to
confuse the function of these last two verbs). We might also, for example, consider
the sites and images of popular contestation as cultural representations on their
own merit. We cannot complain that these are invisible if we refuse to see them.
So, for instance, we might ask Elvira Arellano - the undocumented Mexican
mother who refused deportation by taking refuge in a Chicago church for over a
year and, in so doing, took hold of the reins of spectacle to inspire tens of thou-
sands like and unlike her to resist - what she thinks makes for active and effective
opposition, and what, if anything, the visible, the spatial, or any terrain we nor-
mally hail as material for our investigations has to do with it. Should we measure
the efficacy of her protest by her fate as an individual, or can we learn from the
visual discursivity she has unleashed? Few artists have been as deft as Arellano in
their deployment of the visual imagery of motherhood or in their understanding
of its deep resonance within her community or in others. Just ask Cindy Sheehan,
whose disidentification with the acts done in her "name" surely instances the kind
of disagreement that Jacques Ranciere has identified as lying at the core of poli-
tics, the theorization of which has found its place as only the newest French fuel
for the art world's ambition to secure its own significance. More than just actions,
though they are crucially these as well, these instances of resistance might be
thought to represent themselves. As such, they are things that all of us invested in the
visual and its possibilities need to think about, to write about (elsewhere as well as
here), to talk about, and, most importantly, to teach about.
I do not mean to suggest that the ambitions cited above can't occur in coin-
cidence with the gallery or the museum. Nor do I mean to suggest that these
concerns are absent from contemporary aesthetic production, no matter how
48 OCTOBER
market frien
of the artists
(as does that
our privilege
ciplinary dif
representatio
expanding th
stitutes a poli
need to make
It does not s
Iraq or even
pages of this
humanities, h
bly, viscerall
have an impa
the gallery, t
HANNAH FELDM
University.
HARRELL FLETCHER
1. In June 2005 I was in Vietnam for a month at an international artists r

One of the reasons I went on the trip was to compare my concepts of Viet
most of which had been derived from Hollywood war movies - to the reality of
country. I was particularly happy about the opportunity to learn about perc
of the Vietnam War from those who had lived through it. But I found th
people didn't want to talk about the war. When I asked, they told me that
long over and there was no animosity about it left. A few times I pressed
for more information; they often told me that I should go to the War Re
Museum in Ho Chi Minh City if I wanted to find out what the war was lik
those in Vietnam. So when I got to Ho Chi Minh City, that's what I did.
The War Remnants Museum is a memorial museum for what is referred to in
Vietnam as the American War. In front of the museum is a walled-in yard filled
with leftover U.S. military equipment - helicopters, tanks, planes, even bombs.
The main museum contains a selection of about a hundred documentary pho-
tographs from the beginning of U.S. military involvement in 1965 until the end of
the war in 1975, along with images of people affected by birth defects and war
wounds long after the U.S. military left the region. The images are from a variety
of sources - Vietnamese documentary photos, U.S. magazines and newspapers, and
international organizations' archives.
I decided that I should find a way to bring the experience of the War
Remnant Museum to a larger U.S. population. It occurred to me that I could pho-
tograph the images and text descriptions from the main museum using my
digital camera and then re-create the installation in the U.S. There were no pro-
hibitions against taking photos in the museum; in fact, during my first visit I saw
many people take pictures of the displays. As I systematically photographed every-
thing, I received some funny stares, though no one questioned me. I took the
shots handheld and at off angles to avoid flash reflections, so the images have an
oddly casual quality but are still accurate representations of the material shown in
the museum; they have an added layer of seeing enough of the context (wall color,
reflections, etc.) to make the viewer realize that they are seeing what I saw at the
museum.
Since returning to the U.S., I have taken the re-create

venues around the country: San Antonio, Texas; Richmon
York; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; and
venue I organized some kind of public program to add to
museum re-creation. In some venues, there have been all-
mentaries about the war; in others, I have created public
with connections to the Vietnam War to talk about t
speakers have included vets, immigrants from Vietnam,
and historians.
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 49-52. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
50 OCTOBER
I decided to show the re-created museum in art venues for a few reasons.
One is because I am an artist and art venues are what I have easy access t
occurred to me that it would be good to display the project in libraries, scho
and community centers, but in those venues the project would be more likely
be censored. I also like the idea that an art venue can be used for a show that is
closer to documentary than what is traditionally thought of as art. I hope that
through the example of my project more artists will feel able to present politicall
oriented work that doesn't need to be commodified for a gallery.
2., 3. Art production is seen as transgressive but the transgression is generally

superficial and symbolic, which the art world then fetishizes and commodities.
Too often artists are encouraged to go into their studios and come up with self
obsessive oddities intended to shock the public, and this is seen as art's valuable
contribution to society. Focused almost exclusively on the commercial gallery
world, many artists make discrete objects, without real political content, that can
be easily shown in white-box gallery spaces and sold. Making work that attempts
HarreU Fletcher. Above: Details fromThe American War. Facing page: Installation of The American
War at White Columns. 2006. Courtesy the artist.
Questionnaire: Fletcher 5 1
to address and engage social/politica

fiction writers, who themselves ar
writing worlds.
I don't think there would be a pro
professional status for artists who wan
and political situations, rather than w
cial gallery system. If funding, acad
kinds of "social practice" were availa
the limited commercial model into t
4. The Internet is free from the gri

working on the Web are more open
work for the Web. Many grassroots
making a major impact on the polit
money for campaigns that they sup
esting: they commission filmmakers
messages. Web sites like YouTube cr
ences for video-based work. For th
seem drawn to vacuous content offere
significance - like the George Allen
never have made national headlines.
show their work without commercial
as a viable career practice, there must
52 OCTOBER
5. I think it i
people will no
change.
6. Just as the media lacks focus on substantial subjects and all but covers up
activism, the art world also underreports and devalues art and artists who try to
engage socially and politically. There are those artists who take on political content
in formalized, general ways that don't have real- world impact.
But art can have an impact. Mark Sladen recently organized a show at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, called Memorials for the Iraq War. A group
of international artists was asked to make proposals for the monuments, which
would then be displayed at the ICA along with a few realized proposals. For my
contribution, I worked with Michael Patterson-Carver, an artist here in Portland
who at the time was homeless. All of Michael's drawings depict political protests -
historical, current, and imagined. I asked Michael if he would like to design a
monument for the Iraq War, and he made a drawing of injured Iraq War vets
protesting the war and the Bush administration. I wrote a text explaining my
involvement with Michael and suggested that the figures in his drawing would
make an amazing life-size sculpture. Around that time I also organized a show of
Michael's protest drawings at White Columns in New York City, and arranged for
an exhibition of his work at Small A Projects in Portland. Based on the sales of
Michael's drawings, we have been able to relocate him into a small apartment and
paid six months' rent in advance so that he can concentrate on his work.
If there were greater exposure and support for artists to engage the public
in thoughtful, political, and social ways, there would be, I think, more artistic
opposition to the war.
HARRELL FLETCHER has worked on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over
fifteen years. He is Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Oregon.
COCO FUSCO
1. Before I address the substance of this question, I would like to ask ab

narrow parameters. Why are the invasion and occupation of Iraq treated
thing separate and distinct from the war on terror, the invasion of Afgh
the extraordinary rendition of detainees to secret prisons in other countr
the Patriot Act? I would not seek to isolate this one conflict or detach it from the
effects of war on the domestic front. One of the most serious ethical matters
emerging from the war on terror is that of the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo, and there are quite a few artists who have focused on this.
I believe that the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and the question of tor-
ture have generated more response than the war in Iraq for two reasons. First, th
prison abuse scandal was made known primarily through the circulation of pho-
tographs and thus involves images, their effects, and the role of the visual in
ideological legitimation and delegitimation of state violence, themes that interest
many intellectuals and artists regardless of whether we are at war. Second, it is eas-
ier for Americans to understand that torture is unethical than it is to comprehend
the political intricacies of international terrorism and the insurgency in Iraq.
Even though many cultural producers may be skeptical about the Bush adminis-
tration's war on terror, I doubt that many artists or intellectuals in this country
would support the actions or motives of those labeled terrorists today. This is not
the 1960s and '70s, when American artists expressed sympathy for the Red Army
Faction and the Red Brigade, or when radicals in the U.S. imitated the tactics of
the Tupamaros in Uruguay or openly embraced the aspirations of Third World
national liberation struggles. Islamic fundamentalist terrorist tactics (kidnapping
civilians, suicide bomb attacks, beheading of captives) strike at values that
American liberals take seriously, however ironic their behavior may be in the
safety of their own environment.
It is also important to keep in mind that the State Department and the
Department of Defense have made an enormous effort to control public con-
sciousness of the negative effects of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by
among other things, restricting the circulation of images of the dead and
wounded. This contributes significantly to the widespread sense among people in
the U.S. of being disconnected from the war. The use of embedded media, the
attacks on journalists who criticize the war, the censorship of images of body bag
containing the remains of U.S. soldiers, and the continuous mischaracterization
of Al Jazeera as supportive of terrorism have engendered a very different visua
culture and consciousness of war than what existed during the Vietnam era
During the Vietnam conflict, Americans were bombarded daily with media image
of the physical toll of war on both soldiers and civilians, and this was key to th
development of antiwar public sentiment and to the recycling of those images o
atrocities by artists who were against the war. The fact that there is no draft now
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 53-62. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technolo
54 OCTOBER
and that less

tributes to th
is therefore n
as susceptible
do think tha
those in the ar
more about this further on.
Many of the responses to the war from the visual arts concern the effect of
the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act affects cultural producers directly, whereas the
actions occurring outside the U.S. do not. The sense of an imminent threat to
artists derives largely from the case against Critical Art Ensemble member Steve
Kurtz, which surprisingly was covered by Artforum (though nothing that CAE ever
did in its two decades of existence prior to the FBI investigation of Kurtz was ever
paid attention to by the mainstream arts press). What does this suggest to me?
That the art world operates with a tribal consciousness just like many other com-
munities do, and it responds with greater speed and lucidity when one of its own
is directly affected. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that Kurtz's efforts to
defend himself should not be supported - but why not demonstrate equal concern
for the hundreds of others (who are not white or American or English-speaking)
who have been unjustly detained, falsely accused, and otherwise mistreated? It
took only one auction to pay for Kurtz's hefty legal bills. Imagine what the art
world could do with its capital if a political decision were made to invest strategi-
cally in more antiwar efforts.
The response to the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the field of the
visual arts, as opposed to other artistic fields (popular music, film, theater, and
academic endeavor), has been pretty weak. That said, as the years pass and the war
goes on, a few arts institutions have begun to organize exhibitions relating to the
theme of war. I am thinking here of War Fare, a photography exhibition at the
Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago held in 2006, and an upcom-
ing series of exhibitions and programs at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
(for the record, I was asked to participate in public programs connected with
these shows). I don't think the exhibitions about war that I mentioned were
designed as social critiques of militarism, or even aimed at shocking audiences
with images of extreme violence. In that sense, they are somewhat tamer than the
kinds of interventions that were made by artists during the later years of the
Vietnam War. Perhaps the most one can expect is that they provoke discussion of
the war and militarism, which is better than pretending that there is no war at all.
I find it somewhat difficult to conceive of these exhibitions in terms of their

efficacy. First of all, it is really too early to tell. Second, it would be absurd to
assume that antiwar efforts are ineffective just because the war persists. That said,
Questionnaire: Fusco 55
the fashionably skeptical view

toward this position. Too often
having failed if it does not gen
judging any kind of art in term
shortsighted. There is more at
political issues than immediate
comes from the persistence of
maintain the possibility of opp
ment with art outside a marke
for publics other than curator
this kind of work is subject to
high-profile art-world players.
efforts of the U.S. government
rations of the failure of polit
exhibition, there is little discus
generate provocative and thoug
pleasures when the art world i
market. The problem isn't just
about the war in Iraq - it is th
about anything.
It seems to me that mainstream
nostalgic looks at the Vietnam
the last Whitney Biennial and
War Remnants Museum in H
"impressed" by the radicalism o
of a past era than it is to cons
wave of looks at the past are p
staggering amount of art critic
the war has been assessed quit
about Vietnam is frequently re
ory of the war and no strong p
supposed to draw a critical poli
Nam, which consists of the scrip
matted as one long paragraph?
artists, such as An-My Le, who h
War as expressed through reen
attitudes and collective sensibilities.
The most visible, commercially oriented sector has been quite reticent to
address the invasion of Iraq. The only area of the visual arts with a substantial out-
put relating to the war is new media and graphic design. Take, for example, the
Institute for Applied Autonomy's counter-hegemonic surveillance of the CIA's
extraordinary rendition flights, called Terminal Air; or Jordan Crandall's study of
the militarization of political violence, Under Fire; or Ben Langlands and Nikki
56 OCTOBER
Bell's interac
an extensive
uses and imp
Many new m
of digital tech
The visual a
Iraq have pro
here of Steve
ded with Am
American sol
the soldiers
exploring the
gies of dece
Serrano made
the article "I
asked to cons
turbing exam
inexorably m
New York Tim
photojournal
Serrano pictu
cally to enco
been Serrano's
On the othe
esting scand
British soldi
tance, a mem
ultimately r
September 10
McQueen has
of national i
the families o
U.S. media has
support the w
Warby Andre
so I cannot co
The art wor
art fairs, an
addressing po
and audiences
Hirschhorn
exception for
fusing, and
images of carnage to be compel

props and formalist drawings.
The fear of risk among artist
cially in the early years, but so
might hurt their careers donat
openly antiwar gestures. James
Industry" (1989) has a good deal
that artists and dealers took aga
artists of the time were reluctan
timents even if they were agai
chose to make an anonymous f
rather than creating overtly antiw
Aulich, Vietnam Images: War and
The backlash of the 1990s, th
ingly unstoppable growth of th
artists who want to be successf
radicalism strictly as a matter o
tions within art history that d
intervene in political arenas as t
have also contributed to a clim
schools. This view of the politica
the de rigueur public pronouncem
cal" even when their work to
matters, as if their embrace of m
do not mean to suggest that all
memorable, nor do I think that
modernism to create a "chilling
and quick financial gain and a
shrinking editorial space are not l
ing in the Visual Arts division
students who would, for exam
Buchloh's lectures and heard him
late-twentieth-century avant-ga
consider political engagement as
reward young artists who publicly
politics, feminism, and commun
with attention and praise. The o
concerns at present is the ultr
Nicolas Bourriaud, is "post-poli
tally antagonistic social and
occupation when the focus is on
On the other hand, in the fie
to the invasion of Iraq have em
58 OCTOBER
works as Cha
Ghraib (2007
Uncovered: T
Gandini's Gi
Michael Tuc
young soldie
SOP (Standar
surely be an
Guantanamo
works offer
recent Holly
In theater,
addressing th
and Eve Ensle
In the acade
research eff
Mirzoeffs W
effective for
connections
of visual cult
ing their live
At least six
sentation, m
Crandall, Ja
and Michael
since 2004. In
focusing on
Palestinian c
productive t
not already
politics as an
socially enga
think about
tunity to dis
are genuine
Vietnam War.
There are many other arts professionals and scholars who are more con-
cerned about the effects of war on society and culture than whether political art is
"effective." The College Art Association has had several panels at recent confer-
ences about art, artists, and war, for example. CAA has also published reports on
the destruction of art works in Iraq and issued an official statement against the
Patriot Act (which I cowrote during my tenure as a board member). In 2005, I
organized a panel for that year's conference on the impact of the Patriot Act on
arts professionals that featured a

ACLU, the AAUP, and the Ame
which suggested to me that peo
2. The absence of the draft is a

tor - that explains why antiwar
Vietnam War. The expansion of
grade averages, which occurred
war protests exponentially. The
Americans felt they could be af
armed forces were full of unwi
military and who eventually pro
current "volunteer" military's pro
of long-haired deserters tossing
clean-cut soldiers in jackets and
ously handing them to U.S. Con
While I think it is true that m
been reluctant to engage the issu
are many scholars in cultural s
and other fields who are doing
culture of contemporary warfa
They do so despite the fact that
paigns against academics who ha
the attacks on Nicholas de Gen
Eastern Studies scholars who are critical of U.S. views of the Islamic world.
Professors whose criticisms of U.S. policy reach the mainstream media must co
tend with death threats, hate mail, and harassment from conservative groups o
and off campus, as well as the pressure that is put on university presidents an
trustees to oust them. In such a climate, few junior professors are willing to go out
on a limb, since they have no guarantee that their institutions will support th
right to free speech or protect them from the vitriol of the Right.
I have not seen the manifesto-like gestures that intellectuals and artists made
during the Vietnam War, such as taking out full-page ads with hundreds of sign
tures in the New York Times. Nonetheless, scores of legal scholars are addressin
the legitimacy of the State Department's defense of torture and its strategic cr
ation of the category of enemy combatant. Feminist cultural theorists Pao
Bacchetta, Tina Campt, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, an
Jennifer Terry issued a statement entitled "Transnational Feminist Practic
Against War" just after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, detailing
collective analytical project as a response to the militarization of American cu
ture. Military historian Alfred McCoy came out with an excellent book last yea
that connects the current use of torture with a fifty-year history of mind-control
experiments by the CIA. James Der Derian, director of the Watson Institute fo
60 OCTOBER
Internationa
initiatives th
on war, diplo
carefully at
invasion of
attempts by
ical engagem
The reasons
address the
questions.
3. Don't believe the hype - most artists still don't make much money from the
sale of their work. Many of those who sell don't even turn much of a profit due to
production and material costs. And many more of the young artists who garner
media attention for brief periods don't command very high prices. Not all artists
have become professionalized, but the diminished presence of alternative media
covering the arts and the conservative political culture of the commercial art
world and art history contribute to the impression that "all" artists have become
highly paid and market dependent providers of information - since other artists
simply don't exist for the mainstream art world. I do think that the privatization
of culture has encouraged arts professionals in museums to stay away from contro-
versy, which translates into eschewing open engagement with politically volatile
issues. It was quite stunning to see how, for example, at the Feminist Futures con-
ference at MoMA last winter, the older generation of women scholars and curators
was far more radical and critical of the art market than the younger generation,
all of whom restricted their presentations to established women artists who exhibit
at Documenta and Venice and/ or whose work is collected by major museums.
Academics are subject to similar pressures, even though I have tried here to
mention some notable counterexamples. The influence of corporate-style man-
agement is pervasive in academia. This means that universities develop more and
more ways to control the political influence of faculty and reduce costs by increas-
ing the percentage of permanent nontenured positions. The shift to the right in
the larger culture has had a chilling effect in the academy - it empowers conserva-
tives inside institutions, who feel free to take more openly punitive stances toward
progressively minded scholars, refusing to hire them, promote them, publish their
work, or grant them tenure. Conservative political groups have turned universities
into legal battlegrounds, funding lawsuits brought by students that challenge affir-
mative action and sexual harassment and misconduct codes. Historically liberal
universities have more and more conservative students who challenge liberal and
Left professors and even lead campaigns against them. Students have taken legal
action against professors who teach courses in Peace Studies and others who have
assigned the Koran as required reading. Christian fundamentalists offer training
programs to teach college students how to undermine discussions of evolution,
abortion, comparative approach

the Patriot Act has created a climate in which "concerned citizens" and overzeal-
ous police see classroom discussions as threatening to national security. University
officials are often more concerned with negative publicity and potential loss of
tuition and donations than the right to free speech. This is not an environment in
which the nontenured majority that teaches in universities can feel free to express
their views. Many still believe that culture and education still offer the possibility of
transformative engagement with the social, but few can actually afford to take risks.
4. In some ways, activist-oriented Internet culture is not very different from the
alternative media of the 1960s and '70s - pamphlets have become Web sites, but
petitions are still petitions. Protest culture still has a strong live theater element.
The most significant changes have to do with speed, leverage, and the archiving of
the documentation of protest. It is much easier to get information out to large
numbers of people, and this makes it possible to organize and orchestrate actions
on a global scale with far greater ease, such as the antiwar march just before the
invasion of Iraq. The introduction of electronic disturbance (a concept first devel-
oped by CAE and then realized by the Electronic Disturbance Theater) makes it
possible to have Internet-based, mass-scale protests occur within the space of the
digital, thus adding another arena to the culture of protest. Moreover, phenom-
ena such as Indymedia allow media activists around the world to share footage of
actions, facilitating communication and heightening awareness of parallels
between different protests around the world.
5. There was a period in the mid-1990s when many new-media advocates in

online discussions who putting forth this view of the Internet as a radical trans-
former of every aspect of social and political life. Nevertheless, that euphoric
stance has been tempered a great deal by the persistence of the fact that commerce
and pornography dominate the Internet and structure most of its interactivity.
Advanced technologies are not universally accessible. Computers continue
to be an unattainable luxury item for the majority of the people in the world.
That majority also does not have phones at home. Cybercafes are indeed plentiful
and well used in many Third World cities, but the most users are playing games,
seeking partners, and checking out porn. At the same time, it is undeniable that
the cultures of dissent in many places in the world rely heavily on the Internet to
convey messages.
I have to say that there is something about this line of questioning that wor-
ries me. To figure out why there is so little response to the war on terror from the
visual arts, we should be looking not only at what has changed but what is made
difficult, impossible, or dangerous in our current political culture. We also need to
ask ourselves what conditions are particular to the visual arts because other fields
have shown much more activity. Even pop musicians sing songs against Bush and
make statements against the war in Iraq on MTV!
62 OCTOBER
It is too conv
art still exist
market prero
marginalized
The fact tha
does not mea
Every advanc
transmission
But the goals
nological cha
6. The quest
world and br
against the w
control of po
Number one
and intellectu
concerned ab
gles take a lo
Fomenting po
sarily lead to
own perform
how we are al
acts on our be
I actually th
elaborate - ou
years and the
a stronger po
complicated i
about oil, abo
Afghanistan
important are
social and pol
historians, cu
concentrated
ily bad for th
in the contem
notion that t
are comprom
tions that wan
COCO FUSCO is a
rent art projects
LIAM GILLICK
Responses to the invasion and attempted occupation of Iraq have been m

tiple and fractured. There is a strong division between those who are antiwa
not against direct action in certain circumstances and people who still feel al
ment with earlier pacifist movements. This is nothing new, but the division has n
been clearly articulated this time, which underscores a sense of collective lack
many, the question seems to be whether to take a generalized approach to wa
a specific series of positions in relation to this war. It is clear that the specifi
the upper hand, which creates automatic difficulties in terms of assessing the eff
cacy of opposition.
Unfortunately, the art context is a hotbed of specificity. The war has bee
continual presence in discussions at Columbia University, where I run an occas
seminar program in the graduate department of the School of the Arts, but i
rarely been the precise subject of any student's work. There have been some
conscious attempts to address the question in the broader institutional context
London, the ICA's recent Memorial to the Iraq War, for example. However, mo
these overt structures have been marked by the same super-subjectivity and
consciousness that is present in the art discourse in general. We are more like
find an ongoing critical presence in complex cultural formations such as the unite
nationsplaza project in Berlin, where critique of the war remains a key marker, w
art production in a traditional sense has been set aside for the time being.
The war has had a clear psychological effect on certain work being produ
by students today. The ongoing fact of this failed adventure marks artistic
tice. This is a truism and is often veiled behind an apparent return to
collective practices in general and pre-modern imagery in specific cases. In sh
in the art context many attempts to read specific work through the filter of
conflict tend to be overwritten by formalist or ironic discourses.
An international boycott of American goods, services, artists, academics,
cultural products could have some effect and has been discussed in Europe.
idea is not taken seriously by the generation that protested against the Viet
War, as they still operate under the illusion that there is some base-level democra
potential within American society. They also seem to believe that their comp
with the system operates within a set of critical social codes that may also be at t
heart of American culture and are just waiting to be uncovered in some Ne
esque form. Of course, we have seen time after time in the postwar period t
this is just an illusion and we are operating within a mature Empire.
We have a society based on paradoxical nostalgia both for the "woods" (
the ironic rather than Walden sense) and "progress" (in the iPod rather than p
ical sense), and we need to accept that we are watching a private enterp
between two sets of superstitious elites who both believe they are operating withi
a battle for control of the metaphysical high ground toward the "end of days." It
64 OCTOBER
not surprisin
respond to th
and the recor
artists away f
tique of glob
war as a med
body. It is im
about the war
militarism tha
2. There are
activity. Ther
avoid the inc
center is also
showdowns in
cess of the w
to two gende
strike compa
at Greenham
protests.
The rhetoric of mainstream opposition to the war remains locked in a self-
regarding and self-celebrating nostalgia for the techniques used to protest against
the Vietnam War, as if no other struggles have happened in between. A notable
example of this lack of relevance was the New York demonstration during the first
weeks of the invasion. Much to the horror of many taking part, the same old folk
singers were wheeled out to croak the songs of the Vietnam period. There is little
or no attempt by the organizers of big antiwar events in this country to move past
the techniques of the past and find new models of direct action or any action at
all. It used to be sufficient to claim that we might all be on the "same side of the
barricade." As we have learned from antiglobalization protests, the barricade is no
longer anywhere near the center of action. There is a feeling of lack and fragmen-
tation partly because the forces of order make sure that there can be no sense of
operating at the true border of any meaningful power structure.
Many younger artists and activists, therefore, have privately expressed fear
for their personal safety in light of increased attacks on democratic protest, the
treatment of demonstrators against the Republican National Convention in New
York being a good example. It is not possible to suggest that the Vietnam War pro-
duced a consistent united voice across the academic and institutional sphere. The
war in Vietnam occurred within a context of increased consciousness across a
broad section of society, influenced by post-imperialism, class awareness, and t
women's movement, among other things. The Vietnam War also produced a situ
tion where a larger proportion of the population in the West could find some
ideological justification for support of a supposed "enemy." The idea of a peasan
Questionnaire: Gillick 65
struggle against the combined for

War was easy for people to empat
and in an ongoing context of de-
find reasons to be against the war,
with the people of Iraq and the v
Iraq has more in common with a
the British Empire in the early t
pre-late-modern set of relationsh
sophisticated techniques of cultur
Within this context even Georg
the draft. Instead, we have a form
everyday. A public school I recently
eral neighborhood, proudly displa
There is nothing strange about
"this flag was sent to the school in 2004 from the front line of the global war
on terror, god bless America and god bless our troops." Perversely, the use of t
draft in the 1960s was a supposedly democratizing and trusting gesture by t
Democratic presidents who started and sustained the war in Vietnam and it i
unlikely to happen now in a situation where there are endless numbers of priv
teers and mercenaries offered for hire today. The war in Iraq is the predictab
behavior of a mature empire. Maybe people should be encouraged to go and col
nize Iraq. This could be the "new draft." Send families out with a truck and gi
them some land in Mesopotamia. Accept the implications of a true empire an
face the consequences. The alternative solution, a Saigonization of Iraq, with
introduction of good old corruption, go-go dancers, heavy drinking, and limitl
drug use, seems an unlikely strategy within the context of a born-again presidency
3. This characterization of artists is hard to take seriously unless one imagin

only certain types of artists as being "significant." There is a big difference
between a spectacular event choreographed by Olafur Eliasson, a simple film of
hero of 1960s avant-gardism by Tacita Dean, and the ongoing work of an artis
collective. Even then we cannot be sure that the supposedly "professional" arti
are apolitical. Would a world of "amateur" artists be better? The assumption th
"professional" is linked with "infotainment" is incorrect. "Professional" may ac
ally be a better synonym for "middle-brow concern," an earnestness that does little
more harm than a folk singer leading a group of nostalgists in another run-
through of "We Shall Overcome."
One thing we can be sure of is that the notion of political consciousness is
not synchronized in terms of the critical flows of production and analysis with
the cultural field. If we are to speak about the market as a carrier of parasitical ide-
ologies we must also consider the processes of instrumentalization within cultu
production that are at work in Europe and to a lesser extent in the U.S. The m
ket is a straightforward component of cultural production that manifests itself
66 OCTOBER
obvious way
now see cult
and instrum
critical proce
tions. A sens
sensitive crit
posedly won
new complex
as business as usual. What the British used to do, the Americans do now. It is an
Anglo-Saxon issue. A lot of noise, expense, and the domination of globalized media
by a smallish conflict that is no more - in fact rather less - than an Algeria.
4. Regular vigils against the war take place all over the country and remain an
important visible form of protest. There has been no lack of flyers, fund-raisers,
and demonstrations. The use of the Internet has been the major improvement in
this situation. The Internet enables a much more effective and wide-reaching
matrix of communications than a small group of usually urban people photocopy-
ing information and making speeches to each other. The larger numbers of
people who oppose the war in Iraq than opposed the war in Vietnam are a key
indicator that the Internet has been a more effective and politically useful com-
munication tool than people meeting in lofts alone, although of course this would
arguably still be important, if artists and critics could still afford to live in lofts, for
all their "professionalization" and production of "infotainment."
5. Yes, this condition implies a fundamental transformation of the sense of a

public political subject away from the localized, specific, and factionalized toward
a more inclusive and effective series of political communications. Thankfully we
are no longer reliant on avuncular news anchors and macho student leaders to tell
us when we have had enough of something. Along with texting (SMS), which has
been used very effectively during antiglobalization protests, mobile e-mail and
fast-changing Internet sites have rapidly improved the ability of people to form
effective social and political networks and maintain them while moving around
sites of protest. People can operate more flexibly in relation to the forces of the
state. Such a situation is less spectacular but in the long run has shown to be more
effective than the campaigns against the Vietnam War. This is also demonstrated
by the much lower popularity of the president today than of any president then.
The Internet provides exactly the opposite of what is suggested in the question/
statement. It provides an escape from social confinement within small groups of
like-minded "activist" people and creates new spaces of social expansion and a new
level of access to the political.
6. Stop being so nostalgic about the Vietnam War.
LIAM GILLICK is an artist living in New York. He teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
MARK GODFREY
The events leading up to the current war - and the war itself - could be
characterized, insofar as visual representation is concerned, in terms of specta
lar visibility and near invisibility. While September 11 was planned as a visua
spectacle, one then replayed on TV screens and pictured on front pages,
deaths of American or British soldiers are never pictured, less still the calami
befalling Iraqi citizens. The war is perpetuated in part by keeping some imag
present in the memory and by consigning others to obscurity and oblivion. Som
of the most compelling artistic responses to the war have addressed this dynam
of visibility and invisibility.
On the one hand, artists have found ways to make visible what governmen
and news corporations prefer to render unseen. In a number of recent instal
tions, Thomas Hirschhorn has papered walls with horrific pictures download
from the Web and pushes viewers into constricted spaces to face these images
mangled Iraqi and American bodies. Less graphic, but no less powerful image
have made their way into Martha Rosler's new series of collages: here again, as
her Vietnam-era series Bringing the War Home, Rosier takes magazine adverts a
interrupts comfortable consumer scenes with shots of the war. Mark Wallin
responded to the British government's attempt to render invisible (in the imme
ate vicinity of Parliament) the protest placards of Brian Haw by fabricating
replica and displaying it in Tate Britain on the border of the exclusion zone ci
cling Westminster. Jeremy Deller, in his contribution to an Artforum portfolio on
the subject (September 2004), made an economical textual work invoking but n
showing a well-known but now rarely printed photograph: that of Dona
Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983.
Other artists have dramatized the problems of the urge to render visibl
places and cultures involved with the war. In 2003, Marine Hugonnier produc
the film Ariana, which presents itself as a record of a trip to Afghanistan, a t
motivated by the desire to produce a panoramic film there. According to its fr
tured narrative, Hugonnier twice attempted to find a pinnacle from which t
make a 360-degree panning shot, but in both instances recognized that to do
would be to assume a questionable power over the people and landscape surveye
The film she ended up making is a document of the failure of the film
intended to produce. Hugonnier was one of the first artists to travel to the cou
tries targeted in the "war on terror," and the first to recognize that to produ
package, and then display an image of these countries was in some way to al
oneself with the ideology of the invading forces.
There have also been responses to the war in Iraq that make visible prev
ously unrecognized links between current and historical conditions. For instan
filming over Ground Zero in his work Muhheakantuck - Everything Has a Name (2004
Matthew Buckingham prompted his viewers to consider the attack on the Wor
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 67-70. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Techn
68 OCTOBER
Trade Center
area by Euro
HuitLegons Su
a less distant
historical con
But what is i
would barely
make their
(non) represe
effect chan
accepted this
holding out li
"professional
and mode of
Thomas Dem
cerns the Ni
Bush used a
weapons. The
embassy. No
aged to acce
photographe
At the openi
by art world
the political
paper and de
neither to sl
myself for e
critical art is
It is hard no
New York, W
of course, wo
false one, an
economic and
to me to assu
essarily susp
these events
tality and na
over facsimi
important w
tion in Bob N
early 2002. H
Center made
Wolfgang Ti
Questionnaire: Godfrey 69
Steve McQueen. For Queen and Coun
have had 9/11 in mind; the pairing m

avoiding turning memory into kitsch.
Even more tricky than addressing
for an artist to make a project about
commemoration of "the glorious dea
hypernationalism and victorious cele
and Country is particularly remarka
because it addresses and is structured by
mentioned before. Working with th
sheets of stamps bearing photograph
beginning of the war. These stamps are
can be pulled out of a cabinet, each d
makes visible the faces of the dead (i
newspapers), but the cabinet's struct
until the viewer decides to pull each d
sible for deciding whether to make e
identical, uncut stamps is pulled out,
smiling, living soldiers with the unse
families, all the while thinking of th
70 OCTOBER
As I looked th
on both sides
here, but the
be-killed sold
project as a w
away in a cor
the stamps w
that has been
the Queen, as
died. Despite
would have in
alistic, for w
many victim
nothing about
lies have fou
stamps are ac
could respect
locate it in a
nationalist se
them. Perhaps
ernments requ
MARK GODFREY
TIM GRIFFIN
An emblematic moment for my own thinking through of art's engagement

with politics arose when, devoting an issue of Artforum to the subject in September
2004, I sought to publish a project designed by Paul Chan, The People's Guide to t
Republican National Convention. In the months leading up to the GOP event, slat
to take place at Madison Square Garden in New York, Chan had collaborated wit
a number of other artists and writers (collectively dubbed the Friends of Willia
Blake) to produce a map of the city festooned with addresses for delegates' hote
and headquarters of corporations either sponsoring the convention or enmeshed
in the military-industrial complex, along with the locations of major media out
lets, legal resources, and hospitals - everything, in sum, a good protester wou
need to approach the task at hand.
My first impulse upon learning about the project was simple enough
include a foldout copy of the map in every single issue of the magazine, whic
would appear in time for the convention. Before long, however, I found myself
having to take into consideration the legal restrictions placed on commercial pub
lications that would seek involvement with such causes. Already for this particul
issue, Artforum had been forced to print Richard Serra's now-famous poster rea
ing "stop bush" without a U or H, since its unaltered reproduction in our pag
would apparently have constituted an illegal donation of advertising space to
political party. ( The Nation, I learned, was forced to make similar concessions
publishing this image.) To distribute Chan's map would be to enter similar
fraught territory, and so, as with the Serra poster, we had to create a kind of buffe
zone between our publication and the project: while we could not disseminate th
actual map, we could nevertheless reproduce and discuss its significance in th
pages, such that the project's appearance would fall under the rubric of "cove
age," as opposed to any kind of partnership. There is, in other words, a differen
here between information (and its conveyance) and representation - between som
thing actively entering the field of political action (becoming another elemen
within its set, as it were, and sharing the same properties as those other con-
stituents) and something delineating the axioms of that field. To be sure, the
latter is still a very important kind of endeavor, but its impact is less immediat
and, indeed, is often at risk of bad faith.
This distinction is, I think, of central importance when it comes to consider
ing the art (its producers, distributors, historians, and critics) and the politics
our time. For we see the representation of politics - its motifs and imagery -
everywhere now in art, and this circumstance presents us with a kind of doub
bind. On the one hand, much of this work is not "political" in any meaningfu
sense, since it hardly requires any critical reflection on either the contours of a
production and reception - asking what it is or could be - or the nature of th
culture cradling it, but rather reinforces conventions. Politics becomes, in othe
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 71-76. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Techno
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74 OCTOBER
words, a mat
nique and, m
radical legacie
even when th
of critical or
only at the co
it: anything t
sense "repre
Readers forei
cation) will lik
in its pages a
the mainstream
Op-Ed column
critics, histor
the work of d
gratulatory v
signifier than
tual acknowle
In light of th
flage art's pol
from some 5
techniques of
garde in any
gurus of adve
either). Here
the time-base
glossy magaz
issues to pars
ronment less
more than a
became in the American mass consciousness a mainstream rather than "extremist"
position; but one wonders if they comprised, after all, only a fiction of creating
and engaging a larger public. These monthly magazines have done very little to
follow up on their political statement. In courting desire, activism also became
subject to style. (Now, if only the electric car could obtain the allure of the iPod.)
One then wonders how to create and sustain a mass critical/countercultural
sphere in print. (For the sake of focus I will set Web-based media aside.) Here, in
fact, I might point to the Onion, since its premise seems incredibly pertinent, espe-
cially as it exemplifies how, in the United States, a leftist position is put forward
most prominently in the vocabulary of humor. The Onion is brilliantly attuned to
our moment's Rumsfeldian loss of the indexical in language. In its satirizing not
only of public figures but also of the journalistic entities supposedly quantifying
and verifying these individuals' utterings and actions as information - the stuff of
Previous pages: Friends of William Blake. The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention. 2004.
Questionnaire: Griffin 75
Stephen Colbert (left), spe

Meet the Press, October 1
reality - the publication implicitly

begin to grasp) governmental and e
well obscured as to go by no name, b
tours, no beginning or end. (We liv
borders or true image.) The Onion p
mation - such is the basis for its humor - much as did La Caricature with its
featuring of satirical pieces by the likes of Daumier. But it merely amplifies th
question, offering a kind of feedback loop instead of any resolution or decon-
struction.1 It asks the reader to know just enough to understand its premise, nev
acting upon the dilemma therein, never translating that awareness into anythin
beyond the recognition of its underlying logic and, more importantly, of the fa
that there is a collective audience here, of which one is a part. With laughter - n
only here but also in television programs hosted by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colber
and Bill Maher - comes this comfort. Regarding that particular collectivity, how
ever, there is no commons but only customization. Different parts of the politic
1 . While the very notion of a "resolution" is implausible - and certainly none is to be found
Artforum, let alone in this short text - perhaps this quality of amplification nevertheless reflects a bas
shift in the popular terms of countercultural engagement. I recall once attending a strategy meeting i
the offices of the weekly magazine Time Out New York in 2001, where the publishers voiced an opinio
that the Onion had stolen a whole generation of readers away from the Village Voice. The latter public
tion, of course, was never a stranger to counterculture as style, yet it still sought to attach that style t
context of hard facts and journalistic analysis.
76 OCTOBER
spectrum rar
rather, to he
sumers, displ
purchase). Po
Again, repres
Looking bey
gle with thes
of a society s
mentor of min
your time. Yo
there." In othe
representatio
And then he
think withou
model. It seem
something aft
TIM GRIFFIN is ed
JENNIFER R. GROSS
1 . Sadly, not in any significant ways. While Robert Storr's recent Arsenale instal-
lation at the Venice Biennale foregrounded the work of artists protesting the war
in Iraq, and many artists who participated in the Biennale attempted to be opposi-
tional in the work they presented, it is clear from the American press and attendees'
responses to the Biennale that their efforts were not perceptively received. Most
commentators and visitors whined about such work being tiresome or depressing.
Clearly the art community is not interested in mixing content with its consumer
foraging for culture. Perhaps the European press and public responded differently?
2. The lack of motivation to assume positions of public critique appears to be

closely linked to the profound cynicism that pervades the views of students, artists,
and academics as to what can be accomplished through protest in institutions of
higher education or in a public sphere. The lack of the draft may influence this
apathy, but it appears to be a disconnect that transcends academic and art-world
politics and signals a broader debasing of societal attitudes toward institutions of
power and our political system. Our society is more self-centered than ever, and
people find it difficult to find the time to invest in anything beyond personal
lifestyle and intellectual aspirations. This cynicism is compounded by the misper-
ception of the generation, primarily comprised of students who in the past were
responsible for instigating societal change, that activism is defined by con-
sumerism. They believe that social responsibility means purchasing consumer
goods from companies that espouse social responsibility as an integral part of
their institutional profile and that purchasing a ticket to a rock concert that sup-
ports refugees in Darfur are examples of effective, personal engagement in a
future of shared global values.
3. As stated above, the disconnect between political consciousness and cultural

production is not unique to the art and academic worlds in the landscape of per-
sonal values broadly held today.
4, 5. The sphere of electronic-technological protest seems to perpetuate a further

abstraction of one's involvement in these issues and one's relationship to one's
peers and society. This form of displaced articulation, rather than personal inter-
action, discussion, and active protest undertaken alongside others, affirms protest
as mere personal opinion rather than a consensus of shared values achieved
through an active public engagement of ideas and issues. This type of communica-
tion is great for information delivery to insiders interested in the dialogue but it is
ineffective in creating a dialogue of diverse opinions, and certainly does not insti-
gate a consciousness of community and shared humanity against which differences
and concerns can be reckoned.
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 77-78. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
78 OCTOBER
Emily Prin
Afghanist
Afghans). 20
6. This is a d
economically
of a loved on
focused on m
do so, as there
effective in ou
as money and
Perhaps from
mainstream c
als can persua
poses another
tual ideas with
JENNIFER R. GRO
University Art Ga
HANSHAACKE
1. I am not familiar with the academic world and cannot claim to have an
overview of what is happening in the art world.
To my knowledge, the Whitney Museum has been the only prominent
institution in the U.S. that has offered a significant forum for such critical prod
tions. I am thinking, in particular, of the Peace Tower, a large communal wo
the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Rirkrit Tiravanija, together with Mark di Suver
their assistants, organized the participation in this collective endeavor and
structed the tower.
Speaking of New York, over the past four years, I have seen a number of rele-
vant solo exhibitions by well-known as well as by lesser-known artists and
collectives in commercial galleries, in nonprofit and in alternative venues. Among
them, Election - the last exhibition of American Fine Arts in Chelsea, in 2004 -
deserves mention as perhaps the first. It was curated by James Meyer. I don't know
much about what has occurred outside the City. I am a New York provincial.
In this year's Venice Biennale, Robert Storr included a handful of works with
critical references to George W. Bush's "war on terror" in Iraq. The international
press took note, acknowledging particularly that it was Storr, a U.S. citizen, who
lent the Bienniale's considerable symbolic capital to that critique. Other commen-
tators dismissed the works as not worthy of a big art event such as this. Roger
Buergel and Ruth Noack selected two works explicitly relating to the Iraq War for
Documenta 12 from among 110 artists: the collaborative video work 9 Scripts from a
Nation at War and Phantom Truck by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle. Unfortunately, only a
connoisseur of CIA "intelligence" could recognize this truck as a replica of
Saddam Hussein's putative mobile lab for the production of chemical warfare
agents. 9 Scripts could only be viewed individually on desktop monitors.
Consequently, this thought-provoking work by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes,
Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, produced under the auspices of
the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in New York, was seen
by relatively few visitors. Particularly since the media had so much else to dwell on
in this Documenta, it is not surprising that these works went mostly unnoticed.
One of the most remarkable oppositional installations was shown in the
palatial Duveen Gallery of Tate Britain: Mark Wallinger's meticulous reconstruc-
tion of the banners, photos, objects, and private messages the British war
protester Brian Haw had amassed from sympathizers and fellow demonstrators
over the past five years at his encampment opposite the Houses of Parliament.
The original objects had all been lost in a police raid. Before Tony Blair's anoint-
ment as "peace envoy" to the Middle East, he had the British Parliament pass the
"Serious Organised Crime and Police Act," which prohibits "unauthorized" anti-
war demonstrations within a radius of one kilometer of Parliament. That
exclusion zone bisects Tate Britain - and Wallinger's installation State Bri
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 79-82. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute
80 OCTOBER
worth noting
commission b
public servan
could afford
Matching th
ing from asso
U.S. governm
such works do
2. No doubt,
joined the m
fore have pe
hundreds of
has little in common.
During the Vietnam War young artists did not worry much about their
prospects in the market. Perhaps more than ever, today, the need for personal
security is often understood primarily in financial terms and met above all by
focusing on building a lucrative career. A generation or two have been shaped
with this in mind, and the results are visible around us. It has fostered a culture
very different from that of the Vietnam War era. Starting with the dot-com bubble
and, with much greater force since the recovery from the burst of that bubble
shortly after 9/11, money has been pouring out of every crack in New York. The
art market and the culture/entertainment industry at large are booming.
Promotional lingo has become the "talk of the town." Lifestyle magazines cele-
brate the winners. In this culture, conventional wisdom has it that getting involved
in politics does not help one's career. It's just not "cool."
3. Contrary to what is often assumed, the overwhelming majority of young

artists in New York during the years of the Vietnam War did not include refer-
ences to the war in their productions. However, as much as their peers in different
regions of the country, a notable manifestation being the original Peace Tower of
1966 in Los Angeles, they did have strong opinions about the war. They made
them known vociferously at protest rallies, at sit-ins, and by disrupting business as
usual inside art institutions such as MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It was "hip" - now an archaic term - to take a public stand against the war. Such
oppositional events were covered not only in public policy and art magazines but
also in some of the general readership press, thereby amplifying their impact.
In the early 1980s, artists rallied again nationwide, this time under the ban-
ner of "Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America." A large number
of prominent galleries of contemporary art in New York and elsewhere lent their
spaces and their name to this call. Several of the participating artists, in fact, had
an international market and belonged to the "stable" of these galleries. And
again, the media took note.
Questionnaire: Haacke 81
A good part of the 1990s was

absorbed the energies of the "cri
Freedom of expression, sexuality,
tion based on gender, sexual orien
Thanks to the fervent support th
from fundamentalist Christian or
current presidential contenders!),
tinue to affect people's personal
more immediate concern than the threat to the lives of American soldiers and
Iraqi civilians and the long-term dangers for the future of the Middle East and, by
implication, this country and the world. The assault on civil liberties is happening
close to home rather than on the other side of the globe. Many universities and
the art world - in this respect relatively liberal enclaves of American society - are
generally tolerant of if not sympathetic to the assertion and the defense of these
basic rights. The "professionalization" referred to in the question seems not to
have weakened critical engagement in this regard.
For their spring issue of 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the
editors of October -wrote a forceful editorial in which they unequivocally stated "this
war is morally and politically wrong," and they warned against the catastrophic
consequences, which they correctly anticipated. Contrary to what one would
expect after this editorial, I could not find a single article in October addressing the
repercussions of this fatal move. I do not remember reading anything about the
frightening and absurd prosecution of the artist and university professor Steve
Kurtz as a "bio-terrorist" under the auspices of the so-called Patriot Act. I had to
go to the June 2006 issue of the German Texte zur Kunst for a full account - by
Judith Butler - of the introduction of political censorship at the Drawing Center
in New York and the shameful ouster of its director, Catherine de Zegher. For a
discussion of artists who produced works fitting the first question of this question-
naire (now banned from display at the Drawing Center), one had to turn to art
magazines that are financed by gallery ads. I do not suspect that the lack of a fol-
low-up to the 2003 editorial is due to timidity or driven by career or market
considerations. I rather suspect it is attributable to that other kind of "profession-
alization," which leads people with little time to spare to concentrate on teaching
and research in their respective fields and on the pressing issues of the day in
their workplace rather than a geographically distant war. It is all the more signifi-
cant that October is now preparing this questionnaire for a special issue for January
2008. Between the time of the submission deadline (August 1, 2007) and the pub-
lication, however, much will have happened that may demonstrate that the
answers are representative of a moment that is past and therefore perhaps have
lost some relevance. That is an inevitable problem of all quarterlies.
4. The Internet offers a tremendous tool for instant communication. It has

been employed by all sides in the current political debate, in their campaigns
82 OCTOBER
rallying supp
ing developm
being in touch
ing in a rally
events that a
without which
also is that h
shots. A publ
political repe
psychologists
than I am. Pr
5. One woul
nents - whet
imagine both
From my ow
and comment
consuming,
engagement w
als who, stuc
that matters.
dice.
6. Learn from MoveOn.org and others who have experience in political orga-
nizing. Make such involvement intellectually rewarding and give artists the sense
that the art market is not the whole world (it can collapse, as we have seen most
recently after a disastrous auction in 1990 - a delayed reaction to the 1987 crash
of the stock market), and that political engagement is cool. Cultural production
should indeed be "a socially and politically communicative, transgressive, or criti-
cal activity." It requires professionalism of the highest level.
HANS HAACKE is an artist living in New York.
RACHEL HAIDU
Your questions merge at least two separate problems. One concern

effective mobilization of public protest; the second concerns the role and
of art. I find that the two join uneasily, reflecting an awkwardness bound
to protest nor art but to the speaking position delineated by your question
call up that cipher once known as a "public intellectual." If I use that term
than Michel Foucault's vision of a specific intellectual, it is because I think that
antiwar struggle has nothing specific about it; it is not a sociological problem r
ing to particular groups and concrete struggles, but rather a broad public s
that ought to bring the very values which Foucault himself sought to comp
truth, knowledge, and power - to bear on a crisis perpetually and deliber
removed from almost all conditions of life and work in America. But whereas
Foucault's conception allows for a smooth working connection between the intel
lectual and a limited public, I don't see such a promising prognosis for th
contemporary antiwar movement.
Popular support for America's current war in Iraq once derived its force
from a narrative based on deliberate lies by our administration and manipulativ
fantasies about American national identity. Yet since fall 2002 there has been sig
nificant, often immense antiwar opinion in the U.S.1 Today the antiwar majorit
stands at about 75 percent, although polls make it impossible to discern disap-
proval of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from an ethics of antiviolenc
or from more general resentment of the Bush administration.2 If that "antiwar
majority, heterogeneous as it is, were translated into electoral terms, then we
would have a landslide such as this country has never known, and perhaps even
shift in foreign policy. But this war no more decides elections today than the
American war in Vietnam did in 1968 or 1972.
I mention this because I think it is crucial to recognize that antiwar opinion
is not at this time the position of a disenfranchised group. Situations of disenfran-
chised people may galvanize the analytical drive and rhetoric of oppositional
culture, but "antiwar" is not a term describing people in that situation. It is a term
1. For data on 2002 polls, see the Pew Research Report, "Support for Potential Military Action
Slips to 55%," released October 30, 2002, at http://people-press.org/reports. Of course, it is critical to
distinguish between Americans who disapproved of the war in Iraq in 2002 and those who approve of
immediate withdrawal today; "antiwar" certainly has a different meaning years into a catastrophic and
apparently unendable military venture than it does on the eve of that venture.
2 For results of "official" 2007 polls, see, e.g., CBS's "Poll: Calls to Get Out of Iraq Escalate: 77% In
CBS News Poll Say War's Going Badly, 40% Urge Withdrawal of All U.S. Troops," June 29, 2007, avail-
able at http://www.cbsnews.com. For a different type of poll-reading, see Noam Chomsky, "Prenons,
par exemple, l'eventualite d'une guerre contre l'lran: 75% des Americains estiment que les Etats-Unis
devraient mettre un terme a leurs menaces militaries et privilegier la recherche d'un accord par voie
diplomatique." Noam Chomsky, in "Plus efficace encore que les dictatures: Le lavage des cerveaux en
liberte, entretien avec Noam Chomsky," Le Monde Diplomatique, no. 641 (August 2007), p. 1.
84 OCTOBER
that describ
political iden
perfectly ab
agency can b
gration bills
America is o
relations to
supranationa
only dissolve
benefits of c
cation with
functional A
accountabilit
are in turn d
tions betwee
to bypass the
Questions of
son, and iden
identity to th
perhaps non
the dictatori
cessfully outs
claiming eff
there is a qu
engender the
ment would demand. It seems to me that critics who assert the fixed identities of
those publics participate in a foreclosure on agency that is both depoliticizing and
corrupt. Whether artists can do better is another question.
Even when art proposes knowledge, research, or explicit truths to its audi-
ences - as in, for example, the works of Hans Haacke or Critical Art Ensemble - it
still empties its efforts into a fundamentally unmeasurable dynamic of suspended
propositions with unpredictable audience-subjects. Its truth-bearing capacity is
always but one factor in a complex, open-ended encounter. On the other hand,
when a critic demands that art be "effective," she subjects it to a series of problem-
atic assumptions - about the wholeness of the subject, about the sanctity of truth
and knowledge, about the heroic nature of means that are effective as opposed to
those that are not. By heralding the imperative of "effective" art, criticism regresses
to the familiar, reductive understanding of audiences characteristic of the very
sociological discourses that art challenges. Such a demand is symptomatic of a
desire to shut down art's unpredictable and dynamic operations in the name of an
urgency that strives to answer the political. This desire recognizes that the nature
of political life is immanently tied to truth-seeking and identification. But whereas
art can outwit truth, knowledge, and other definitive ends to being by suspending
Questionnaire: Haidu 85
its operations against all that it

for art simply reasserts these v
as it foretells the effects of exp
is at the very crux of contempor
Let's not forget that the most
used by the media: persuasion,
ject identities. These are the too
consumer products and viable
as those who have successfully
does not dismantle critical elitis
right to demand something oth
sion from at least some modes of
Finally there is the question o
not merely at motivating audi
political identity. Can art play a
inchoate group of people whos
legitimate, sanctioned, even ma
rupt the standard of "effective
thinking that art is almost uniq
ask art to address us as American
address "Americans" while circum
restrictions that identity itself
set up, anyway, between critics a
affirmative relationship, based
on a perpetual (if classic) search
and knowledge and the claims
merely reformulated a now-clas
that could repurpose a majorita
the benefits of the nation-stat
collective identity that, I think
art's own. Either way, I can ac
which the discourses on aesth
decades: I'm not sure, however, th
antiwar movement to such a slu
RACHEL HAIDU is Assistant Professor of
DAVID JOSELIT
Market Dissent
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the American multi-

plex that in defending the Bush administration's efforts to evade congressional
limits on its war, Ryan C. Crocker, Ambassador to Iraq, had recourse to cinematic
metaphors:
"In the States, it's like we're in the last half of the third reel of a three-
reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we're done here, and the
credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and
go on to something else," he said. "Whereas out here [in Iraq], you're
just getting into the first reel of five reels," he added, "and as ugly as
the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way,
way worse."1
Crocker's statement betrays two facts fundamental to the current state of

American politics. First, it demonstrates that domestic consensus for war is now
established by transposing foreign conflict into the idiom of Hollywood cinema.
Crocker suggests that the duty of citizens - indeed the only wartime sacrifice most
of us are called upon to make - is to tolerate the grotesque violence of the govern-
ment's epic military drama whose narrative opened with Colin Powell's
duplicitous presentation of satellite images at the United Nations and proceeded
to spectacular aerial bombing over Baghdad before cutting to segments of senti-
mentalized reality television on the ground, hosted by television correspondents
"embedded" with the troops. This "screenplay" was punctuated throughout by
heroic poses struck by the president, often in costume and showcasing his signa-
ture resolve, while images of the Iraqi dead and wounded or the physical
destruction of Baghdad were ruthlessly edited out. One can almost sympathize
with Crocker's frustration that this carefully scripted "victimless" war, whose only
true casualty was meant to be Saddam Hussein, has curdled; its cinematic proto-
type shifting gradually from Top Gun to Fahrenheit 9/11 - in part through the
circulation of unauthorized images giddily exposed by soldier-torturers in Abu
Ghraib. The significant insight afforded by Crocker's cinematic metaphor is that
citizenship in the United States, especially but not exclusively in times of war, has
become a form of spectatorship.
The second fact indirectly presumed by Crocker is that citizens grow accus-
tomed to, and even enthusiastic about, war through their consumption of
1. John F. Burns and AlissaJ. Rubin, "U.S. Envoy Offers Grim Prediction on Iraq Pullout," New York
7i!nes,July7,2007,p.Al.
Questionnaire: Joselit 87
entertainment products ranging fr

keted to children and young adult
broadcast on television nightly an
produced with the explicit assistan
Cumulatively, this military-enter
establishing consensus for the Bush
consensus for war is unconsciously bu
and film in the United States is ta
empathize with their ethical struggle
and over that the judgment of t
because it is the result of such tho
challenge of our moment, as neatly
cinema, is thus twofold: we must fin
we must learn how to operate acros
tainment and politics. The Vietnam W
inspired a series of tactics among a
and independent film economies -
dramatic telegenic protests in orde
for free.2
We now live in a different era. The Bush administration's scenario for the
Iraq War - which was enormously effective for almost four years - was fashioned in
response to what "went wrong" from the perspective of the hawkish Right in the
domestic reception of Vietnam. The parasitic media strategies of yippies like
Abbie Hoffman, for instance, do not work so well under current conditions.
Witness the case of the highly sympathetic activist Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a
slain soldier. As part of the Bush administration's repressive control of media mes-
sages, Sheehan was arrested for attending the 2006 State of the Union Address (as
the guest of a congresswoman) because she wore an antiwar T-shirt. The charges of
disruptive conduct, later dropped, were entirely trumped up, and undoubtedly
meant to prevent cameras from dwelling on the shirt during the audience-
response shots that always punctuate the televised coverage of this event. Under
such conditions of repression, what is to be done? If, as I contend, the citizen now
functions as a spectator, and political consensus is built largely through the con-
sumption of entertainment, it seems quite feasible that visual artists and perhaps
even the art world could have a significant role to play. But this has hardly been
the case.
I think a great number of progressive artists are caught on the horns of a

dilemma - on the one hand they feel (partly on account of generations of histor-
ical and critical writing, much of which has been published in the pages of this
journal, and partly on account of the massive academic transformation of art
2. For my account of these means of intervening in the media public sphere at midcentury see
Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
88 OCTOBER
education as
articulate a
staged withi
(which since
audience frie
tradiction i
enunciation
appear to resi
paralysis wit
mous expansi
business - th
plenty to ga
statements o
museums wh
benefactors.
In fact, the dilemma I have sketched is easy to solve theoretically but diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to resolve practically. Rather than entering into the
contradictory position of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the art mar-
ket, artists could embrace markets more broadly and imaginatively as a medium.
They could invent, as the artist and activist Peter Fend suggested some time ago,
new markets either by using the art market opportunistically or by leaving it behind
altogether:
The art world has a main job in isolating artists from the real world.
The power of artists to combine into corporate structures is blocked.
They are unaware of the fact that other forces are making sure that
they are in a little corner playing with their toys. . . . Art does allow you
to show what is otherwise not allowed and thus to bring that into the
stream of society. The main thing is to do it in such a way that in the
end your project is on the front page of the business news, and not just
in the culture supplement.3
And, I might add, such corporate structures devoted to inventing new models of
image dissemination could bring artists' works to the front page of the news sec-
tion as well. For if, as I have argued, political discourse in the United States
addresses citizens as spectators in an idiom closely aligned to commercial enter-
tainment, it is theoretically possible for artists to market alternative narratives to
various and even very broad publics. While I don't pretend such a program is easy,
and while I fully acknowledge that it requires a shift in artistic practice as well as
patronage structures, it is by no means impossible. If art is to become political,
which is neither necessary to its survival nor inevitable, I believe it must make this
3. Mark Kremer and Camiel van Winkel, "Interview with Peter Fend," ARCHIS 12 (1993)
http://www.archis.org/archis/newsletter/.
Questionnaire: Joselit 89
leap - as it did in the avant-gardes

practices since World War II. Th
SoHo into a neighborhood where
process whose significance should
neighborhood as an al fresco mal
of his own fame in order to crea
class and gender divisions loosen
Kruger's sharp visual rhetoric cir
with the same trenchant message
self-branding that helped not on
achieve enormous political progre
'90s. In short, as certain contem
and guerrilla media attest, it is p
ing new publics) as one's medium
The fact remains, however, th
focused activism that the Vietna
did, and this, I think, results fro
that can be radicalized. As Ambas
tor-citizen's response to their dis
go on to something else," which i
sumer-citizens are not acquain
because the military-entertainm
own pacification. The suppress
grotesquely in the gulf between w
to watch. What the "spectator
Corporation's striking and presci
the multiplex. We middle-class cons
country entertainment is a battleg
and thoroughly mediated, home f
DAVID JOSELIT is Professor in the Depart

recently, of Feedback: Television Against Dem
SILVIA KOLBOWSKI
U wlk in2 d r%m

wyor pencil n yor h&
U c sumbody naked
& U sA, "hu iz dat mang?"
U try so hard
bt U dun undRstNd
jst wot UL sA
wen U git om
cuz somTIN iz hapNn hEr

bt U dun knO wot it iz
Do U, Mister Jones?
U raise A yor hed

& U ask, "iz DIS whr it iz?"
& sumbody points 2 U & sAz
"itz Hs"
& U sA, "wofs myn?"
& sumbody Ls sAz, "whr wot iz?"
& U sA, "Oh my God
M I hEr aL aloN?"

Do U, Mister Jones?
Uh&n yor ticket

& U go watch d geek
hu immediately wlkz a 2 U
wen he hErz U spk
& sAz, "How duz it fEI
2 b such a frEk?"
& U sA, "Impossible"
az he h&z U a bone

Do U, Mister Jones?
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 90-92. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Techno fogy.
Questionnaire: Kolbowski 91
U hav mNE contakz

Amng d lumberjacks
2 git U facts
wen SOME1 attacks yor imagination
bt nobody hz NE rSpect
NEway dey alredi Xspec U
2jstGIVachek
2 tax-deductible charity organizations
Youve Bin w d profeSRz

& dey1 al_ liked yor L%kz
w gr8 lawyers U hav
discuSD lepers & crooks
uve Bin Thru aL of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's bukz
ur v weL rED
It's weL known
Do U, Mister Jones?
weL, d <;;;;;;;;; swallower, he cumz a 2 U

& thN he kneels
He crosses himsLf
&thN heclikzHs hi heels
& w/o furthr notic
He asks U how it fElz
& he sAz, "hEr iz yor throat bak
thx 4 d loan"

Do U, Mister Jones?
nw U c DIS one-eyed midget

:-V d wrd "nw"
& U sA, "4 wot rEsN?"
& he sAz, "How?"
& U sA, "wot duz DIS mean?"
& he screams bak, "Youre a 3:-o
GIV me som mlk
o Ls go om"
92 OCTOBER
cuz somTIN iz
Do U, Mister Jones?
weL, U wlk in2 d r%m

Ilk a camel & thN U :-(
U put yor eyes n yor pocket
& yor nose on d ground
ther ought 2 b a law
agAnst U comin rownd
U shud b mAd
2 wear earphones

Do U, Mister Jones?
SILVIA KOLBOWSKI is an artist who lives and works in New York.
CARIN KUONI
1. Globalism has not so much produced unified mass movements as it h

exploded into a myriad of individualized and highly specific interest groups t
work on individual issues, "locally" in the sense that they are confined often
very narrowly defined subjects.
In some cases, in a tacit acknowledgment of this reality, but more impo
tantly in order to acquire agency in this fairly novel situation, political acti
happens on a local level. As we have all observed (with regret and some nostalg
there are few mass protests but instead highly individualized and localized ini
tives. At the New School, a private university with a progressive history, th
happens in various classrooms with newly launched courses that address Isla
stereotypes, the ethics of war and shame, or with an enhanced Arab language p
gram. These are usually individual initiatives, subtle shifts, not mandated by
university's central administration or the provost's office.
In this search for "local" partners, interdisciplinary efforts seem more se
ous, rich, and sophisticated than before. They yield academic appointments
artists to departments and disciplines previously reserved for conventionall
schooled scholars. It also means a profusion of public conversations across di
plines that is initiated and supported by large or grassroots organizations, am
them in New York: Rhizome, Peace on Avenue A, Art in General, Orchard,
16Beaver, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and, of course, the Vera List
Center for Art and Politics at the New School.
When a mainstream art magazine such as Artforum, largely driven by the art
market, showcases work with a political edge, it's a significant change from the past.
2. The dialectic opposition of public versus private sphere is no longer valid

and applies to neither the built, legal, nor philosophical realms. The public
sphere where protests against the war are held is any sphere: protesters are the Yes
Men on television, Billionaires for Bush at political rallies, the student commence-
ment speaker at a private university, or legions of progressive bloggers.
The absence of the draft is not the only reason for the perceived lack of pub-
lic outcry or the seemingly arid landscape of (mainly) aging protesters. Political
disengagement is equally attributable to overstimulation and the information
onslaught through the media. A deeper understanding of the complex dependen-
cies we're subject to has proven to be somewhat paralyzing.
3. Political consciousness has probably not vanished from cultural production,

but is more subtly embedded(!) in a much broader range of politically engaged
works. But we can certainly speak of a "co-option" of the artists whose livelihood is
completely dependent on the private sector and individuals.
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 93-94. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute ofTechnobgy.
94 OCTOBER
5. The era o
thing about
is the result
in two disti
connect the
taneity of r
for clarifica
line, we are
to set conditi
A number o
nomenon, fo
range from
example is 9
political con
Geyer, Shar
been hugely
Smith and W
Bartana, Wil
artist's lecture itself as an art medium.
6. Online activism deprives participants of the affirmative effects of commu-

nity and group immersion. Direct, physical interaction benefits not only society
but the artistic originator as well. Community building, strategic networking and
marketing, and a consistent public presence are all necessary.
CARIN KUONI is the director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York.
CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY
Say "political art" and the first images that come to mind are protest piec
posters, logos, and other weapons of symbolic warfare. Such expression has be
important here in the U.S. in the context of the current war, even when the form
are not necessarily those of the past. We've had Richard Serra's Abu Ghraib im
haunting the festivities at the last Whitney Biennial, but also new types of attemp
to stimulate political will through identification and empathy - like those in which
superimposed maps of here and there provide GPS-era updates of the "bring t
war home" strategies of protest art past. For instance, the "dislocative touri
agency" You Are Not Here (Thomas Due, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Charles Pr
Ran Tao, and Mushon Zer-Aviv) posted a series of signs in New York with pho
numbers; dialing them on your cell phone gave you a tour guide's chipp
description of a site in Baghdad physically corresponding to your location in N
York, audio "visits" whose tour-guide pabulum was subtly punctuated with ideology
deflating factoids (as by the guide to Firdos Square, who mentions as if in pass
that when the square's statue of Saddam Hussein was famously toppled in Ap
2003, the crowds in attendance were predominantly U.S. troops and internatio
journalists) (http://www.youarenothere.org/tours/). Pushing more aggressiv
on the idea, Alyssa Wright has a project in progress in which she walks the str
of Boston/Cambridge wearing a backpack rigged so that whenever she cross
into an area corresponding to one on an overlaid map of Baghdad where a bom
ing has recently been reported, the pack "explodes," sending up a cloud of sm
and a sheaf of confetti bearing names of dead Iraqi civilians (http://web.me
mit.edu/-alyssa/about.html). Dispersed in space, complex and time-consumin
to put into action, and likely to be experienced more often online and in retr
spect than live on the ground, these new tactics compare strangely with those
say, Martha Rosler's Vietnam War-era photomontages, the Art Workers Coalit
And Babies? poster, or GAAG's [Guerrilla Art Action Group's] gory protests at
Museum of Modern Art. But they nevertheless share with the now-canonica
instances of antiwar artistic activism an impulse to force a connection betw
the complacent here and the there bloodied in its name.
It's certainly worth debating the relative efficacy of the two periods' diff
ing tactics. Is it self-evident that when awareness of a gesture develops gradu
and collectively through links between blogs and other forms of digital word
mouth it is less effective in building solidarity and spreading indignation tha
physical protest like GAAG's? Is the new work's lower-pitched, even subtle co
demnation of the war insufficiently pointed? How would the older work's ton
emergency come across in the contemporary context? Do the current examp
succeed in bringing the war home, or do the opposite? After all, as the grou
moniker reminds us, "You Are Not Here." But did the earlier examples escape t
dialectic?
96 OCTOBER
You Are No
toward F
All interestin
ing the futur
what may m
daring and ex
Around the
examples of p
tutions' fund
offer protot
produced wit
of a Brazilian
a boat to tak
waters to rec
waves.org); or
conversations
antagonists,
(Wochenklausu
endeavors lac
emotional po
Questionnaire: Lambert-Beatty 97
than administrative, and while they may be truly

terized by compromise and controversy. Moreov
address may be, one would be hard-pressed to p
emergency as that in Iraq today. Yet projects in th
reasons all the more important to encourage in
Because as of this writing, in summer 2007, wh
cal energy seem to be shifting toward U.S. mili
remains a disturbing dearth of public debate abo
meet our moral obligations to Iraq and Iraqis in
value the art of protest, what I long for now is an
Are they out there? Cells of artist-wonks in
experiments that inspire imaginative solutions
Iraqis and calling to conscience the U.S. and its
that I can't call up strong examples in this vein
and institutions oriented toward forms of pol
another media-political environment. I hope
informing me about such efforts - even though w
of political art, such projects would be mere dro
even though, more than posters or paintings or
of not only futility but foolishness in comparison
ousness of the situation on the ground. But ho
wring out of public fatigue, disillusionment, an
responsibility, and hope.
-August 2007
CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY (Iambert2@fas.harvard.edu) is A

Architecture and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Har
PAMELA M. LEE
There are no Guernicas to protest the so-called war on terror, no singu

works of art that wholly capture our disgust for the U.S. -led invasion
Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the occasional example might dramatize so
thing of the occupation's abject iconography (think of Richard Serra's graph
renderings of a shadow figure from Abu Ghraib), we are far and away from
approaching anything resembling an antiwar aesthetic: a cogent and system
visual response to the horror show that is the Bush White House. But rather t
bemoan this state of affairs as yet another sign of the failings of the Left (to say
tle of current artmaking), this condition productively forces us to examine w
constitutes a genuinely oppositional mode of art practice now, one measu
against the traditional criteria of visibility and emblematic power. Whatever
practice is or will become, my sense is that it must reckon with the twinned prob
lems of production and mediation, both the uses and circulation of artistic m
and its cognate in the larger world of communication. For where media is at is
so too is the question of distribution and reception; and where distribution is
stake, so too trails the fate of a counter-public sphere. In short, if the "war on ter
ror" is as much a war fought with images in the media as it is on the ground,
need to be far stealthier about the economy of this media relative to the arena
which we typically operate.
Paradoxically, the absence of any emblematic oppositional practice seems
fly in the face of a conceit that we have more or less internalized as a mantra
the times: 'tis the season for "political" art. In the long shadow of that most se
ingly punctual date in recent history - 9/11 - how could it be otherwise? T
global abbatoir that is Bush's new imperial challenge throws down a gauntlet
those of us working as historians, critics, and artists, forcing us to confront the r
evance of what we do, and motivated, undoubtedly, by feelings of rela
powerlessness. Only the most cynical among us would question the need to th
about our work and the war; and only the most insensate could imagine that
and art criticism could simply chug along, business as usual. To be sure, the vi
evidence for some kind of shift seems unimpeachable, whether that shift is
mic, minimal, or subliminal. No matter what the market-driven ethos of the art
world - and no matter how intense the artist's (and critic's) drive to professional-
ization - you can't say that world has turned a blind eye to the subject and related
issues. Some random examples: the welter of large-scale exhibitions addressing
the range of politically charged subject matter (pick your favorite biennial); the
proliferation of photo-based and video imagery documenting war-torn lands;
the special issues of art magazines and journals devoted to current geopolitics;
and the generalized thematic of globalization that has repeatedly surfaced over
the last several years. The range of these examples suggests that the war is too
unwieldy in its origins and implications to find exclusive representation in one
OCTOBER123, Winter 2008, pp. 98-101. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Questionnaire: Lee 99
type of imagery or theme. C

such issues from acute pers
American occupation in part
instance, or Jeremy Deller o
neocon revolution of Margar
But just how we figure the r
an entirely different matter f
notion about which many of
be clear: "political" art and
hardly need consult Adorno
fied; and that the pressure
thematic bent is, to borrow th
nal, a kind of cultural "bla
avant-gardes and neo-avant-
war or representing politics
sitional practice. The histo
should be profoundly suspici
Indeed the conventions (re
art" too often close around a k
consolidate a notion of polit
and opposition. The task of
is imperative to any such p
demand far greater complic
(and to a lesser extent, the 1
rent practice, but with an im
such visual rhetoric does no
now but as a matter of histo
or work through the forma
learned, and inherited collec
Gmelin). As a result, such w
intensity comparable to the
War" because it makes no cla
ties, nor to the affective cha
contemporary moment. Thi
moment we now inhabit med
fantasy that we can formula
challenges our presumptions
first place.
There's another way to put
that a counter-public sphere
write the circulation of such i
the mediation of oppositiona
gest later on, however, this
100 OCTOBER
build an oppo
trary, to reco
a very differe
By contrast,
rent "politic
representatio
unblinkered r
you might ha
serves as one
large, glossy C
the documen
unavoidable -
political symp
But this is als
when attendin
beyond this li
overdetermin
cial art world
This nod to
indeed an issu
gest) due to th
institutional r
further in te
Forum in Car
against the U
art that seem
practices but
substantive re
demands grea
attendance at
est terms the
professional ha
I suspect ma
ambivalent an
ical" in our p
opposed to th
Paul Chan - an
political messa
tacit distincti
tional demand
later. Yet it's
concedes noth
advocate on b
Questionnaire: Lee 101
research does engage related

there's a difference between m
for example, many of us teach
politics circa 1968); and it is a
that like Retort's Afflicted Power
Retort's example inspires n
points us again to the questio
we might expect for our interv
its unbridled didacticism- n
short form. This mode of po
seems to be experiencing som
arcane relative to the infinite r
cisely this differential value vis
of opposition by academics; it
accorded, however weakly, to
grown cynical (and not witho
tual," that iconic figure occasi
piece in The New Yorker and
hand (and the anti-intellectua
time to rethink this figure r
might stage opposition now:
thinking about politics as such
PAMELA M. LEE is Professor of Art Hi
SIMON LEUNG
While I welcome October's questionnaire as a part of the public discourse

"the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq," it strikes me that the framin
the questions necessitates some consideration. Read in succession, they
toward a description of a current situation that stands in contrast with wh
implied to have been a more "motivated," "intense," and "transgressive" mo
from the recent past, where antiwar interventions felt more "immediate," "publ
"active," and "effective." What, this implicit mourning for the earlier mo
seems to ask, can be done about a diminished "sense of a public political subj
I share in a project that tries to understand the current war(s) through
recurrent undercurrents of past wars, but the comparisons we are asked to
if I am not mistaken, tend toward a nostalgic tinge. Just as the war that ha
the 2004 presidential election was not the one waged in Iraq, but that in Vie
perhaps the citations of counter-public cultural practices enumerated from
antiwar movements of the late 1960s and '70s are also symptomatic of how
meaning of that historical moment, likewise, remains in transformation,
while its evocation as "the past," as a signifier, is meant to stabilize the terms un
which the present can be understood. I resist either a functionalist or quali
comparison between an "electronic-technological public sphere" of the pre
and the supposedly unplugged "public protest of the Vietnam era" because
not sure what can be learned in such a comparison. I don't find "real-time" f
of protest missing or mutually exclusive from today's technological commu
tion; and as is often noted, the protest against the Vietnam War, like much
war itself, was conducted via the media on television. Further, it can be a
that from Rambo to the Bushes (41 and 43), we are still in Vietnam.
Art and activist practices exist in perpetual dialogue with continuous p
cal struggles and social transformations. The continual radicalization o
political subject lies not in holding onto a narrative of an a priori political su
tive entity whose contiguity is disrupted by technological assaults, but rathe
Levinasian sense, in the response-ability of the subject called into difference in t
world, where there is always a potential for rupture, which is the conditio
change. In other words, the radical political subject is also always an ethical
ject, who must open him/herself to otherness, not the least of which may
"transformation (s) of the sense of a public."
This ethical challenge addresses the subject vis-a-vis technology. I wou
reframe the dynamic this way: the very makeup of the political subject is f
by the relationship between the self and the other in the polis. Some of thes
ers are the machines, networks, and virtual collectives that make up the ma
often social condition of the public sphere. The political subject does not c
before but is constituted out of the continual and mutual imbrication between
the reality of such material conditions and a mortal sense of the world. Political
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 102-104. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Techno
Questionnaire: Leung 103
agency and sociality, to borrow

through the "enabling violation"
but it does not "depoliticize" the
"collective action" (here I think
examples like Wikipedia or YouT
are already understood to be cont
lable, the more apt approach f
metaphors of "social confinemen
drive," which places the subject in
repetition.
I am invested in making "intellectual and artistic opposition to the war more
active and effective," yet I am not sure what "the war" is. Like many I believe in
and participate in various forms of protest against the U.S.-led invasion and occu-
pation of Iraq, but I don't understand "the war" to be defined in those terms. The
gravity of the present situation has something to do with the fact that we know
this to be an endless war, that war is the dense atmosphere under which we live,
that it is our ecology. The Bush Doctrine formalized this, but it is not entirely new.
Kant's "Sketch for Perpetual Peace," Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," and
Derrida's "Force of Law" all approach peace as a version of truce, as the condi-
tional suspension of bellicose hostility that can always be suddenly reignited. War
is the most flagrant example of, to use Benjamin's term, the state's interest in "a
monopoly of violence." It is a foundational violence of the law. There is an urgent
need to "end the war," but war comes after war, and we exist in the throes of its
redundancy. War is a syndrome.
For most of the 1990s, spurred on by the experience of the first Gulf War, I
worked on a series of projects addressing what I called "the residual space of the
Vietnam War." The figures of war for me were not ones directly engaged in the
times or events of battle, but ones that resonated as war's remains, as untimely
sites where one must contemplate the development of an ethical encounter to
resist against the logic of war. Today, perhaps because I live mainly in Los Angeles,
where the version of the fractured art world I come into contact with consists pri-
marily of those with whom I retain a discursive, intellectual relationship, my
observation is that cultural opposition to war does not look as anemic as the ques-
tionnaire's authors imply. Artists and intellectuals "still regard cultural production
as socially and politically communicative, transgressive," and "critical." I find the
most compelling works activating a challenge to war to be works that addresses the
power of the state as it intersects the psyche, ones which engage the correspon-
dence between aesthetic/political/form/subject and the effects and affects of
power. As such they often do not address this war as being separate from other
wars or other economies of power; they often interpolate representations of the
mechanisms of power with signs of resistance; they often contemplate the vicissi-
tudes of daily life held hostage by masculinist drives toward domination - some of
them leading to war. In other words, they tend to frame another order of time
104 OCTOBER
within our tim

day. They ten
if we should u
accomplish s
mourning - w
SIMON LEUNG i
project that is also
LUCYR. LIPPARD
I am not an academic nor attached to any institution (and never have be

for the last fourteen years I have lived rurally as a freelance writer, so man
these questions simply do not apply.
There is no question that there is less art activism in opposition to the
War than there was during the Vietnam War period, although there was a b
and strong attempt to stop the war before it started, invisible for the most part
the mass media. We live under a virtual dictatorship masquerading as a demo
and the corporate war machine has become infinitely powerful and profitabl
The absence of the draft is the major cause; the poor are fighting this
and few others give a rat's ass. But additional causes are the higher cost of li
the fact that so many artists now are academics (they weren't in the late 1960s a
early '70s) and in the current political climate they may be more afraid to
risks. The stakes are higher now. And globalization diffuses the issues for t
who haven't kept up with events and the literature. Artists fall for the Right's s
cessful anti-Islamic campaigns as much as everyone else. The insidious Patrio
makes it impossible to support anything but "our troops" or face prosecution
It was always hard to drag artists out of their studios into the streets, but d
ing the Vietnam period, the draft, the counterculture, the movement, and
factors made antiwar activism popular and even fun. It was easy to be agains
war. Now only the deeply committed are active. The "me generation" has n
stepped up to the plate and us old folks are tired.
Some of this can be blamed on academics, who do not seem to be firing
their students the way they used to. There is nothing inherently political about
as it is taught and disseminated in this country. Nobody buys antiwar art,
cially if it names names rather than relying on ambiguity and irony to g
makers off the hook.
The Internet may be good for organizing on the horizontal level (it can
reach a lot of people cheaply and easily), but it has not been a substitute for face-
to-face organizing, for meetings that are exciting and educational and contagious;
for the communal brainstorming and arguments, the "let's go out tonight and
wheatpaste" or "whose studio shall we make the demo stuff in?" All very old-fashioned
in this "sophisticated" high-tech era, but more effective vertically. Of course, if
there is an across-the-board agreement that the media will not cover activism, it's
mostly for nought, which has discouraged a lot of activists.
Artists Against the War, with its "We Will Not Be Silent" T-shirts and three-
screen video Disarming Images that has been shown all over the country, is the most
effective art group I know about. They have done performance events in museums
and in the streets, like the Art Workers Coalition, Guerrilla Art Action Group,
PADD, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, WAC, and endless
other groups since the '70s. I have a huge archive of reports and images of art and
106 OCTOBER
events against
pre-Day One.
image-based g
installations in New Mexico.
A lot is going on, but it's obviously not enough.
LUCY LIPPARD is a writer, activist, and curator.
TOM McDONOUGH
Fictions of the Dismal Theorem
Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
- Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy

of the Commons" (1968)
Any thoroughgoing assessment of the current mobilization on the Lef

take note, among other features, of what Fredric Jameson has recently c
ized as the "political revitalization of the theme of enclosure and the co
since globalization." Indeed, we may well claim that this resurgence dates
from the inception of the current round of militarized neoliberalism
Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, for it was in the immediate run-up to this
that the Midnight Notes Collective first published its text on what it term
new enclosures." Enclosure would come to be understood, not as a unique
cal episode (theft "on a colossal scale," as Marx wrote, through which th
landlords and capitalist farmers of the modern era had emerged, while
were forced off the land and thereby "'set free' ... as proletarians for man
ing industry"), but as an analytic tool with which to comprehend the o
dynamic of capitalism, "a regular return on the path of accumulation and
tural component of class struggle." Under the heading of the "new enclosu
Midnight Notes Collective has described the last quarter century as a period of
haps the greatest division of the commons in world history, with an accompa
"proletarianization" on an almost unimaginable scale. This theme has been
echoed in the writings of Retort, where it is directly related to the logic of p
tive accumulation, and has been popularized by activists like Naomi Klein.
However, despite the efforts of groups like Midnight Notes and Reto
the vast majority of intellectuals the connotations of "the commons" a
outlined in the famous 1968 essay of Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy
Commons." From an essentially Malthusian perspective, Hardin argued th
dom must necessarily be curtailed if human population growth was not t
the ecological carrying capacities of our planet. He drew deeply on a littl
tract published in England in 1833 by William Forster Lloyd, a disciple of
and an apologist for the Parliamentary enclosures that were at the time
ing much of the remaining common land in Britain and Scotland. In it L
posed a number of polemical questions: "Why are the cattle on a com
puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped s
ently from the adjoining enclosures?" His answer was simple: bec
individual owned his animals, the gain of adding to the herd accrued
alone, while the loss incurred by overloading the common is distributed a
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 107-109. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute
108 OCTOBER
who utilized it
add another a
was ruined.
While the reference to Lloyd provided Hardin's article with a certain anti-
quarian flair, he need hardly have had this recourse to arcane nineteenth-century
debate: contemporary American economists were discussing the same phenomenon
under the name of the dissipation of rent, demonstrating how common-property
resources tended inevitably to be overused. From these arguments, Hardin extrap-
olated his "tragedy," that "individuals locked into the logic of the commons are
free only to bring on universal ruin." Humanity has learned this lesson in food
gathering, he wrote, having instituted private property in real estate and having
enclosed farmland, but it has yet to apprehend "the necessity of mutual coercion"
in other aspects of its existence. While Hardin's primary object here was the post-
war "population problem" (just as Lloyd's had been the Industrial Revolution-era
labor market), the implications of his line of reasoning for vast swaths of human
experience was clear, and was quickly recognized by scholars in far-flung disci-
plines; his paper became one of the most cited in the social sciences and has been
reprinted in over one hundred anthologies in fields ranging from biology and
sociology to ethics and economics. "The horror of the commons," of the illusion
of freedom that open-access resources provide, was to be avoided at all costs:
"injustice is preferable to total ruin," a lesson that certainly would not have been
lost on the various liberation movements of Hardin's own time, which themselves
were engaged in a struggle to "reclaim the commons."
Like his predecessor Malthus, whose work had been a refutation of the
Utopian hopes embodied by the French Revolution, Hardin was determined to
prove that there were determinate limits to human aspirations, that "progress"
could not free us from the bonds imposed by nature itself - which makes it all the
more curious that he paraded his work under the banner that "freedom is the
recognition of necessity," a phrase of Engels that he misattributed to Hegel! In any
case, Hegel's conception of freedom was precisely opposed to Hardin's claim: for
the former, the freedom of the human subject depended upon the transcendence
of necessity embodied by the object and its finitude - "Freedom means that the
object with which you deal is a second self. . . . For freedom it is necessary that we
should feel no presence of something which is not ourselves" - a notion that
stands at the heart, we could say, of the most radical struggles against the late capi-
talist life-world, in the later 1960s as today. For what this formulation of freedom
entails is nothing less than the most extreme rearticulation - in the reconciliation
of subject and object, and by extension of the community of subjects itself - of
what is held "in common." Hardin's consistent, not to say paranoid, reiteration of
the "universal ruin" brought on by the Utopia of open access to resources
(whether conceived in tangible or more properly "psychological" terms) might
then be seen as a misrecognition of the real goal of the commons: the ruination
of all separation as the necessary prelude to the reign of freedom. That these
Questionnaire: McDonough 109
might be the watchwords guiding a half

aesthetic practice, from the Situationist
potential analysis beyond the scope of this
conjuncture has made all the more urgen
TOM McDONOUGH is Director of Graduate Stud

State University of New York, Binghamton.
YATES McKEE
Perverse as it may sound, the disastrous state of "sovereign except

declared by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11 has proven t
boon for politicized artistic discourse in the United States. In the ro
Gramscian sense, cultural and intellectual practices - including but far excee
the specialized domain of contemporary art - are widely regarded by activis
having a crucial role to play in the construction of public sentiments oppos
the occupation of Iraq in particular and the neo-conservative geostrategic pr
in general. This has provided an important opportunity for artists, critics
curators to link themselves to the expanded networks of activist counter-pub
that have proliferated over the past decade.
With a handful of exceptions, October has up until now had relatively little
say about this cultural-political conjuncture, especially when compared with
humanities journals such as Social Text, a popular weekly such as The Natio
cultural publications such as Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The Journal of Aestheti
Protest, and Bidoun. Rather than a simple matter of conservatism or bad fa
charges often leveled against this magazine by Leftist critics - I believ
reluctance of the magazine to engage contemporary activism can be illumi
in part by considering an earlier October questionnaire from around a decade
This would be the "Visual Culture Questionnaire" in October 77 (Summ
1996), in which the magazine in essence announced its determination to de
the specialized field of art from the purported flattening-out and disembod
of sensory experience by new media technologies and the emergent schola
analyses of the latter, both of which were implicitly accused of contributin
"producing subjects for the next phase of global capital." Collapsing technop
"global village" narratives with the emergent digital technologies and infras
tures themselves, October risked painting itself into a disciplinary corner, isolat
itself from the highly energetic counter-public spheres and visual culture
activism that, felicitously, the current questionnaire asks us to comment upon.
As the editors now acknowledge, the Internet is indeed a key infrastruc
for the general elaboration of "antiwar opposition." However, the framing of
tion 4 insinuates an untenable Habermasian opposition between the contemp
"electronic-technological public sphere" associated with the decidedly instrum
activities of "distributing information," "raising money," and "organizing de
strations," on the one hand, and the richly cultural activities associated wit
"public protest of the Vietnam era" on the other. The latter included "wor
mouth, flyers, and planning meetings," the exemplary sites of which were stree
museums, theaters, and various print media.
It is very encouraging to see that the editors regard it as being within
purview of the magazine to consider a full range of practices, forms, and sites p
taining specifically to political activism - which ironically is more than can b
OCTOBER123, Winter 2008, pp. 110-115. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of T
Questionnaire: McKee 111
for the majority of actually exist

culture. But the implicit oppositio
communication invoked in ques
film, broadcast television, and h
experimentation and interventio
including Newsreel, the Yippies
tracked through to recent pheno
(www.indymedia.org), formalized
and prankster- activists such as th
"tactical embarrassment" campaig
outlets as hyperbolically imperso
attention to the unaccountable pr
such as Halliburton. Such practice
between bodily presence and med
indeed the most seemingly immed
ing the '60s and now, have been st
by the presence of image-based m
Furthermore, the various form
editors have not only continued a
This is the case not only in relatio
worked mass distribution present
possibilities of so-called "social me
active devices, programs, platfor
many cases user-generated.1 A pr
at the dynamically designed Web
(www.codepink4peace.org) in whi
pageantry and nonviolent civil dis
faceted participatory architectur
flashes, celebrity endorsements, p
In terms of the style and tonality
war activisms have oscillated unea
1. Evoking the memory of the nationa

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith (co-fou
.org] that organized the historic global d
behind the electronically networked Fall 20
War," The Nation, June 18, 2007: "Morator
buying gas; from writing letters to politici
religious services to music, art and cultural
alternative classes. Organizers will work wit
the site and on YouTube and similar sites. .
strators to the streets have consistently fa
fact that the antiwar movement needs to ad
genial today - even if they are very differe
people go to Amazon instead of the booksto
new friends, perhaps the media and the an
show up at demonstrations in Washington,
112 OCTOBER
truth-telling
Texas (2005), a
9/11 (2004), on
to register wi
alienated by ov
mutually exclu
strategy of ant
tion to activist
what I have cri
art that aims t
militancy. Such
of nongovernm
nities or camp
made by Iraq V
to the MoveOn
coalition (www
Alliance, which
U.S. economy
urban employm
and David Gar
"Of course it i
alternative sce
of working wi
entities in the
If artists cho
publicity discu
practice? I bel
sustain a gene
investigations,
niques, and cir
between "vert
on artistic com
drum I would
famous "to wri
pher's posttrau
images" with
rights activism
As Thomas Kee
between the v
and a subseque
question that f
evidence of ev
work required
images in a way that would stimul

accountability, rather than simply
general. Though these two inflect
been predominant in a number of
range from Martha Rosler's delibe
the War Home series, to the anony
appearing throughout U.S. cities
consumers-revelers were replaced
iRaq), to Richard Serra's crudely g
its many appearances in the form
Imagine Festival during the 2004 R
well-synergized collaboration amon
a quantitative high point of antiwar
A more complex artistic response t
come from the experimental geog
large-scale photographs at Bellweth
evoke the effervescent optical spa
upon closer examination, the view
details marking the otherwise abs
necessity with a super-telescopic p
their intended targets, these blur
index, formally and thematically,
(not) shown in Paglen 's photograp
Trevor Paglen. Canyons and Unidentif

Distance -18 miles/ 12:45 pm. 2006. Court
114 OCTOBER
of exception"
to Kabul thro
have been circ
"extraordinar
lous diagram
unofficial mil
Lombardi's ul
ness and dem
articles, book
laborative wo
amateur Sout
through mom
worked land
sovereign exc
cised on a syst
The second a
tionnaire is P
Chan claims t
distribution c
(2004) and Th
(2006) - from
complicated,
Particular Ord
culated in act
coffeehouse, to
ritual, to a sub
video is comp
taken on the
bearing deleg
The second vi
sperses high
students, a pa
town), with
radiantly abs
archives. Mark
aster-to-come
so-called "red
like the rest o
rary art that m
The notion o
ment claims t
treating secu
but rather as
has come under great duress with

years by Christian, Jewish, Islam
religious mobilizations tout court
relinquishing the universalist aspi
criticism insists that cultural prod
historically variable, and interna
weight in the contemporary worl
torically proximate insights of W
criticism affirms that politics rem
quasi-transcendental, if not divine
the immanent realm of human r
present a major challenge to the res
as that deriving from Peter Burger'
ing Marx's demystification of rel
for its own project of ideology-c
(religion as such is not even menti
insofar as he assumes its putative
transferred to the realm of aesth
capitalist development).
Without indulging the neospirit
explores the potency of religious
struction of contemporary mode
these questions through a halluci
tary material, digital distortion, and
such as monochromatic abstract
provocative step "backward" in the
reactivates what Mark C. Taylor w
from Malevich to Blanchot, which
Marxist critics alike.
Paglen and Chan complicate the politics of visuality in ways that are highly
suggestive for the task of making "intellectual and artistic opposition to the war
more active and effective," as the editors put it. If for Paglen art after Abu Ghraib
involves a paradoxical conjuration of unseeable evidence within a variegated and
tactically conceived media landscape, for Chan it is a matter of prayers and tears, a
"profane illumination" of the everyday that speaks simultaneously to the history of
advanced art and certain "others" against which many avant-gardists have tradi-
tionally defined their world-historical mission.
YATES McKEE is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Columbia University, and coeditor with Meg
McLagan of The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Politics, forthcoming from Zone Books.
JOHN MILLER
1. If we consider "significant" to mean affecting broad public opinion, I'm not

aware of any significant antiwar practices on the part of artists and academics.
Personally, although I've taken part in demonstrations, I have not done so espe-
cially in the capacity of an artist or academic. My sole contribution in this vein has
been a short paper I wrote prior to the invasion for the Kunstraum Innsbruck
titled "Islam and World Politics: A View from the United States." In it, I warned
that the Bush administration was opportunistically conflating Al Qaeda with
Saddam Hussein's regime to justify the invasion of Iraq.
2. a. Before the U.S. invasion, antiwar demonstrations took place worldwide.

Together, these constituted the largest political protest in history - at least mea-
sured in terms of the number of participants. Oddly, in the U.S., these protests are
notable for their lack of resonance. In New York City, under the pretext of secu-
rity precautions, the Bloomberg administration kept antiwar marchers more or
less in pens. Although demonstrators turned out in force, penning them up made
the ostensible march seem impotent.
b. Certainly, the Republican tactic of dispelling the "Vietnam syndrome" with a

professionalized army is significant, but it is not the only factor. Ironically,
Congressman Charles Rangel's proposal to reinstate the draft may be the most
effective way to galvanize the public. Nonetheless, the Iraq War differs from the
Vietnam War in many respects. Several other factors have served to demotivate
protest from artists and intellectuals in the U.S.
First: the trauma of 9/11, which left the United States open to political reac-
tion. This served to neutralize criticism at the outset of the war.
Second: the low-intensity nature of the war itself. After the initial invasion,
the insurgents have conducted this through intermittent suicide bombings, IEDs,
and guerrilla skirmishes, not conventionally organized combat.
Third: the administration's handling of news coverage of the war. Embedding
reporters within the army has proven to be a far more effective way to produce
favorable coverage than having the Pentagon hire an advertising agency to man-
age the news. In the U.S., the large number of wounded troops, which includes a
high percentage of amputees, has received scant notice. The much larger number
of Iraqi deaths has met with an often ambivalent response from the U.S. public
because it can't distinguish friend from foe.
Fourth: the war in Afghanistan - for many, a more justifiable one - taking
place alongside the war in Iraq. To some extent, this has given the Iraq War a
weakly defined character that the Bush administration readily exploits. Do, for
example, operations in Iraq and Afghanistan both constitute part of a larger war
on terror, or does the Iraq invasion originate from a separate, neocolonialist logic?
Questionnaire: Miller 117
Fifth: the legacy of the first G

George H. W. Bush for not going
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney
down in a quagmire. Bush also p
losses. After his tenure as Secretar
board and CEO at Halliburton from
contradicting his previous position
change. Shortly after the invasion
six-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to
Sixth: while a majority of U.S. Con
lacks the strength to override a pres
intellectuals included - seems resigne
Seventh: since the U.S. cannot w
reconstruction has become more imp
not rally around this kind of issu
would have previously handled su
tracted it to private, for-profit co
most virulent form of neocoloniali
ers, not Iraqis. This increases t
marginalization. The corporate bo
oversight, much of the reconstru
the corporate subcontractors hire
ate outside the Geneva Convention
Iraq War may be the first truly priv
3. a. Professionalization does anch

the middle class, which in turn l
"the dominated part of the domin
In the context of New York City,
tionship; many artists make mor
Even so, I don't think this elimina
tion. As such, "infotainment" may
Good infotainment may be more p
b. Absolutely. The effect on acad

and the art market constitute recipr
c. The effects and the causes ar

tion of U.S. culture.
d. Yes, and justifiably so, even if cultural production cannot mount an adequate
response to the Iraq invasion.
118 OCTOBER
4. Several yea
that virtual s
pointed out th
more far-rea
Nonetheless, I
tive cannot in
common space
the Internet.
space dialectic
one way we m
5. a. Yes: an in
b. Yes. Startin
ments of poli
6. I am not su
have to begin w
ting out of Ira
JOHN MILLER is
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
The tenor of the war in Iraq has been changed by public-sphere c

responses, including those of academics like Giorgio Agamben, Judith B
Slavoj Zizek, supported by local activism. Exemplary in this effort ha
work of art historians and archaeologists concerned with the region its
periods, ranging from the effort in Iraq to protect archaeological sites t
ing illegal art trafficking and the promotion of Iraqi contemporary art. At
although the antiwar movement has scored significant successes in shif
opinion away from supporting the invasion, the administration and t
States military have changed their approach in striking ways. Despite r
such strategies after the Vietnam War, it has now actively engaged in
insurgency policy, producing a new Field Manual (FM 3-24) calle
"Counterinsurgency" for daily use in the field. Like its predecessors, s
notorious COINTELPRO program (1956-71), this strategy is as concern
U.S. public opinion as it is with events in Iraq. Opposing the war within
now means opposing the counterinsurgency at home and abroad. In th
ued absence of any mainstream media engagement with the new strat
groups most likely to do so are intellectuals and academics.
The new Field Manual, dated December 15, 2006, has already been
loaded from the Internet over 1.5 million times and has recently rece
extraordinary imprimatur of publication by the University of Chicag
which issued it in a twenty-five-dollar edition, complete with an endorseme
Harvard professor Sarah Sewall. She calls the new doctrine "paradigm s
because it argues for the assumption of greater risk in order to succeed
"civilian leadership and support" for the long war. This presumed
located in a recognizably conservative interpretation of history and cu
example, insurgency itself is defined as existing on a continuum from
Revolution of 1789 as one "extreme" to a "coup d'etat" as the other (C
Section 5 - further citation by chapter and section). These events are b
nal to national politics and cannot be equated with an insurgency a
external invasion. Nor is there an equivalency between a (military) coup
ular revolution.
The counterinsurgency strategy has produced a new engagement with the

militarization of what the army itself calls "culture" in general and with visualiza-
tion in particular. On the one hand, "media activities" can be the primary activity
of an insurgency, according to the army, and on the other, "imagery intelligence"
in the form of still and moving images can be vital to its opponents (3:97).
"Cultural knowledge" is now seen as being "essential to waging a successful coun-
terinsurgency. American ideas of what is 'normal' or 'rational' are not universal"
(1:80). To that end, readers are advised to consult such apparently unlikely works
as Small Wars: A Tactical Handbook for Imperial Soldiers (1890) by Charles E. Calwell,
120 OCTOBER
produced at th
with imperial
"Better an Ara
"paradigm sha
altering course
created a natio
Culture is unde
all forms of act
"'operational c
made to define
might be betw
a "society." Inso
tates of exped
kinship system
marry a cousin
ple eligible for
Within the cul
forestall the ch
and visualizatio
(1795-1881). Th
while the ma
Revolutions an
right and only
Marines must
tions], especia
intent must be
necessity of kn
time; of creati
issues; and so o
der's visualizati
to be a new for
However, give
sense of heroi
tary strategy
Iraqi woman w
2006: "You sur
begins coming
Americans hav
nearly everyon
too many blund
she left Iraq. H
in July 2007: 8
risk of famine
Questionnaire: Mirzoeff 121
side Iraq. Further, 43 percent of Iraqi

inadequate access to water, 80 percent
it clear that the counterinsurgency r
of Iraq first has no more substance th
people of New Orleans after Katrina.
further chaos, is now the prime justi
Iran, or even Pakistan: whatever it take
I see many outcomes resulting from
ment has undermined the rational
counterinsurgency policy. At the sam
frame of reference from the "single
racy," both by showing that freedom
the meaning of democracy, as Alai
recently. More particularly, it is timely
of U.S. democracy in his 1935 classic,
ters, Du Bois described how the comb
of the working classes by means of "
such as share-cropping defeated Reco
out, these issues are far from behin
again decide what is meant by "cultu
That question should be informed by
tion, especially the cultivation of bio-
soybeans that have led to the devast
sugar cane for ethanol in the southern
opens what, in hommage to Gramsci,
referring here to the global divide b
States still determined by its post-Re
To what extent is the U.S. military, d
culturally inflected by that settlement?
cally, displacing agricultural producti
"cultural" hegemon? Effective engage
would "bring the (cultural) war home
ing the cultural assumptions on whi
Chaos is based.
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF is Director of the Visual Culture program at New York University and author
of Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture.
RAYMOND PETTIBON
Raymond Pettibon. Above: No Title (I Wish I). 2007. Facing page: No Title (If Tom Cruis
2007. Following page: No Title (You killed - Murdered - ). 2007. All images courtesy the a
and David Zwirner, New York.
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 122-124. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
RAYMOND PETTIBON lives and works in Hermosa Beach, California.
YVONNE RAINER
1. The most powerful art work I've seen in the last several years is a video
Julie Meltzer and David Thorne titled Not a matter of if but when .... It consists of
close-up of the talking head of Rami Farah, a Syrian actor, who rants and rave
Arabic for fifteen minutes about his abject feelings about himself and the stat
the world. It expresses more than anything I've seen the rage and disgust ab
what is going on in the Middle East. From the Web site of Meltzer and Thor
"The improvisations of Rami Farah speak to living in a condition of uncertain
chaos and stasis . . . : Teace. I don't want it. Fairness. Why? Victory? Makes
sick! Love? What a pity. Freedom? Ugly! Friendship? My ass!'" I doubt if it will hav
any effect on the course of things.
2. I do consider the absence of the draft to be a crucial factor, although pri

to the invasion the largest demonstrations in history all over the Western w
pulled millions into the streets. But our failure to stop the Bush juggernaut h
been very discouraging. As long as the U.S. middle and working classes can
about their normal business - despite the tightening economic nooses - thei
habitual amnesia and xenophobias will sustain a prevailing "de-motivation" f
protest. As for artists and academics, though not as amnesiac and xenophobic
live our lives hoping and waiting to be swept up in a mass resistance that only uni
versal military conscription might bring about but which the Republicans a
canny enough not to instigate.
3. As an artist I still have hopes for art as "a socially and politically communi
tive, transgressive, or critical activity." After 9/111 turned to early art transgressio
for inspiration, to the 1950s and to 1900 Vienna. I wasn't able to integrate wh
was happening politically in my contemporary surround. Certainly, "professio
ization" is something that began to plague the dance community years ago as a
organizations became more important and powerful and economic realities p
the squeeze on individual choreographers. Although avant-gardism and transg
sive experimentation have persisted as an ideal among dancers and fil
videomakers, the pressure to institutionalize in order to survive is enormous.
recent hire in a university, I am witness to the demoralizing effect of bureaucrati
demands that turn faculty into administrators at the expense of their research an
production. How do full-time faculty/artists have the time or energy to take to th
streets, write petitions, attend to fifty e-mails a day while trying to produce their
work? In L.A., at least, most of us just want to retreat into our hedonistic havens.
4. Life in general was easier in the '60s for middle-class artists/activists. Re

was cheaper, food was cheaper; most of us didn't expect to make much of a liv
from our artmaking, so we didn't expend our energies in that direction. Indignatio
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 125-126. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Te
126 OCTOBER
at the Vietnam
organizing actio
ings. We were
diffused. Politic
unwilling or afr
5. I think a g
sumerism, e-
ownership, ho
nauts and their
6. Could we fo
ing demands o
Protest to the
do we mount a
From my armc
YVONNE RAINER
lished by MIT Pres
MARTHA ROSLER
1 . A good number of artists and students I know have in one way or anothe
opposed the present war. Before it began, in the summer of 2002, the art, lit
ture, and activist communities came together by the hundreds, if not thousan
and spurred the formation of the activist coalition group United for Peace a
Justice. A group calling itself Not in Our Name issued a statement in opposition
the war both online and in print (including full-page ads in newspapers such
the New York Times, with an impressive number of signatories from the arts and
erature). Numerous public meetings were held by those in the visual arts, as w
as poets, writers, and theater people. Literary groups organized antiwar readin
and performances with celebrity headliners, including events at Lincoln Cen
and other public halls in New York. The activist group Artists Against the War
which I am a founding member) formed in this context. Many young artists,
students, and others interested in symbolic actions and interventions took part
antiwar activities, from writing graffiti and postering to street theater and perfo
mance, as well as joining marches and vigils and engaging in civil disobedien
Many were also involved politically during the election season of 2004, especia
during the huge demonstrations protesting the Republican National Convent
in New York, when people in the institutional categories you mention are m
likely to have joined in.
The most effective action, to my mind, is always the street demonstratio
and march - especially if it is very large or neighborhood-based and frequen
Some of the art actions and publications were striking and poignant; street th
ater and symbolic activities in the context of demonstrations were often quite well
done. As in the 1960s, people these days are regularly informed that street protest
are ancient business, old hat, and useless, but as usual these actions are exact
what command the attention of governments (because traveling, showing up, a
marching require a certain commitment and always pose the possibility of esc
tion and insurrection) and often attract the media and therefore reach a wide
public. Images of hundreds of flag-draped coffins or of giant puppets (Bread
Puppet Theater), of satirical street-theater groups such as Billionaires for Bush
of drumming groups, as well as scores of signs with rude or telling slogans, are th
meat and potatoes of publicity for political actions in public spaces. Cell pho
and Internet organizing and the dissemination of information have joined oth
forms of organizing. The Internet has also led to a new genre of political anim
tion: short, political works both informational and critical - a newly intensif
form of political speech.
2. To answer this and the following questions it is useful to rehearse some o

the salient elements surrounding antiwar protest in the 1960s. The early '60s r
resented the first moment of awakening in the postwar world after the sleep
OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 127-130. © 2008 Martha Rosier and October Magazine, Ltd. and Massach
Institute of Technology.
128 OCTOBER
small-town insul
1950s. The huge
tion was under
of increasingly
ing, and other
amnesia of the
stated ideals an
democracy and
antiwar movem
intensity of the
tions joined wi
ahead. (The book
Nightmare [Hen
suggestive here
fact that the vas
racially: middle
class counterpa
disproportionat
the armed for
academic/vocat
and eventually t
Martin Luther
baby doctor, Be
The long years
served there w
indiscipline, inf
cases, promptly
far fewer soldie
brain injuries. A
ers, the absolut
stateside antiwar
ation in the 1960s and '70s.
I would not say that the absence of a draft has decisively prevented antiwar
organizing now; rather, the fact that the now-aged baby boomers still make up the
largest population group is a large factor in the diminished presence of the
protest movement. The general assault on civil rights, labor, the constitutional rule
of law, environmental and personal rights, and the entire New Deal/post-New Deal
consensus has meant people are fighting on all fronts. The problem is that except
for the remnants of the "global equity" (antiglobalist) and the new environmental
campaigns, these all amount to a struggle against, not for something (e.g., socialism,
social justice). There is no politics of insurgency, only some version of electoral strat-
egy. Nevertheless, students have consistently organized and protested (and have
started an SDS redivivus) and have campaigned assiduously for antiwar candidates
Questionnaire: Rosier 129
(who promptly proceed to sell us

tion mobilized a greatly increas
successful redefinition of the role
the paradigm of liberal education
changing it into an elite form of
suade students to lay low and c
potentiated in large part by the s
sistently running well above inflati
beefed up their own numbers and
In the early 1980s, banks were disco
to humanities students (then bein
everywhere in the country); gov
end this practice. But the ground
along with rents. Now what educ
insurance - especially now that e
child bearing? The lessening of pr
heavy plowing of the fields of co
toward respectability that differs s
As to the relatively paltry faculty
your feelings against the postmod
words and phrases from the past
praxis," the Long March through
moted, gotta put my kids throug
modern play, socialisme ou barbarie,
this crashing of the Utopian drea
requisite disclaimers).
The cynicism of artists in relati
to the young enrollees in graduate p
successful graduate career is to ob
tion or in the year immediately t
and sculptors, but not exclusively.
not fear that a performative rebe
even be an aid. There is a question
uct; but now that they are freed,
and thinking, perhaps they can find
a thought; but I will say that ther
and critical inquiry among my U.S.
The much greater integration o
industry, which has been under w
been part of the pressure on the
is not unfamiliar to workers as a ne
place. For young people (but not
passingly similar and have som
130 OCTOBER
"performing t
unprofessional
to motivate a
unfashionabilit
years ago) are
in the face of
there are no d
ished. But man
superhighway")
Professionaliz
of young peop
the sit-ins and
from their life
hold antiwar t
nounced than that of the artists and art students.
3. It seems very likely that the intensification of the digital world's engagement
with and penetration of our lives has decreased participation in public spaces, but
then again the identification of public space with public sphere, we can all agree,
has been disappearing in the longer term. The idea of the political subject is con-
fined to the legal and electoral arenas. The problem with online activism and
participation in political blogs is that they threaten no one and show little signs of
the mobilization that thus stands as largely individualized and often frankly imagi-
nary. Bread and Puppet Theater, by the way, unlike New York's Living Theatre of
Judith Malina, Julian Beck, et al., has had its forum not primarily in theaters but
in the streets, and continues to do so.
4. The emphasis on technological speech and organizing is somewhat mis-

placed, it seems to me. People are still gathering, though not in the same numbers
(see the demographic argument above). As to the humanities, this relates to the
increasing technicization and instrumentalization of education and knowledge,
which has been following an upward curve since the concerted attempts by the
powers-that-be at pacification of the academy consequent upon the anarchic
decade of the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.
5. Yes. See above.
6. Organize, organize, organize.
MARTHA ROSLER works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and wr

She teaches at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt and the Mason Gross School of the A
University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
KARIN SCHNEIDER AND
NICOLAS GUAGNINI
Vietnam, Iraq, Terror
While the comparison between the Vietnam and the Iraq Wars stands
many regards, it doesn't in a fundamental one: the Vietcong were fighti
their right to self-determination and to construct an equal society. Sectaria
tias and the other factions fighting in Iraq, in contrast, have a terrifying prog
The occupied Iraqi civilians are caught in a war without a possible side to c
We should then begin by making a distinction between the Iraq War and in
and the so-called war on terror.
The program of terror is blatantly retrograde and repressive: religious sup-

pressive control of secular society and elimination of women's rights. In sum, it is
a pre-1789 agenda, effectively put forward in the U.S. by the Republican Party.
Terror is not outside this society; it's among us. The basic duty of any person
within the cultural sphere of the West is to fight terror, beginning with the imme-
diate space of professional action.
Protests
It must be noted - or rather not forgotten - that the invasion of Iraq

prompted massive demonstrations worldwide, including in the U.S.
In South America, anti-imperialism revived by the invasion galvanized the
entire political spectrum to the point that a party with any laterally or marginally
declared support to the U.S. is not electable at any level: city, region, or country.
The Iraq War helped to speed up the subcontinent's tilt toward a democratically
elected Left that has, after forty years of generals and neoliberal technocrats,
placed in key cultural positions vocal antiwar advocates belonging to the ranks of
the intelligentsia. The current ministers of culture of Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and
Argentina are, respectively, Magdalena Cajias, a historian and filmmaker; Paulina
Urrutia, an actress; Gilberto Gil, a tropicalist musician; and Jose Nun, a sociolo-
gist, whose landmark academic article "Middle Class Military Coup" (1967)
exposed the complicity of the educated liberals with the advent of U.S.-backed
military rule in the subcontinent.
The Question Concerning Technology
The Internet has fulfilled Brecht's 1932 demand of radio: that the receiver
be a producer. Political action in the West using the Internet appears to be confined
132 OCTOBER
to organization
to be a rerout
tool. But the I
bodies, agencie
tions are far
nation-state and
If anything m
decentralized a
strategies, like
don't obey or c
Classic cell st
party that acte
tures were ul
compromise at
ologies, from
fundamentalist
There is an u
space of mass
part of the pr
technological i
hippie and ant
abandoned the
president of Ch
oil, gun, and p
ernment at eve
Univ
The late 1960s

moment in wh
working class
above everythi
fectly well tha
possibly enhan
Admissions is
How can the so
ratives emerg
spectatorial in f
useful political
tives are determ
elitist at the root.
It is specialization and the triumph of the disciplinarian formatted as career
Questionnaire: Schneider and Guagnini 133
paths that erased the possibility of collective action, tran

tion, even within the humanities. Franz Boas and Aby W
to correspond today. The disciplinarian presses knowled
fixed identities, regardless of the relative autonomy of
tion between methodology and interpretation as the locu
and value production stratifies the circulation of such
political action.
Students
The generational goal of most students is to graduate

off their loans, and satisfy their parents' mandate. Chem
ity and behavior, once the territory of the contestator
against the normative reality of the American Dream, is
health services pushing antidepressants or whatever uppe
tee that freshmen don't drop out or underperform, dr
stats. The institution itself deals the drugs to assure its stat
The Artist
Defining the artist as a "highly paid and market-depen

tainment" implies that artists exist only if they succes
market. This is true only for a small fraction of artists. Am
ber of South American and Eastern European artists ac
present that are being "discovered" by institutions and b
the market. Both inside and outside the U.S. the enormou
on the brink, whether they produce cultural craft, info
souvenirs, fetishized merchandising of radicalism, celebr
modes and moods of relation, chic or formalized depicti
(which may even include their participation), or lucid cr
We have all known since June 1968 that there is no s
cle and that no matter how radical or heroic the aesthetics of denunciation, no
matter how astute or personalized the analysis, you can at best provide a model to
explain why your oppression as a bourgeois artist and intellectual makes you an
accessory to that very oppression. Whatever your production, it will be reified and
instrumentalized. This irreducible double bind is the state from which we always
work, not a point at which we suddenly find ourselves rendered inane by Art
Miami Basel and the hedge-fund boom. The fact that the art market exploded is
not an indication that the ethos of all practitioners has imploded. The very auton-
omy of the cultural and artistic spheres that signals domestication to capital
134 OCTOBER
enables discur
to be exploite
What to Dot
As a testimony to the fragmentation of the field (and our own), we can at

best replace that question with another: what do we do? A basic precondition of
political expression and antiwar activism is some kind of exchange space (or
counter-public sphere) in terms not absolutely dictated by market forces.
Experimenting with the subversion of the structures and forms in power is a
long-standing South American tradition. We take our clues from Liberation
Theology and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which effectively co-opted
the repressive and socially enlarged resonating spaces of the Catholic Church and
the educational systems to enact changes at both molecular and structural levels.
The social form of exchange that epitomizes the art market is naturally the
gallery. Rather than making the gallery an art work itself, we attempt to reconfig-
ure and resignify it as a social space (which we specifically choose not to define as
an art work either), to use the advantages of privatization for our own ends, for
once; to make it a means of production in which younger artists can assert their
genealogies and benefit from explicit endorsements, hence generating a system of
public legitimation not necessarily regulated by sales; a place where art history is
read and reconstructed without institutional agendas and constraints, to enable us
and others to see, and see ourselves and themselves seeing; a space in which dis-
cursive and curatorial coordinates are exclusively geared to the desires and
politics of the producers and their created, found, or preexisting audiences. The
fate of subcultures and countercultures is absorption. We meant our experiment
to have its own death inscribed in its program, setting three full seasons as the
timeframe for its implosion.
KARIN SCHNEIDER and NICOLAS GUAGNINI are founding members and 20 percent shareholders
of Orchard, Lower East Side, New York.
GREGORY SHOLETTE
Clearly the response by artists and academics to public events was

direct and confrontational in the not-so-distant past than today. On Ma
members of the Art Workers Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group
mock gun battle in front of the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1976 a
art historians and artists produced an anti-catalog denouncing the natio
racism of the bicentennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American
late as the early 1980s, members of Group Material collaborated w
Salvadorian support group to curate an exhibition opposed to United S
icy in Central America for a popular dance club, and the collective Po
Documentation/Distribution paraded a blue, blimp-like Pac Man with
tures of Uncle Sam in front of the White House. Militant street theater, inter-
ventionist scholarship, activist curating, artists directly challenging their own well-
being by denouncing museums and the art market - all of this appears
inconceivable today. Perhaps the last artist-organized cultural campaign aimed at
mass-mobilization in the United States was Artists Call Against Intervention in
Central America in the mid-1980s. Organized primarily in New York City by veter-
ans of the 1960s such as Leon Golub and Lucy Lippard (as well as younger
organizers such as Doug Ashford of Group Material), Artists Call brought
together younger artists, alternative spaces, small commercial dealers, and even a
few major art galleries. Skillful organizing convinced these varied cultural partici-
pants that acting to oppose U.S. military buildup in Latin America was ethically
necessary and politically invaluable. (Imagine today a similar series of exhibitions
and projects calling for the resignation and trial of President Bush and Vice
President Cheney for human rights violations.) The focus on mass mobilization,
however, began to shift with the tactical approach of ACT UP and the Guerrilla
Girls. Both of these groups, starting in the mid-1980s, moved away from broad-
based ideological critique in order to highlight and hopefully resolve specific
instances of social injustice. One might say that this shift reflects the demise of
one political paradigm - the totalizing critique of the New Left - and the rise of
another - single-issue campaigning associated with Non-Governmental Organiz-
ations (NGOs). In this sense, the counter-WTO events initiated in Seattle in 1999
represent a new type of mass collectivism in which numerous individuated inter-
ests converge in the form of a symbiotic swarm, as opposed to a mode of
collectivism in which ideological positions or a unique vision of society draws par-
ticipants together, as was the case with Modernism, or is the case with radical
Islamism. Three structural changes therefore distinguish the current political cli-
mate from the more aggressive, social commitment of artists, academics, and
cultural institutions in the United States roughly between the mid-1960s to the
early '80s, including:
1. The enclosure of public spaces through privatization;
136 OCTOBER
2. The dismis
3. The loss o
across a range
The latter co
political engag
and gay libera
radicalism of
hierarchical a
especially aft
centers, some
demonstration
onset of war.
filled their co
paralytic shoc
heartfelt opp
extra-parliam
immune to th
tical result of
the actual spa
(high rents, l
seem worthw
alternatives b
the possibility
in turn has le
the past. But
tor to consider
has occurred
aimed at limit
rific events
neoconservati
field like the
The United St
Steven Kurtz
such a purpos
Cultural resi
mutation in a
Tactical medi
retooled the c
ries as those
activism of th
front autho
technologies.
ment, celebra
Questionnaire: Sholette 137
of this is clear enough, after the fa

activists fear the re-imposition of cent
capitalist hegemony. This has transfo
is the Modernist notion of social plan
find horizontal networks of "pro-am
"collectivized" by information techno
it is impossible not to see this same
corresponding to the precepts of neo
Do It Yourself (DIY) approach gained
activists in the 1970s, becoming near
proportion to the disappearance of p
tive or countercultural space. What is
many younger artists today see their
even if it is not always directly interve
ness of this new oppositional actor
orphan. Yet she or he may also repre
quite different from that of the '60s
ceptual distractedness that Walter Be
be endemic to cyberspace, but it doe
leads to depoliticization. After all, t
long working hours did not prevent t
ining a society with different social
or what David Harvey describes as
through the return of what Marx ca
Klein terms the Shock Doctrine), is
including artists, to nineteenth- and
postwelfare state, people simply have le
political organizing or protest. (I hav
concerns about incurring repression
comments regarding the Kurtz case
testors at the Republican National C
also fear taking too much time away
wars over oil reserves and other resour
and the mechanization of leisure tim
markedly different today from the wo
cal proletarian class-consciousness
manufacturing and the disappearance
and systematic resistance. Thus resist
past. It moves from the industrial work
the everyday.
The return of precarious modes of
decentralized organizing. Digital net
markets depend upon for expansion
138 OCTOBER
means of such
in the U.S. to the war is disconnected from familiar institutional forms such as
unions, universities, museums, political parties, or even alternative spaces. On th

cultural front, such U.S.-based groups as Code Pink, Billionaires for Bush, Cente
for Urban Pedagogy, the Change You Want to See, Reverend Billy and the Church
of Stop Shopping, as well as global collectives like 6Plus in the Dheisheh Refugee
Camp, Palestine, or the HIJOS group in Argentina who focus on justice for th
disappeared, or the Independent Media Center of Cape Town, South Africa, sim-
ply do not show up on the art world's radar screen. While some collectives have
gained limited visibility - the Yes Men and Critical Art Ensemble for example
even these groups tend to be wheeled out only when a critic or curator needs to
signify something political. In other words, this other cultural production is like
missing mass or cultural dark matter, a spectral presence within the economy o
the art establishment. What could be done to "make intellectual and artistic oppo
sition to the war more active and effective" is for privileged intellectuals to
overcome their bias that significant cultural activity only takes place within th
sanctioned institutions of high culture. Naturally, if one's intellectual horizon is
limited to this reified and instrumentalized sphere, it is impossible to see beyond
what Julian Stallabrass calls Art Incorporated. It is simply no longer possible to dis-
connect the intention of an artist's work, even when the content is deeply social or
attempting an institutional critique, from the marketplace in which even hedge
fund investors now partake. Which is not to say that an art work is entirely deter-
mined by capital, any more than an exhibition in a large cultural institution can
never enhance broader political mobilization, but at the risk of sounding reduc-
tive I will assert the need to confront the tremendous power of the market ove
artistic production directly, by rethinking the way aesthetic values are established,
as well as reevaluating the way artists are educated. Nevertheless, radical change
never initiated by cultural elites. Instead, what scholars, artists, and historians ca
do is support ongoing political resistance by developing a sustained, critica
engagement with creative practices external to or even indifferent toward th
established art world and its economy. It is my contention that such informal, non-
market, and socially based production is already having an increasing influenc
on the thinking of professionally trained visual artists. Now theorists and histor
ans need to catch up.
GREGORY SHOLETTE is a New York-based artist and writer, and a founding member of two artist
collectives: Political Art Documentation/Distribution (1980-88) and REPOhistory (1989-2000). H
coedited Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 with Blake Stimson, and The
Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life with Nato Thompson. He
Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art and Art History at Queens College and is cur
rently working on a book about the political economy of the art world and his concept of creativ
"dark matter" for Pluto Press.
KAJA SILVERMAN
I participated in many peace demonstrations in San Francisco in the months

leading up to the Iraq War, and each time I was overwhelmed by the size and
diversity of the crowd. I saw other veterans of the Vietnam protests, but also for-
mer soldiers, small children, people in their seventies and eighties, high school
and college students, and representatives of every other imaginable cultural
group. Although we were all there to register our opposition to an impending mil-
itary action, our way of coming together was as important as our protest. In the
days and weeks following September 11, the Bush administration engaged in the
most pernicious kind of nation-building: it demanded that we all experience the
same outrage, the same hatred, and the same will-to-punish. The crowds that gath-
ered on the streets of San Francisco refused to be interpellated in this way, either
by the government, or by the ghosts of revolutions past. Instead of cohering into a
1960s-style counter-culture, they formed affectively heterogeneous assemblages.
Because this kind of group exists only so long as its members are co-present,
it has no lasting political force unless it is documented, and this documentation is
widely disseminated. For this reason, most of the demonstrators stayed until the
helicopters had finished their "count," and I turned on C-SPAN when I got home,
to watch its coverage of the New York and Washington peace rallies. But since not
even the New York Times was willing to publish photographs of these events, those
who participated in them were left feeling that they had never occurred.
I was so depressed when the Iraq War began that I didn't think I could teach,
but eventually I realized that one of my courses was an ideal venue for thinking
about our historical moment. Since my students were as dispirited as I was, they
jumped at the opportunity to have this kind of conversation, and for the rest of
the semester our classroom became the site of another sort of political assem-
blage: one that - although also provisional and affectively heterogeneous - was
self-documenting, and had far more staying power than a peace demonstration.
The papers written in that class were unlike any I have read before or since, and
they showed me that there is more than one way of mounting a Student Movement.
When I finished reading them, I started working on one of my own. Here is part
of what I wrote.
Divine Wrong
In Freud's first official account of the Oedipus complex, the mother is

more important than the father, and aggression a by-product of desire.1 However,
1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74),
vol. 4, pp. 262-64.
140 OCTOBER
immediately be
analyst summa
patricide takes
than the proces
that Oedipus hi
murdered man
story, the fath
was once a prim
brothers. He ke
became adults.
what they wan
loved him. Wh
prerogatives, b
therefore bande
themselves, bot
him as their id
Through this
death than he
dominated and
through their
unit. "The viol
of each one of
Totem and Tabo
fication with
meal, which is
a commemorat
of so many th
(p. 142). Freud r
and more trut
version" of th
In "Thoughts
World War I, F
in human socie
after that war
agency of dest
erotic drive is a
an agency of di
the death we d
2. Freud, Totem an
pp. 140-46.
3. Freud, Beyond t
Works, vol. 18, pp.
Questionnaire: Silverman 141
unpleasurable, and dying reduces e

Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud
and Thanatos as a war. He also maintain
than that of the individual psyche; its st
the survival of the world. Finally, Freu
drive, and installs them in the positio
process, civilization ceases to be a hum
the erotic drive achieves primacy over
death drive succeeds in reversing this r
Civilization is a process in the service

bine single human individuals, and af
ples and nations, into one great unity
has to happen, we do not know; the wo
collections of men are to be libidinal
man's natural aggressive instinct,
opposes this programme of civilizati
derivative and main representative of
found alongside Eros and which sha
now, I think, the meaning of the ev
obscure to us. It must present the st
as it works itself out in the human spe
We are prevented from dismissing th

fiction by the uncanny precision with
rary American society. They also help
toward all things sexual of those withi
cutions, practice cut-throat capitalism
Freud concludes the paragraph from
breathtaking proposition - the propos
screen behind which this struggle can
giants," he writes, "that our nurse-ma
Heaven" (p. 122). But as we will see late
the role played in human history by Er
gle between them - and not the one we
Like the primal father, we begin life

ers. Civilization demands that we d
ourselves. We comply with this demand
4. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in

Works, vol. 21, p. 122.
142 OCTOBER
Since no one
psychic agency
is, of course,
the father, the
jection of th
murder," an
Fascinatingly,
derives not f
directs it away
also not castrat
This might s
sion, one that
super-ego is th
measure the e
ure to approx
says not only,
father's place
transgressing t
deep into the
repressed that
between these
the unconsciou
gain by repre
advantages in
or kill other
who don't.6 T
at its disposal,
Freud writes
because "livin
Although the
for the father
only it can (m
approval, the
and that is to
results in an
become even "b
5. Freud, TheEgo a
p. 58.
6. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 128-29.
7. Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 53, 58.
8. Judith Butler provides an extended reading of this reflexive "turn" in her brilliant book The
Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). She finds it not only in Freud, but also
in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Althusser.
the subject are more and more ones th

which he has no conscious access, he be
The super-ego will no doubt uncover ot
more terrible than those that have alr
subject begins to believe that he is irre
into dread.
No one can tolerate this pressure forever. Sooner or later, we all succumb to
the temptation to rid ourselves of it by re-exteriorizing our aggression. This re-
exteriorization may take the classically male form of brute violence, but it may
also take the classically female form of moral disapproval; we then identify with
the super-ego and judge others with the same severity it shows us. Most danger-
ously of all, we can engage in both of these forms of violence at once. "Guilt" is
expelled from the ego and relocated within the real. We become avenging angels,
eager to serve the cause of justice; if we take up arms against others, it is not to
injure them, but rather to "discipline" them. The paranoid logic through which
this conversion takes place goes something like this: "It is not I who am evil, but
rather the other. He must be found, condemned, and punished, before he injures
more innocent people. I will undertake this mission, because I am good."
Although what I have just described is usually called "morality," it would be more
accurate to call it "moral sadism."9 It is the shortest and easiest path to a zero
degree of tension, and it is also an extremely effective way of becoming once again
one's own ideal. For those of us who are Americans, this is a familiar road; we
have traversed it so often that we know every twist and turn.
But the most problematic entity within the psychic structure that is sup-
posed to "civilize" us is not the super-ego, but rather the ego-ideal. The ego-ideal
may defer the moment at which we will be omnipotent, but it in no way challenges
our desire to achieve this goal. As Freud observes in Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, narcissism does not end with the Oedipus complex, but merely
assumes a new form. The ego-ideal "gradually gathers up from the environment
the demands which the environment makes upon the ego and which the ego can-
not always rise to; so that a man, when he cannot be satisfied with his ego itself,
may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in [his] ego-ideal."10 And if we take
9. There are a number of affinities between my account of moral sadism and Butler's discussion of
"ethical violence" in two of her other books: Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham, 2005),
pp. 40-82, and Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). Like my forth-
coming book Flesh of My Flesh, Precarious Life grows out of, and is a response to, our current historical
crisis. Jacqueline Rose also arrives at many of the same conclusions in her book Why War? (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), and what she says about the first Gulf War is equally pertinent to the second: "Only if
Hussein was evil personified could Bush - in what appeared to be a battle of wills between the two
men - claim the right to go to war. . . . The absolute veils the more troubling forms of ambivalence and
mutual implication: the shadow of self-interest (oil), the fact that the West had at the very least armed,
and could in some sense be said to have created, Saddam Hussein" (p. 25).
10. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 18, p. 110.
144 OCTOBER
pleasure in it
other people's,
In "Function
tinguishes betw
The first of th
the one the so
of the Law. To
the real fathe
other two. In
ded in a large
In "Aggressive
Lacan argues
absence of all
of organic fo
everyday inti
itself."12 Mak
prerogatives,
This has led t
"isolation of th
But Lacan 's u
in "traditiona
indulgence, n
word to chara
mal father. T
distance betw
there is virtu
chasm. And what determines how wide this distance will be are those "saturations"
of the ego-ideal and super-ego whose disappearance Lacan laments. The subjects
who have the most access to narcissistic pleasure after the resolution of the
Oedipus complex are those who are "entitled" to occupy the position of father,
either in the present or in the future. And it is not only women who are excluded
from this position, but many men as well. American society does everything it can
to shore up the authority of the white, upper-middle-class father, but it is indiffer-
ent to what happens to a working-class father's authority when he cannot feed his
children. And even the way we treat working-class fathers pales by comparison to
the way we treat another group of fathers; by systematically criminalizing African-
American men, we have stripped the vast majority of them of the right to
represent for their children either the ego-ideal or the super-ego.
11. Jacques Lacan, "Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (1953), in Ecrits:
A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 66-67.
12. Lacan, "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis" (1948), in Ecrits: A Selection, pp. 27-28.
I am not arguing for an equal-oppor

society's ego-ideal is, the greater is its
more effective at masking social, econ
heading off real change at the "pass,"
Again, we do not have to look far to find
the rapid growth of poverty in the Un
played within it by the prison-industrial
who feel themselves capable of repr
extremely small. However, since Amer
mary sustenance from religion, it remain
life. Visitors coming from other indus
how "Third World" our cities look. But
what our forebears saw: "God's own coun
The last three words come from Fre

Illusion to convey the peculiar piety o
which I refer, he treats "God's own c
notion of a "Chosen People." He also ch
fantasy. "Now that God was a single pe
could recover the intimacy and intensity
one had done so much for one's father,
be his only beloved child, his Chosen P
dent how a plural category like "Chos
take the place of one whose defining f
cepts have a high narcissistic yield.
In order to cease being individuals a
Group Psychology and the Analysis of th
with each other at the level of the ego
position of leader by making him their
look like a renunciation of self-love, si
group one must abandon the hope of b
for those whose narcissism is wounded. F
group is augmented through its unificati
ber is freed from the demand that he
it is a requirement of the group that h
all of the other members of the group
opportunities for a kind of collective Sch
13. Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), in The

vol. 21, p. 19.
14. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 129-33.
146 OCTOBER
them is any be
order for the
"father" and ea
this violence s
leader. Hetero
the Land. Beca
the ties bindi
depends upon
the leader. Wh
was not, as I
rather, that h
mal father in
because it rect
our most forbidden wishes and who affirms us when we do.
The two primary groups discussed by Freud are the army and the church.
Interestingly, he suggests that the army is more prone to disintegration than the
church, since its leaders often fail to provide the love that their followers
require.15 He also imputes the neuroses precipitated by World War I to the fact
that German military officers disciplined and punished the soldiers serving under
them, rather than calming and rewarding them.16 By playing the role of a super-
ego rather than a wildly permissive ego-ideal, they violated the fundamental
principles of group psychology. This explanation of war neuroses seems to contra-
dict the one offered in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the latter work, Freud
attributes such disorders to the unpreparedness of certain soldiers for their expo-
sure to the forces of death and destruction (pp. 12-13). However, the death from
which most of us are in flight is not literal, but psychic; as Freud wrote in 1923, the
fear of death is "something that happens between the ego and the super-ego."
And we experience it when we feel "hated and persecuted by the super-ego,
instead of loved."1?
Through the conflation of church and state, which was already so evident
during Freud's lifetime, America heads this danger off at the pass. Since it is
"God's own country," those who fight on its behalf need not fear a loss of love;
their earthly leaders may fail them, but their heavenly leader never will. Every war
we fight is a holy war, and although we may walk through the valley of death, we
need not fear its evil. America has also attached another safety latch to group psy-
chology. Freud refers at one point in his study to the "psychological poverty of
groups," and he maintains that "this danger is most threatening where the bonds
of a society are chiefly constituted by the identification of its members with one
another, while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance that
15. Ibid., pp. 93-95.

16. Ibid., p. 95.
1 7. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 58.
should fall to them in the formation of

tural state of America would give us a g
to civilization which is thus to be feared."18
Now obviously America is not leaderless, nor has it been at any moment since
its constitution. On the contrary, the executive branch of our government arrogates
ever more power to itself, not only at "home" but also abroad. It has repeatedly
declared the United States to be beyond the laws that hem in other countries, and
it is well on its way to monopolizing the planet's resources. It ruthlessly imposes its
will on other nations and wages war on them when they resist. If the ambitions of
our current administration are realized, the United States will soon be a monumen-
tal version of the primal father. It is nevertheless true that there is much less
psychological distance between us and our leaders than in the groups discussed by
Freud. And although we might expect this "populism" to function as a counter-
force to the dream of empire, it is an excellent vehicle for its realization.
Americans tend to favor leaders who embody two contradictory values:
mediocrity and narcissism. Many of our most popular presidents have been unre-
markable in every way - poorly educated, unworldly, and of average or below-
average intelligence. They fall asleep in official meetings, are prone to mala-
propisms, and confuse countries with continents. Yet rather than attempting to
conceal their mediocrity, they flaunt it; they show themselves to be no better than
we are, and perhaps much worse. At least in recent history, Americans have also
been willing to support presidents who are openly dishonest and self-serving.
Although the policies that such leaders implement make almost everybody's lives
worse, they retain our confidence, because nothing can diminish their self-satis-
faction; they are immune to external criticism, and no internal voice reins in their
drive for power, wealth, and destruction. From them we learn how absurd it is to
strive for perfection, and to suspend our self-love until we achieve it. There is no
need to postpone narcissistic gratification, because we can be the ugliest of
Americans and still dominate the world. And what could be more pleasurable?
It might seem surprising that a nation accustomed to thinking of itself as

"Christian" would make "search and destroy" its political manifesto. The Gospels,
at least, are imbued with a very different spirit. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they shall be called the children of God," we read there; and "he that is without sin
among you, let him first cast a stone."19 Christianity also absolves us our "sins" and
should therefore free us from the anxiety that so often precipitates the turning
around of self-aggression into hetero-aggression. Yes, it says, we are all guilty, and
18. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 115-16.

19. Matthew 5:9, and John 8:7, in The Holy Bible: King James Version (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 950 and 1059.
148 OCTOBER
our guilt has

the price that
has died in ou
as our Savior, a
But although
is, first of all,
a position in h
doctrine promi
is the bourn fr
the transition
the Judgm Last
ascending to h
continues to i
evangelical pra
If simple fait
the Gospels an
as closely as p
and when our
reciprocal act
they are close
much libido in
which our eg
demand to lov
of Christianity
but devolve on
But now this
Instead, it expr
a Salvation Ar
"God's own co
and the depor
hand, an exp
reaches of th
between them
every mornin
20. Freud, Civiliz

VII: The Ethics of
KAJA SILVERMAN
16BEAVER
Ayreen Anastas
Rene Gabri
Benj Gerdes
Jesal Kapadia
Pedro Lasch
Naeem Mohaiemen
Paige Sarlin
1 . a. It is good to talk about the war on Iraq, but why only focus on Iraq? Where
do we place Afghanistan? Guantanamo Bay? The Patriot Act? The occupation of
Palestine? Or last year's war on Lebanon? Why not at least refer to the inane "war
on terror," which preserves the infinite and all-encompassing dimension of what
we are confronting? How to begin to discuss Darfur and our impending ecological
crisis within this same conversation? How do we discuss the large-scale disposses-
sion being carried out in the name of development and "free markets" across the
globe? How to connect these global issues to what is happening in American towns
and cities or just on or across our borders? And the struggles last year in Oaxaca?
You ask, how are artists and academics and cultural institutions responding to
Iraq? It seems that your question is designed to produce only one answer, too
often isolating it and removing it from a much larger picture. We need to try and
connect the dots, which does not mean not resisting the war in Iraq. It just means
that our activism and our daily activities need to connect. Our resistance needs to
begin to be lifelong and embedded in our everyday activities. As cultural workers,
if we are ignorant about the connections and we are not actively seeking to dis-
cover them, we are part of the problem.
P.S. Since when did magazines, dealers, and collectors become cultural institu-
tions?
(Rene Gabri)
b. A war is a war is a war with only certain tongues spoken in October. Breaking
News: "the mainstream media has also claimed responsibility."
The most inspiring examples are found in small circles and unpredictable
forms among the multitudes, not among the anointed or representative few.
Search through the 16Beaver Mondays or Articles archive (www.16beavergroup.org/
monday/) or the projects/ events pages (www.16beavergroup.org/). There isn't a
month since 1999 without a mention, or discussion, or reading, or screening, or
action, or project, or protest about Iraq Sanctions, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq
War(s), Guantanamo, Palestine and the Occupied Territories, Sudan, the WTO,
150 OCTOBER
Electoral Scam
sift through th
in a few years
war. This majo
the various ye
media or the tw
(Ped
We also have
greatest signi
quences of all
moment of vi
before it. An
map of creatio
(Lasc
Our work at
connections an
conference wi
the city of Ne
lated, taken, a
Some of its sig
fetishized (in
of what motiva
and change the
uring out the
other. By conn
ing what and
ongoing oppos
situations name
(Ga
c. as*ssess: to
rate or amoun
rate, b: to sub
property) for
value of; 5: to c
Ass ess S S? I
get grants, cr
assess. I hope w
sponsible (or c
multiplication
(Las
Questionnaire: 16Beaver 151
2. a. There are two common yet trou

worth addressing. First, it is implied th
succeeded in creating a true counter
ourselves to. While we can agree that
of the war was better than the war i
tance and the people involved in it w
genocidal state criminals of that per
transform what they were fighting ag
of the people in that generation and th
they created a great model for us to
war a success seems especially crude
Vietnamese survivor. Second, it is im
ment should be to end the war, just
would ask here is: if all had "gone w
"no more American lives were being lo
would you/we be talking about an op
I hope we would, but in that case o
tem that needs to be changed, even
bring to justice the people responsibl
tion, even if only so future leaders m
footsteps?
In terms of the present counter-public sphere, there are many examples of
active opposition wherever you look. However, our contemporary forms of censor-
ship and self-censorship have become so sophisticated and powerful that one of
their largest dangers seems to be the way in which they make us unable to see the
very movements we are a part of ... very much in the way that classic factory alien-
ation breaks the connection between the worker and the fruits of his or her labor.
It is precisely the existing connections that are the most threatening to militaris-
tic, greedy, and territorial minds. They go straight for the destruction, criticism,
or obscurement of these links across boundaries, and they have shown all willing-
ness to use any means and resources necessary to do it. If we simply rebuild the
links or point at them, the picture of a massive and brave creative production
(and opposition) emerges.
(Lasch)
This question of visibility "now" as compared to "then" always comes up, but
precisely because the resistance today is far-flung and transnational in a way that was
not possible during Vietnam. Much of the pan-nation solidarity organizing of that
era was between the United States and Europe - the iconic images of student
action at Columbia, Berkeley, etc., ended up inspiring other direct actions in
Germany and France (often with different methods and intensity), and vice versa.
In Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins's book 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), juxtaposed
press images construct a story of parallel, perpetually interconnected movements.
152 OCTOBER
But just lookin

sound and fury
war movement.
sprawling, tran
instead of bein
network. There
of New York an
happening.
Paradoxically,
of resistance ins
U.S. population
perception that
trast, consider
virtually unkno
discount the po
because American activists fail to reach out to much wider networks. Or both?
(Naeem Mohaiemen)
One clear arena has been the large groupings of social forums and smaller-
scale international and regional gatherings taking place throughout the world.
The impact of these meetings may not be immediately visible, but they will alter
global politics significantly in the coming decades. Artists and cultural workers are
finding their way into these networks, but they need to be integrated as a part of
the discussion, not as a side show or decoration.
(Gabri)
b. I do not see less motivation in the current generations as related to previous

ones. I'm afraid we tend to romanticize past struggles and in so doing fail to see
the power of our common present and the ways we challenge it. How long did it
take to end the Vietnam War? How many years, how many dead on all sides? What
might possibly help us now is if we stop looking for the center. The center will find
itself, if it is needed. A large part of the damage caused by corporate media and
party politics is justified by the notion that they are creating a middle ground. On
the one hand, this is simply false. Rupert Murdoch is not a figure in the center,
and there is clearly no equivalent to him on the Left. But even if it were true, we
should ask ourselves: a center for what? There is too much focus on negotiation
and polling of "public opinion" these days. Majorities can be wrong and have been
shown so repeatedly and violently. By insisting that we are connected to people
who disagree, but that we are voicing a viewpoint (a minority one) and will con-
tinue to act in a particular way regardless of what a "majority" reportedly thinks
(or how they censor us), we are not being elitist, intolerant, or undemocratic.
Within the U.S. this set of implications is one of the most successful concoctions
of the Republican movement against the status of culture, education, and dissent.
It is also what keeps Democrats in exi

integrity and respect for their constitu
but that we think we have somethin
the repercussions. It is also an importan
ments that dare stand against conven
away at first chance. Let's join and f
the various "parallel governments" est
tions, the governing structures of r
borders and corporate hierarchies. T
deep global crisis of the structures o
with alternative forms of transnati
find these in "the center."
(Lasch)
The critique and "opposition" to the war on terror is building around more
than just the "barbarous acts" perpetrated by this government against a foreign
country. That this could be a formulation or appositive for the war indicates an
oversimplification of the very nature of what it is that one would be "opposing."
It's also terribly symptomatic and illustrative of one of the central dynamics from
which activism and discourse around Iraq has suffered. Namely, the absence of a
political critique of how the war is in fact an articulation and intensification of
business as usual for the system we are operating under. The absence of a more
nuanced and varied analysis of both the war and its opposition and the forms that
"protest" and "critique" can and do take lead to this apparent "de-motivation"
your question points to. For me, and for many others who collected on the streets
of Chicago, New York, Rome, Paris, London ... on February 15, 2003, we were
participating in an international protest that was larger than any other protest
against a war, ever. That many of the people collected there believed that if we had
a large enough number and loud enough voice we could prevent the war from
happening led to tremendous demoralization when the bombing began. Protest
and opposition appeared futile. For me, the absence of an analysis that went
beyond simple opposition and moral conviction was palpable and the cause of the
political depression that ensued. We've forgotten that the movement to end
Vietnam was just that, a movement with many factions and groups with a whole
range of reasons for opposing the war.
(Paige Sarlin)
Much has been written and said about the coordinated global protests that
have taken place against the war, including the ones on February 15. And I recall a
point made by C. Clark Kissinger at a panel discussion we organized shortly after
"victory" was proclaimed in April 2003. Clark was one of the principal organizers of
the first march on Washington against the Vietnam War. He emphasized that we
should not forget that without those worldwide protests in 2003, this war could
154 OCTOBER
have involved
were "significa
in the '60s, th
being waged o
civil rights str
the struggles f
struggle for di
anunderlying
fact also worth
sidering that p
that those cri
exchange for
rights, and fr
this same issue
Paris this year
so focused on
ignored the n
own parties, s
They abandone
overall plan. Th
essary discuss
Leftist politics
(Ga
c. The signifi
the U.S. public
estimated. The
discourse of t
States is actua
reservists and
adage that peop
to lose. Within
uing the war
the most activ
the work don
the Gold Star F
(Sarlin)
Conventional wisdom says that there are no bad questions. But let's say that
better questions are able to generate thought, are thought-provoking. This kind
of question is what fills most of our airwaves and television sets. It only serves to
break people into camps. Yes, no, for, against.
Do we actually think that we are going to convince the majority of Americans
to reintroduce a draft? Or is this qu

dimension of this war? If the latter,
directly? We need better questions if w
ent opinions and start thinking about
ecological catastrophe we are in.
(Gabri)
3. a. One should speak of professiona

only in relation to the artist. Somehow
as the nonprofessional by definition,
be cleared up first: the whole society
magazines - like this one - are the on
comes to other spheres, problems, qu
their specialized field, they will often
they are doing. This happens in art,
think, for example, about the so-calle
rate his political desires for justice and
occupied Palestine that will undermine
It should also be noted that the ma
market dependent. Sadly, many wish
to be addressed in another forum. An
dependent may not really be the mo
given the fact that the main supporter
it's easy to get confused.
Resistance to professionalization is
artist. A professional artist is someo
imposed onto her/his being as an ar
and thus misses the opportunity of t
to come.
(Ayreen Anastas)
To describe "professionalization" within cultural production as

with the artists indicates a lack of structural analysis. Rather, the circui
art fair, biennial, and museum - which seems to provide a valid field
many critics select "viable" models for art practices, politicized or not -
certain across-the-board consent toward professionalization. Thi
reveals a lack of scope and an unwillingness to set the bar any higher
your options, yes, a certain apolitical trend will likely emerge.
There exists a too-prevalent critical trope where artists first reward
market are doubly valorized as the most important political practitio
moment. Often praising their savvy or cynicism, critics affirm these ar
heuristic fallacies in which political practitioners who more frequently s
as activists are said to participate.
156 OCTOBER
It may be im
irreconcilable
capable of sup
cized practices
seem to critiq
market. The p
an alternative.
(Ben
b. Professionalization is a sickness of the Western world, thus it has affected a

wide range of its population. It separates and parcels life into compartments that
are alien to how life is or could be: one issue always connected to the other, one
idea to the other, one notion to another, and so on. There is hardly any separation
possible.
Unfortunately, professionalization is a part of the logic of the market. So
those who argue that we must accept the market miss this point. The logic of the
businessman rules; profit and self-interest are the priority, if not the only logic,
that moves a professional. If someone is aware of this, then they are ready to see
the world as it is and act in a way that does not separate what they do, how they
think, and how they live.
(Anastas)
c. The American academic institution is not only home to some of the brightest
students and professors but a nest of countless corporations. What do we expect? Is
it not strange that one has to pay a huge sum of money to be able to study in such a
"rich" country? We can also speak of examples of how harmful these institutions
can be to the (poorer) communities of cities they are in, such as Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, which has displaced a largely African-American commu-
nity for the sake of building a Bio Tech Park and homes for its professors.
(Anastas)
Professionalization can be seen as a result of trends such as rising student

and consumer debt, lack of job security, prohibitively expensive cost of medical
coverage and care, but overall it points toward the increasingly neoliberal agenda
espoused by universities and museums - both institutions figuring again in this
process as deeply entrenched partners in aggressive urban redevelopment schemes.
If professionalization is now taken to be almost a prerequisite for an artist living in
a Western metropolis - what are the conditions of survival for people at large?
Universities, now run as mercenary real estate ventures (and the students treated
as customers to be placated), contradict their avowed purposes.
(Gerdes)
d. It all depends on which artists and which academics are in question: the ones
that have accepted the systems of excha

are able to find their way, and resist
pressure for normalization. Since profes
( Anas t as)
4. While the differences are significant, I would like to add the following ques-
tion: what are we doing to bridge several generations of antiwar culture and
politics so that it is understood as a continuous struggle not just against the grow-
ing globalization of a European/U.S./Russian military-industrial complex, but for
the creation of an international order with a more fair and sustainable distribu-
tion of wealth, as well as productive systems that do not threaten our lives and the
very existence of the planet?
(Lasch)
What is at stake in such a comparison? We could point to many differing

technological regimes at play in the present, as well as shifts in not only the way
warfare is waged but also the means through which it has been allowed to be made
visible. Network television news programming plays a role in the popular history
of the turning of public sentiment against the Vietnam War, if balanced by alterna-
tive or self-distributed print journalism. What agitprop performance, to take your
examples, could be said to share with various online journalisms is an attempt to
make visible failures of the state. Beyond that, different tactics carry with them
different aims and divergent notions of efficacy, as well as temporal and geo-
graphic specificities. These are not new questions.
If, as I read the above, we characterize the past as primarily a set of physically
situated actions geared toward building affective affinities against the war, and the
present as an online information and networking hub, we misunderstand the
necessity of a range of tactics and practices in any successful oppositional move-
ment. Certain economic and organizational capabilities have become widely
available, but it's interesting to note that much of the work has been done
through fairly low-tech means, especially e-mail lists - this is consistent with many
social movements globally. If the question implies a kind of migration toward net-
worked activism and analysis, the privatization and militarization of what was once
deemed public space - welcoming across class, racial, and ethnic lines - has clearly
led people to seek out inhabitable spaces online. Emergent technologies, wher-
ever they come from, offer new tools and, potentially, new possibilities, but it's
ultimately a question of implementing them tactically.
In the same way that something like 16Beaver can be a group of people, a
physical meeting space, and a Web site, the import of real social relations made in
physical proximity can be enabled by online communication and enhanced by
broader geographic alliances and ongoing dialogue. If there is a contemporary
danger of the interface or possibility of communication becoming fetishized over
the strategy at large, the broader danger is an occlusion of sustained organizing
158 OCTOBER
campaigns - p
emphasis on t
both the unse
political imagi
spaces we may
(Ge
5. Interesting
that is as "pub
subject - have
response to th
mean with this term.
But we could simply ask, what constitutes being political or a truly political
activity today? This critical question is bypassed by assuming we understand what
being political means or thinking that politics is simply about manifesting on the
streets like people did during the Vietnam War (not to mention Seattle, Genoa,
orF15).
To relate to the public part of your question. We are political subjects or the
subject of politics and a necessary part of that subjectivity and subjectivation
depends upon a lively public space. Spaces in which debate, disagreement, and
dissensus can be manifested. Spaces that are common, where information and
ideas can also be shared freely. These spaces are under the threat of privatization
and corporate control today, and this is arguably a far more pressing question,
than whether the Internet has withered or altered our political public subjectivity.
(Gabri)
Sure, the Internet and other emergent technologies have changed the way
people organize, debate, and share information. And this has transformed the way
things manifest in public space. And this will inevitably change our understanding
of the public, since there is an emergent space of knowledge, information, contesta-
tion, and, yes, also "activism." It requires our vigilance to keep it public, like other
public spheres. But we have to consider the multiple dimensions of what we con-
sider to be public in the first place. Moreover, to acknowledge that the very notion
of what is and remains public is under threat today. And one can argue that this
poses the biggest threat to what in fact is a "public political subject." Everything we
have known to be public is being territorialized to greater or lesser degree by a pro-
prietary logic. There are the technologies your question refers to, old and new:
radio, Internet, public television, cable television, satellite television. There are
universities and libraries and other social and government institutions and organiza-
tions. There are spaces of the city, the commons, parks, forests, sidewalks, plazas,
waterfronts, beaches, streets, etc. And there is a less material but nevertheless criti-
cal public sphere; that is, all the accumulated knowledge, research findings,
traditional forms of understanding, stories, words, names, characters, ideas, etc. . . .
The fact that I can search for "public

nineteen dollars to access it from the J
We need to keep an expanded noti
struggle. Within this context, our stru
our struggle is against the privatizati
of our public sphere (s).
(Gabri)
6. I think we should all become pla

"Common suddenly felt the firm tug
attached there. He was attached. Look
lodged firmly in the ground - and h
soft and thin, greenish brown, neith
http://193.l7l.60.44/dspace/bitstre
To address action and measure effecti
to a place of non-solutions and non-ac
situation, like a plant that is fixed to it
mean any neutrality or inertia, set
home or nationalism, or any isms for t
the conditions as they are and the
responses stimulated by one's immed
Exercising the relatively easier optio
responsibility, be it political, persona
only to the more mobile beings. I rem
tles organically, wherever you find you
1. The trouble is that we are too ca
effectivity.
Art must be made with the right i
opposition.
2. Dream. Have we seen any work that shows us a picture of war-endings? If
we cannot even see the war ending in our imagination, in our dreams, then how
can the war end in our reality? It doesn't work just as a Utopian idea.
3. The point in making art (or one of the points), whether politically charged
work or not, is not to solve problems or offer solutions, but is first to deal with the
issue creatively. To engage in a creative act, be it spontaneous, tactical, experimental,
etc. We all as an intellectual artistic community here and the world over are doing
many things, and we will continue to respond and make creative interventions in
myriad ways. This page will not contain examples of what everyone has done and will
do. So many artists, art practices, and art works all over the world have gone unno-
ticed, though all have made their contributions in their own way. We need absolutely
ATI, their efforts, not only the ones who are visible and known to a few of us.
( Jesal Kapadia)
160 OCTOBER
1. Begin by sh
tude without sa
2. Choose the
3. Make a mess
4. Join the m
who migrate b
its always dang
you. You may l
5. Unless you
whatever instit
(Las
By Many Mea
Connect the g
social movemen
social isolation
big institution
construct the
thinking, shar
( Anas
16BEAVER is the
form for the pre
political projects. I
AYREEN ANASTAS
RENE GABRI is th
BENJ GERDES rec
for you."
JESAL KAPADIA quotes Eqbal Ahmed: "Fight your battles organically."
PEDRO LASCH has been asked to look where the finger points, instead he sees blood on the finger tip.
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN is dreaming of the days when "there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl
of oranges, too."
PAIGE SARLIN believes that the tasks set for us to solve require much more than the unique momentum
borne of relentless erudition.
JULIAN STALLABRASS
1. I hope that it is useful to answer these questions in a way that draws on a

British perspective, since the involvement of the British state and military in the
war is (uniquely among its allies) as deep as that of the U.S., while the political
and institutional situation differs greatly. The Stop the War Coalition site lists a
number of artists and exhibitions devoted to antiwar themes, which include the
work of veteran photomontagist Peter Kennard, Mark Wallinger's State Britain
exhibition, and collaborations between British and Iraqi artists. Globalise
Resistance keeps a record of the frequent antiwar demonstrations and meetings
in the U.K., listing numbers of participants - and many of these have taken place
in universities. It should be said that numbers at many of these events are low, and
that even large demonstrations receive very little mass-media attention. "Tent
State," an antiwar event at the University of Sussex (at which I spoke), modeled on
similar events in the U.S., was opposed by university officials who threatened the
organizers with police action, and was poorly attended. Likewise, while Peter
Kennard's work was given some exposure recently in an exhibition at Tate
Modern, there is a wide gulf between the committed, specific, and propagandistic
art of the antiwar movement and the "political"-"documentary" work that has
come into fashion on the global art circuit, which exhibits much higher levels of
ambiguity and self-reflection on its own modes of representation. The divide is
crossed rarely, perhaps on grounds of long-term constancy (in the case of Kennard,
who now serves as a historical figure) or celebrity (Banksy).1 So generally, the anti-
war movement appears ghettoized, and has yet to affect the basic functioning of
the universities or the art world.
2. Antiwar protest did, of course, reach high levels of intensity before the con-
flict began, in an effort to prevent it, and declined swiftly thereafter. In part, the
low level of involvement of artists and academics in these activities is a symptom of
a wider unease with the movement as a whole. The comparison with Vietnam is
useful and yields the following contrasts: first, that the Left is far weaker as an
organizing and unifying force, so that the opposition is fragmented structurally
and ideologically. Second, that the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam
was associated with the global Left, with the widely held yearning for a juster and
more egalitarian society; and that, while they took ruthless action against collabo-
rators with the South Vietnamese regime and the U.S., they had widespread
support in a nation that was striving for independence and unity. The insurgency
in Iraq is, of course, divided into sectarian bands that show no compunction
1 . Banksy is a graffiti artist who has gained notoriety for work that uses a combination of provocative
slogans and stenciled images. While his success was at first gained through street work and books, he has
expanded his activities into the gallery world, and his work has achieved high prices in recent auctions.
162 OCTOBER
about the indi

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action in Leban
are all Hezbolla
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gets. Third, th
Vietnam, the i
Cockburn has
largely unrepo
news media, i
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3. The war has

rary art prices
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by Thomas Hi
tographs from
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production of a
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and have don
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judged by a bo
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4. The issue o
the particular
rapid evolution
separated from
stream U.S. po
presidential ca
capitalist move
gave that glob
tion over conv
never separate
Questionnaire: Stallabrass 163
meetings were regular and highly import

the development of politicized net. art
given to the anticapitalist moveme
"Encuentro for Humanism and Again
Social Forum meetings since. Online
largely to produce political effects i
culturally saturated and carnivalesque as t
tection, of course, from police trunche
many other places know.
5. There is a conservative assumption

something like this: resistance is diff
involve compliance. The mere facts of t
the speed of the connection, or the com
ing about what is being seen, heard, a
wrong word here). Of course, those wh
make mundane communications to thei
will largely find an online landscape th
ers and the mass media. But, in another
material in the form of videos, photog
to blogs is available online: making sense o
of the mass media is no easy task and
would be needed in the realm of paper
political panacea. It is used as much by a
has been suggested that because of the
ample material to confirm whatever be
out, encouraging the ghettoization of g
selves. Equally, there is nothing intrin
confinement or depoliticization.
6. Benjamin's model of artistic produ

producers to produce, and here the Net
material with which to assemble a broa
logical means to harness the collect
challenge is to take the innovations of
and apply them fully to political organ
tional culture.
JULIAN STALLABRASS is the author of Art Incorporated and Reader in Art History at the Courtauld
Institute.
JONATHAN THOMAS
There can be no resistance without memory.
-Jean-Luc Godard,
Eloge de Vamour (2001)
When considering the limits and pressures that are exerted by the existing
conditions, which are not only depressing but formidable in both the intensity
and utter pervasiveness of their penetration, I often have a difficult time believing
in the present possibility of an art, literature, or cinema capable of articulating an
oppositional position that is either strong or insidious enough to sap the repro-
duction of common sense - at least not to the extent necessary to initiate any sort
of structural transformation of civil society as it is currently constituted (if that is
what we are ultimately discussing here). The problem, it appears, is that the
money economy has assumed absolute predominance, if not an apotheosis, and
therefore sets the terms of subject ivization in nearly every field. Everything,
including dissent, has been commodified. Or so it seems.
As a student, I am too young to have participated in the antiwar and related
protests of the late 1960s. Nor, for that matter, have I had the opportunity to par-
ticipate in a comparable culture of contestation today, largely because such a
culture has not crystallized within the United States: it is either latent, or too
scattered to have cohered into a discernible, public formation. Or, and here is
the thing: perhaps the monopoly of mass culture and its dominant role in the
reproduction of social relations is just too powerful and seductive to compete
with, let alone to break? Perhaps it has, by now, effectively poisoned our very
capacity to envision and articulate our collective needs and struggles in properly
political terms? If this is so, does this imply that there has been a fundamental
transformation of the sense of the public, political subject, or that this subject has,
at any rate, been sufficiently nullified and incorporated? By my estimation, yes.
But still, even if we are atomized, so many of my generation refuse to identify with
the swaggering imperial aspirations that resurfaced in the wake of September 11,
2001; many of us find the saber-rattling, Dr. Strangelove-stagecraft of the Bush
administration to be as reprehensible as the complicit drum-beating conducted by
a culture industry that has proven itself antithetical to the proliferation of histori-
cal knowledge as such. In light of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, as well as its
counterpart in Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories (both of
which are underpinned by the political-economic practices of neoliberalism), it
would be salutary to be sure if we artists and intellectuals could counter the
pugnacity of the present moment and somehow stir up something more seditious
and effective, more affiliative, more mnemonic, as a result of the knowledge,
Questionnaire: Thomas 165
affects, and subject positions that

compete with TV?1
October's questionnaire is chin-liftin
ent paucity of political critique with
nearly five years after the war bega
gests that the process of professi
subtleties and circumspection, and i
the internalization of the dominan
sense. But professionalization, as w
humanities and related social sciences within American academic institutions,
should not merely be seen as a cause that leads to a diminished political con-
sciousness as an effect. These are themselves effects of the subjugation of
everything, starting with the autonomy of thought, to the logic and objective
necessities of capitalism. If there is an impediment to the efficacy of opposition
and critique, and therefore a place to focus our transformative energies, this, I
would argue, is it.
1 . Indeed, in the face of such atrocities, one wonders, is it enough that we utilize the privileged
position that the existing condition affords us to continue to construct differentiated modes of percep-
tion and alternative contextualizations - spaces for concentration and historical awareness to
emerge - with the hope, but not the illusion, that this will somehow provide a necessary condition of
possibility for a shift in social consciousness to emerge?
JONATHAN THOMAS is a two-time alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and is cur-
rently a graduate student in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the
University of Minnesota.
NATO THOMPSON
1., 2. In order to gain a better sense of the state of the antiwar movement
mind the history specific to protest culture. Protest culture has never mater
of thin air. The protests against the Vietnam War would have taken on a d
different character if not for the civil rights movement. When discussing p
ture today, one must consider that the antiglobalization movement of not
radically set the stage. The fact that the protest against Operation F
February 15, 2003, was the largest preemptive protest in U.S. history is sig
One could credit this with national and international opposition to the war
massive mobilization must clearly be seen as inherently connected to the w
antiglobalization protests that preceded it. In understanding why there is l
protest and activism today, we must interrogate the dissipation of the ene
antiglobalization effort in the United States.
Until the anti-WTO protests of November 1999, protest culture ha
ingly taken on a more segmented turn. After organizing against inter
Central America, nuclear power, AIDS, and apartheid, protest culture i
found itself increasingly segmented; each targeted effort spread across
political spheres with very few political events uniting them. This con
how to unite the disparate politics that activists work on into a produc
sat at the top of the list of concerns that made the WTO protests suc
mobilized a movement around it. Because consolidation of efforts was a chief con-
cern, the free-market policies of Democratic president Bill Clinton assisted greatly
in uniting disparate political activists against the expanding role of the WTO, G8,
FTAA, World Bank, etc.
However, things changed dramatically during the elections of 2000 when
tensions erupted between Green Party activists and pragmatic Democrats. The
break with the Democrats was a foregone conclusion in the minds of many in the
protest movement. But the elections went sour, as we all know, and Bush crawled
into office amid the rubble of the cataclysmic split within the Democratic Party.
This split exists with us today.
The rise of the Green Party was the handiwork of the antiglobalization
movement and when Bush Junior got into office, something in protest culture
broke. Out of the mire erupted the party politics activists, such as MoveOn.org,
who took the reform of the Democratic Party as their mission. Writing to con-
gressmen, placing clever advertisements, and mobilizing the Web toward party
politics was their modus operandi. Never again would they let their guard down so
much that another Bush would get into office. Yet hiding in the shadows was the
deeply skeptical radical Left (I include anarchists in this), who saw this move to
party politics as a deeply naive, almost centrist, approach.
While the progressives shifted to party politics, the radical Left found itself
increasingly marginalized. The Miami FTAA protests of November 2003 provided
Questionnaire: Thompson 167
a template for the divide-and-conquer t

for the Bush regime over the last eight y
excessive force using the threat of terror
police tactics. The equation of the radic
numerous occasions over the years and
mented Left. Ward Churchill was vilifi
corporate workers in the World Trade Ce
as environmental and animal rights act
laws. Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble found himself in the middle of a Patriot
Act-inspired bioterrorism case, and on and on. Additionally (I credit this insight to
Paul Chan), the anti-U.S. imperialist rhetoric of Al Qaeda dovetailed in some parts
with parts of the more militant radical Left, forcing a complicated rethinking of
points of departure and global concerns. Militancy required some consideration
both in terms of how it was to be perceived and what allies it found. The sum total
of these forces (the maneuver by the U.S. government to approach the radical Left
as terrorists, distancing by the party politics progressives, and a deeply complicated
theoretic concern regarding militancy) was enough to subdue the aggressive, in-the-
streets portion of the protest movement. A portion, I believe, central to the struggle.
Without a thriving-in-the-streets protest culture, political cultural produc-
tion takes on a more symbolic form. There have been multiple exhibitions and
artistic practices that resist not just the war but the Bush regime entirely. However,
because cultural production is such a significant part of neoliberal capital, it can
be hard to take such symbolic maneuvers of protest as seriously as one might
hope. We find ourselves in a similar situation as in the mid-1990s and '80s with dis-
parate political practices finding it difficult to unite themselves again. In order to
return to a level of effective resistance, I honestly believe we need to push past the
politics of elections and back toward the in-the-street form of protest culture that
embraced the radical components that make sparks fly. At some point, of course,
the demands of the protest movement must make their way into policy outside the
corrupted hands of the Democrats. Transforming the political structure of the
United States is a central concern that would prevent the much needed split in
the Democratic Party from being such a cataclysmic blow to social progress.
3. I begin with the caveat that I direct my critique to the activist art community
and its sympathizers. The growth of the art market and its silly apologists in the
waning U.S. critical community will always be there; I don't find their presence
significant to this discussion. The art market is the decorative portion of the art
community that because it brings in such vast amounts of money, its inherent
infrastructure (supported by the cash it makes) at times feels like it is the center.
The art market's infrastructure is disproportionate to its actual importance. This
grand illusion tends to confuse and such is the nature of capital itself.
That being said, the growth of the culture industry into all fields has, of
course, deeply affected the manner by which information is effective or useful.
168 OCTOBER
The arts trade

of cultural pr
regard is deep
stand commod
into the far m
social capital t
manner by w
within a part
rary art, gall
via capitalism,
as anticapitali
The effects of
work within a
and results in
cultural produ
retaining a su
powers that be
ous effect on c
symbolic code
increasingly tr
All cultural w
ingly that thin
critical Left ar
to make such
selves equippe
do find success
4. When a pr
go around.
5., 6. In an age of cultural production under capital (neoliberalism), it is critical

to produce alternative infrastructures of meaning production. We must create
social organizations (art spaces, multi-use centers, journals, collectives) that
address anticapitalism and an ti- authoritarianism, and then tie them into a larger
structure of groups doing the same things from different discursive perspectives.
These do exist with examples like MessHall, AREA magazine, 16Beaver, Camp
Baltimore, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the Change You Want to See,
Basekamp, and on and on. We must build on the progress of the antiglobalization
efforts and attach cultural work into the nascent radical politics that moves them
forward. We must not be too distracted from the deeply compromising politics of
national elections, and focus on movement building.
NATO THOMPSON is a writer, activist, and curator at Creative Time, New York.
ELIOT WEINBERGER
I am neither an artist nor an academic; nor am I connected to any cult

institution. I am a literary writer, responding as such, and the first thing to n
is the absence of literary writers from your list of invited participants. This is
partially attributable to October's general purview or web of connections: there
hardly any "obvious" literary writers to ask. With few exceptions, writers have
as invisible politically throughout the outrages of the Cheney administrat
they were during the Reagan-Bush I years.
Like your questionnaire, discussions of what's currently happening too
begin with the 1960s, and those of us who were young then have bec
tedious as old soldiers. Yet it's worth recalling to the collective amnesia a f
the ways in which that era was quite different from the present. Above all, art
the alternative, often openly hostile, to middle-class America and all of its
tions, including universities. Art was largely the product of bohemians, an
few who made money tended to keep it a secret. Even the most comm
branches - say, rock music - existed with a minimum of marketing. (Wood
may have represented the end - or more precisely, the suburbanization - of hip
dom, but it's interesting to note that no T-shirts or other memorabilia we
there.) Publishing was mainly the domain of a group of independent family
nesses that made a modest profit; serious writers and editors tended to sta
the same house for most of their careers; ambition was aesthetic ("th
American novel") rather than monetary. In the visual arts, reputations wer
by critics and fellow artists, though Warhol was marking the beginning o
change. And almost everyone in the arts needed to have a day job - usual
unconnected to their art - which kept them in touch with, and aware of,
at large. Art was by its nature oppositional; it was not part of the counterc
it created it. The specific political activism around civil rights, the Vietnam
and the draft was only one facet of the new "consciousness" - the counter
was also thriving in countries where these were not issues - but was inext
from it in a romance of political, social, and psychological revolution, wh
strands could not be separated. It's almost impossible to imagine now how
drugs or having sex were seen as political acts, inextricable from demonstra
the streets.
Now of course the market rules. The visual arts are driven by collectors, and
successful artists have lifestyles identical to their patrons. Publishing is controlled
by multinational corporations and is directed by agents and the sales forces. The
bad boys and girls of popular music have zillion-dollar contracts and houses in
Greenwich, Connecticut. Sensitive kids today are obsessed with the Beats who, for
them, are the last authentic people in the arts: genuine outsiders, not the prod-
ucts of marketing strategies. The old "shock of the new," if it exists at all, has been
reduced to advertising campaigns or "sensational" art publicity stunts (usually
170 OCTOBER
British). And t
major cities in t
Two phenome
tation by Nixo
shut up the art
antiwar activit
the foundation
like politicians
themselves, the
proposal. By th
performance a
NEA applicatio
by a Republican
I years, as the
lion became ho
was proposed to
Secondly, the
ingly market-d
response to th
introduced int
In literature, th
ated a comfort
decentralized t
tively neutrali
as the world k
formed into id
its dream, how
everything alon
what was happ
America. It's e
draft, but thi
they're being ta
Although the
arts in Americ
They have beco
of money are s
tions largely de
likely to be ta
grants, prizes,
on earth that
where what pa
The sense of li
after 9/11, whe
Questionnaire: Weinberger 171
by newspapers and mass-circulation mag

they could only summon up some auto
Pulitzer-prize novelist, reminded him of
poetry prize last year, I read through so
poetry; no more than four or five had e
twenty-first century; none had any signifi
As far as I can tell, the Cheney-Bush I
song, novel, or art work that has caught
tion or an epitome of the times. The
journalism: the hooded figure in the Abu
artists and writers have been what used t
little sausages while the world around the
have used their skills - or their magazine
people think.
Fortunately, the silence of the artists is in contrast to the cacophony of ordi-
nary citizens, all of them on the Web. The mass media under Cheney-Bush II (until
Katrina introduced a slight hint of skepticism) has been worthy of the Soviet Union
in its mindless repetition of what the government wants them to say. (The untold
story is the extraordinary extent to which policy was, in fact, directed by public
relations people, paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon and other
agencies.) For the last seven years, the only source of reliable information and oppo-
sitional opinion has been the Internet (including, of course, its ease of receiving
and circulating articles from the foreign press). Furthermore, Web archives and
search engines have given the Web sites and bloggers the ability to expose and
demolish the lies and contradictions of the politicians, the press, and the leading
columnists and pundits. I don't know what we would have done without it. An
authoritarian state only succeeds through absolute control of information. Cheney-
Bush II - the most radical administration in American history - certainly tried hard
enough, but in the end the Web miraculously managed to elude their grasp.
The Web gives the lie to the usual excuses made by individual artists and
writers: "What, can one person do?" "It's preaching to the converted." Etc. With
the Web every person is his or her own publisher, editor, journalist, columnist.
Thanks entirely to the Web and a few comedians, a majority of Americans (at this
writing in August 2007) think Cheney should be impeached, and some 40 percent
want Bush impeached along with him. A vast majority believes the Iraq War is a
disaster and wants the U.S. out of there immediately. Meanwhile, the arts in
America - all of them - have become largely irrelevant to what is actually happen-
ing in the world. Crusading bloggers are the closest we get to a Zola, Brecht, or
Ginsberg. They're valiant, but they're not art.
ELIOT WEINBERGER'S most recent books are What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles and An Elemental
Thing.
KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO
Though I am not an expert in political and cultural anthropology, I w

attempt to elaborate on some conditions and issues that may have contribu
the passivity and silence of artists, intellectuals, academics, and those from
the cultural domain.
The War
Unlike during the Vietnam War, we have no official military draft, which is
an important condition for the potential of a nationwide antiwar movement.
And unlike before the Vietnam War, the U.S. was indeed attacked (in
2001) - not by any country, and certainly not by Iraq - and thus, for many, retalia-
tion seems legitimate. The cultural and larger publics, including artistic audiences
and institutions, are confused by their complex relation to the popular "support
our troops" slogan.
I lived in Poland during the Vietnam War and cannot be a witness here, but
from what I hear from my American-born colleagues, the resentment, resistance,
and fear of military draft in the context of the illegality of the war (because the
U.S. was not directly attacked) were critically linked with, and to some degree
fueled by, powerful and emotionally charged reports and images of war.
The Media
In the current war, there is no attempt to present politically insightful infor-

mation and images of war; particularly absent is the damage done to civilians and
to cultural and social life in Iraq.
To make it worse, the real picture of war damage inflicted on the U.S. popula-
tion (including trauma transmission and dissemination) is not being taken into
account by the media. (I will come back to this issue in the later part of my response.)
The damage to immigrants and their families caused by Homeland Security's
domestic "war on terror" (the subject of my interior projection titled If You See
Something . . . ) is also neither seen nor heard.
Through skillful imposition of the editorial technique of omission, the govern-
ment's "public information" machine has silenced the complexity and magnitude of
the toll of war and successfully manipulated a confused and disappointed middle-
class and its centrist "public sphere." In this way, the government turned media into
its "publicity." The art of the front-page image (no more than trite photographic
war icons) in the New York Times and affiliated Boston Globe testifies to this.
Antiwar discourse between cultures, classes, and generations needs evocative,
Questionnaire: Wodiczko 173
passionate, and "agonistic" war reports

telling." Artists and intellectuals, espe
today only on media imagery. In orde
critical thinking, resistance, and resc
at large - need to see and hear inform
explores, and uncovers the war.
Ernst Friedrich's Anti-War Museum an
project, which relied on photographi
war, would be as difficult today as it
during World War I.John Heartfield w
I am sure that his sense of humor wo
and ridicule the empty sentimentality
and the workings of the censorship it
and the methods of "Electronic Civ
method of photomontage and the use
rotogravure).
Reading the Morning Newspaper . . .
Our postdeconstructive artistic efforts (analytical, critical, and pro-active)

are not only sporadic and lonely but also overshadowed by the "spiritual" impact
of media imagery.
The media provides for a daily spectacle of "humanized" and "universalized"
war trauma. Television, radio, and the Internet provide "spiritual" assistance to
one's confused life. The physical, mental, or moral injury and suffering of those in
Iraq and Afghanistan are being turned into soft and digestible parareligious
media representation. Aimed at comforting our ethically confused souls, today's
art of media culture is elegant and hermeneutical in its careful choice and omis-
sion of critical issues. The phantasm it inspires has a "sublime" and "metaphysical"
effect. Hegel said:
Reading the morning newspaper is a kind of real Morning Prayer. One

orients one's attitude against the world and toward (in one case) God,
or (in the other case) toward that which the world is. The former gives
the same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.
Made long before the advent of the newspaper's advanced color photography and
its iconic impact, Hegel's observation seems surprisingly accurate today. Present
day image reproduction technology adds "quality" to Hegel's "real Morning
Prayer." The large-scale, "holy" image on the front page of the New York Times func-
tions as an altar in front of which we justify our political passivity in real life. They
are skillfully created to be used by a reader as empathy objects.
As long as we look at the tragic media icons with "feelings for the victims" -
174 OCTOBER
establishing a b
we feel that we
that the suffer
sort of "salvati
their and other
When in the ti
needs seem to b
art are put out
Is there a way
challenge what
If You
In my interior
land Security si
and other citie
tragic effects
of our percept
minds (our sub
ing residents o
unjust actions c
With the use
Galerie Lelong
the other side"
walk, one could
and deportatio
according to sc
real life, situa
York streets.
The psycho-political and aesthetic aims of the projection were as follows:

- To come close enough to these "strangers," who one usually does not
notice, to see and hear some unexpected details of their painful, often brave and
comically tragic experiences, and to realize how incomplete our understanding
and access to their experience is.
- To engage the survivors emotionally and aesthetically as coartists in the
production and animation of the projection; to help them develop rhetorical sur-
vival skills and emotional capacities by publically articulating their traumatic
encounters with Homeland Security.
- To help organizations attract media and public attention for their clients'
situations.
- To take advantage of the cultural production situation in order to build

new connections between immigrants and social support networks.
During the two years of the project

many social support groups and est
Collective," directed by Naeem Moh
America, in conjunction with the Quee
were directly involved, numerous law
organizations helped with the project.2
Cultural Economy
The ineffectiveness of early antiwar

the reelection of George Bush weakened
cal sections of the middle-class: the media, universities, museums, cultural
institutions, etc.
Today, in cultural institutions and academia it is in "good taste" to imply that
one may be "against" the interventionism and imperial war conducted by the pre-
sent government - yet only in private or in confidential meetings. In public and,
above all, in one's projects, one must remain "neutral," "humanistic," and "univer-
sal" - anything to avoid what could be called "political."
The political climate ignited by our fears of terrorism, real and/ or imag-
ined, controls of our thinking. Collectors, directors, curators, gallery dealers, art
professors, and artists themselves live with self-censorship and the dubious results
of their common sense choices made in the name of economical survival and aes-
thetic "sophistication." (They say political art is "too simple"; that artists should
not be "preaching to the converted"; that "in our hearts" we are all against the war
anyway, so let's keep quiet "to survive"; it's only a year before "he" is gone.)
Boards of trustees, corporate and individual sponsors, and state and city
political support have indirect or direct connections with the U.S. government's
interventions. One cannot mess with these interests; the new managerial styles of
cultural and academic institutions say so quite openly.
Many people say that the idea of political art is "passe," which sounds like
saying that criticism and the political process are passe, that critical thinking,
protest, and opposition to right wing nationalistic and imperialistic ideology are
passe. The political art of the past cannot, of course, make sense for the present;
2. The social support organizations and groups that directly collaborated were the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee (Asli); the American Friends Service Committee (William Coley); the
Asylum Project, Immigrant Rights Program - NYMRO; the Civil Liberties Union Boston Chapter; the
Coney Island Avenue Project (Bobby Khan); the Council of Pakistan Organization (Mohammad Razvi);
DRUM (Desis Raising Up and Moving); Families for Freedom (Aarti Shahani and Subhash Kateel);
Keeping Hope Alive (Jane Mee); the National Immigration Project (Malik Ndau); Peaceful Tomorrows
(Nail Ashour); Physicians for Human Rights (Barbara Ayoite); Safe Horizons, Immigration Law Project
(Ellen Friedland); the Visible Collective (Naeem Mohaiemen); and the War Resisters League (Steve
Theberge). Without these groups, examples of the presence of an oppositional public sphere, this pro-
ject would not have been possible.
176 OCTOBER
another form
terday may no
Why, then, ha
and engaged ar
I absolutely a
driven cultura
oppositional p
artist's oeuvre
of socially focu
for the lack of
The I
Contrary to Oc
in accordance
other technolo
Internet's com
depoliticizing f
I hold that th
for all of us an
the Internet, i
communication
presence - as m
interfaces and
and disseminat
nating them,
space to be org
environments.
In addition, today's oppositional projects and protests do not always need to

take the form of massive street demonstrations or marches on Washington. The
actions that take place between these big gatherings - actions prepared through
the use of digital media and communication technologies - can be effective.
The War Silence
The U.S. population's silence is in part a result of vast war fallout at home -
the rapid spread of the secondary trauma transmitted by returning soldiers to
their families. Soldiers' psychologically and socially harmful (posttraumatic
stress-related behavior) directly affects their close and extended families.
This war is unprecedented in U.S. history for its excessive use of the National
Guard and military reserves and for recalling older individuals, who typically have
large families, three or four times. Eac

nine members of his or her own fam
rapidly across the country that it will cr
U.S. population. The soldiers' families
themselves. For too many back home, t
means."
As a result of new boot camp desensitizing techniques, 80 percent of U.S. sol-

diers are trained and armed to kill in Iraq and Afghanistan (only 20 percent did
so in World War II). In this situation, it must be very difficult for returning soldiers
to resensitize themselves back home, and there is no comprehensive and effective
government program for such rein tegrat ion.
For every U.S. soldier killed, there are sixteen wounded comrades, an
unprecedented ratio of survival, which means an enormous number of veterans
will suffer deep physical and mental wounds. New kinds of brain, bodily, and emo-
tional injuries are multiplying. These emotional, moral, and physical injuries
affect the lives of veterans as well as those of their children and grandchildren.
Those soldiers recalled several times to Iraq are not only traumatized, but
also retraumatized, and in turn they traumatize, retraumatize, harm, and even kill
others or themselves.
The Iraq human trauma is, of course, far greater than the one among U.S.
soldiers and families. Eighty percent or more of the children in Iraq suffer post-
traumatic stress, joining the vast majority of Iraq as a traumatized population.
Countless Iraqis have lost their lives; countless Iraqis have lost their closest kin,
their friends, and their community; countless Iraqis live wounded and impover-
ished, and seek uncertain and traumatic refuge abroad.
The Tasks
There is enormous emotional and political illiteracy about the scale of today's
war and the spread of war trauma, about war as a lived-through experience, as an
experience with resulting generational and cultural fallout.
The silence of those who know what the present war is - that is, the silence
of one-third of the U.S. population, and the silence of the entire population of
Iraq - is reinforced by the common sense passivity on the part of cultural, artistic,
and academic worlds.
In this situation it is difficult, if not impossible, for the younger generations,
artists among them, to learn and comprehend the existential dimension and scale
of the present war. They do not know what war is from the point of view of Iraqi
civilians or Iraqi "insurgents," nor from U.S. soldiers and their families. There is
no agonistic democratic discourse, based on fearless speech by all parties.
Young people do not have any cultural base from which to develop their eth-
ical and political acts of public speech and art in opposition to the war. The war
178 OCTOBER
impact will soo

the social epide
will have no eq
out. The young
Since 2001, I
part of my In
media art, me
sensus and soc
more recently
for today's war
Each year I re
diers' and civil
students, alter
tions about the
are reviewed.
In the isolated academic environment, it is almost impossible to break the

wall of silence, reinforced by the media and cultural worlds, that separates two
alienated populations: those who know what war is and those who do not. The
wall of silence, passivity, and ignorance must be dismantled. Tactical cultural pro-
jects must be urgently developed with those who know, with the veterans, their
families, and those who work directly with them.
Art far the Political
If, since the 1990s, our objective has been to contribute to the political,
rather than to politics, to the polis rather than the police, to that which is poten-
tia and multitude rather than potentates, to revolt rather than revolution, to agon
and dissenus rather then consensus, to Democratic parrhesia and public interpel-
lation rather than "patriotic" or "civic responsibility," to nomadology rather than
the state apparatus ... let us then continue our effort in inventing "art for the politi-
cal." There have been new and versified methodologies developed in this direction
by artists, artistic and cultural groups, collaborative networks, and coalitions.
Let's hope they will focus on the methods of war against war as a new, post-
deconstructive project. In this context, I would like to mention some names of
oppositional artistic groups and projects (some of them are among the respon-
dents to the October questionnaire):
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, Critical Art Ensemble (Electronic
Civil Disobedience and other projects), Todd Hirsch and works by
Autonomedia, 16Beaver, the Yes Men, Naeem Mohaiemen and the
Visible Collective, John Melpede, and the programs and projects of the
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the projects and teaching of MIT's
Interrogative Design Group (including

presently under development), and ma
It is my conviction that if these and oth

and coalitions further focus their attent
later generations, we will contribute not on
in which it will be much more difficult fo
interventionist war to reoccur.
Developing my Interrogative Design Group and the War Veteran Vehicle

Project in collaboration with Theodore Spyropoulos, preparing new interior and
exterior public projections with war veterens, as well as learning and teaching the
methods and techniques of oppositional art, I try to contribute in this direction.
-August 2007
KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO is an artist who lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
CATHERINE de ZEGHER
1. I intend to shape my answers throughout from my direct experien

art world where I have been closely engaged. To my knowledge, the re
against the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq have been sparse an
dispersed throughout the cultural forum here in the States. Few events
significant enough to draw a crowd and fewer yet have attracted attent
artists and academics have openly and publicly taken a stand against the
most of them - and this I find remarkable - belonging to the former g
who also opposed the Vietnam War: Nancy Spero, the late Leon Gol
Haacke, Martha Rosier, and Richard Serra, to name a few.1 There were al
ber of emerging artists who actively denounced the cruelties of the war
the barbaric treatment of prisoners of the so-called war on terror in Gu
Bay and in Abu Ghraib (for example, Amy Wilson's A Glimpse of What Life
Country Can Be Like [2004] and Zoe Charlton's Homeland Security [2004]), an
abuses by the U.S. government as it attempted to dismantle those part
Geneva Convention not seen to be in the interest of the United States.
Charbel Ackermann's questioning of the "Axis of Evil" in the 2005 summer

exhibition at the Drawing Center was one of the projects described by the Daily
News and the New York Post as "denigrating America." The exhibition, together with
other presentations, such as Mark Lombardi: Global Networks in 2003 and Talespinning
in 2004, may have been considered to be what Judith Butler in an analytical essay
ironically calls "an excess of democratic ethos."2 Attacked in lurid headlines by the
tabloid press, the institution, selected to be part of the rebuilding of downtown
post-9/11, was as a result evicted by Governor Pataki from Ground Zero, losing its
newly designed building on the site. Anyone who reacted against the war was
instantly demonized as un-American, unpatriotic, and unaware of the great dan-
gers that were threatening our lives, our customs, and our freedom. As the Director
of the Drawing Center at the time, I felt as though we were going through in
microcosm what was happening in the country at large: the suppression of creative
and critical expression in the name of commemoration of the dead, a loss of hope,
and an increasing confrontation with manipulation, fostered by conservative strate-
gizing in Machiavellian power-playing and financial dealing, resulting in a policy of
intolerance and overwhelmed by a new wave of (self-) censorship.
Mark Lombardi had pieced together from diverse published accounts the
flow of money within all these fraudulent connections long before the war
started. And there is a price to be paid in terms of intimidation and harassment
1 . In another time, it would be more than diverting to hear the sordidly surreal rewriting of the
withdrawal from Vietnam being rehearsed by the President today.
2. Judith Butler, "Commemoration and/or Critique? Catherine de Zegher and The Drawing
Center," Texte zur Kunst 16, no. 62 (June 2006).
Questionnaire: De Zegher 181
for opposition - and this, of course, very

ily understand why people don't wa
injustice and corruption, though this atti
the invested self-interest of the down
2005, I organized the exhibition Persist
Vietnam War, I was reminded that I w
accent and could have access to the U.S. denied. But I believed then, as I do now,
that exhibiting art from the past can be an attempt to understand the present and
to prompt awareness and reconciliation. And this is what a cultural institution
should do - or maybe no longer?
Currently, even with the wider shift of sentiment concerning the Iraq con-
flict, any antiwar action is still seen as extremely offensive toward the soldiers and
their families. And here we touch on a crucial factor: language and media fram-
ing. Over decades, the radical Right and its patrons have transformed the
language of American politics and, controlling the language, have come to con-
trol the message; the corporate media do the rest (It is all too easy to draw the
connection New York Post/Murdoch and Ground Zero/Bush). And this is, I think,
one of the fundamental reasons why the progressive voice in cultural institu-
tions - and this includes academics, artists, collectors, and funders - could not
communicate its resistance nor get its antiwar message across.
2. It would be invidious to suppose that self-interest, however tightly drawn,

does not play a part either with regard to tenure or sales, or in the numerous shad-
ings of fear or anxiety, or the self-interest reflected in the simple deep-rooted
skepticisms of those who imagine little is to be done. The absence of the draft is
quite evidently a major factor, but it is by no means the only one. During the era
of the Vietnam War protests, significantly, there were numerous liberation move-
ments: the Black Power movement, the women's liberation movement, the gay
and lesbian rights movement, and others, including the antiwar movement.
Together they formed a wide platform for contestation, hoped-for emancipation,
concord, and peace. The protest against the Vietnam War has to be considered in
this context of persistently contesting and re-imagining the world, and of advanc-
ing alternative ideas for socio-political change. To an extent it was effective. It
sometimes seems that since then progressive thought has assumed that an interest-
ing cultural program that builds consciousness and gives an explanation of the
facts is enough to persuade a wider and uncommitted audience to engage in
opposition; nothing could be less true.
Meanwhile, the conservative Right has figured out the critical power and
broad influence exerted by academic and artistic institutions and has systematically
and steadily infiltrated those cultural institutions (universities and museums), tak-
ing hold of their boards, tightening a grip on the discourse, and promoting
regressive programs. In addition, a savvy right-wing government has been manipu-
lating language such that a semantic problem cannot be ignored. What we need is
182 OCTOBER
a refraining: n
the world. Isn't
shaping new f
by the media a
no more space i
As Julie Mehr
marks and sig
with such spee
gether. Where
what I underst
Classically, po
You have soci
foreigners an
And a politica
places. For exa
some social pl
maybe, we ha
tion of the pl
and religions.
fundamental
place. An inte
art - a mixtur
3. As I have no
much has chan
At several mom
can be constru
been slowly bu
an intense com
Perhaps the rh
such sophistica
Have we now b
communicativ
nated as the in
the professiona
linked to its ab
In the arts, th
also despair and
inexistent, the
itself may in f
2. Alain Badiou, "
Questionnaire: De Zegher 183
artistic intention and creation, in the

such is contemporary art the matrix
achieve: challenging the existing status
subjective, inscribing the inexistent as po
the social fabric - here art in its failure/
makes manifest the potential of our pres
But today, in this open space for co
artists have often come to understand
"suckcess," as Lee Lozano put it), celebr
first of all focusing on newly develop
artist needs to be subtly inventive to r
transgressions. When asked what his
moment where we feel least understan
4. It seems to me that this question c

the "no place" for contestation, of plac
space versus virtual space for protest
Badiou's notion of classical revolutiona
new sort of politics as perhaps an actio
the classical approach of the alternativ
or wrongly a museum complex at Grou
place of relation and resistance, no m
being of a material and visual nature,
any case, for any cultural institution, it
revitalization of downtown New York
tural activities and for artists locally and
Those who value an open democratic
such territory to counterbalance an e
voices of oppression and of greed have
uum, they are likely to fill it. After 9/1
community at odds with its usual modu
reflected this coming together and propo
of healing. Culture would act as a buf
tion. Unfortunately, this vision turned
underestimate the gravity of the meanin
for America, and for the world, as much
the events themselves. I still believe th
people of goodwill, whatever their poli
heard, not in cacophony, but as the ex
contesting such a site is to resign from t
the cruelty that ensues, the malign banal
oppression, and the unresisted and ha
justice that follows on?
184 OCTOBER
5. The notion
tions, in these t
are no univer
depoliticization
6. At this tim
urgently need
tinue to speak
fearful, or ove
tion or in exh
process of the
sharp criticism
should have be
their hands an
violence of mo
confusing, so t
While artists
last remain of
present, the n
tions with the
posed move be
concerning na
memory, and th
real estate. Sev
most vigorously
In fact, no m
Center, the ab
responsibility
To concede wo
such attack. To
goes far beyon
and an ethics of
no separation
engagement.
CATHERINE de ZE
Toronto; from 199

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Questionnaire: In What Ways Have Artists, Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded

to the U.S.-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?

The contributions to this issue of October respond to a questionnaire formu-

In 1967, the Partisan Review printed responses to a questionnaire of its own,

Nevertheless, precisely because we have observed and participated in these

5. "What's Happening to America?," Partisan Review 34, no. 1 (Winter 1967).

- Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Rachel Churner

2. Are there examples of an active counter-public sphere in which protest against

4. Antiwar opposition seems most visible on the Internet, where information is

The antiwar protests of 2003 were a significant and spectacular internati

new, more accessible media (as I w

How to respond to this war?

importantly, where Western val

practice - by thinking of ways

I would like to thank the 175 women wh

JUDITH BARRY is an artist and writer liv

Since I take seriously the contention that the war on terror, of w

1. Artistic opposition to the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent oc

vitally, without relinquishing the b

3. "T. J. Clark on Retort's latest publication

tary aggression. Its observational neutrality - studiously achieved - is, in effect,

acutely today when the kind of op

6. In one of the most prescient an

1. As soon as Bush threatened to invade Iraq, faculty immediately went

which has been relentless in its serious

4. The global public sphere - not as it

5. Precisely what political means, and

2. a. No, not that CAE has seen.

3. a. It's not so much a matter of consciousness; it's a problem of action. Almost

only coexist, but challenge each

monolithic force; nor are all com

T. J. DEMO6, author of the recent book

Three thoughts on war and masculinism:

(b) At a conference on "Women Artists at the Millennium," convened

I bring together these feminist and psychoanalytic reflections on war in

1 . Thanks to Mignon Nixon for reminding me of Nochlin 's statement.

and of the limits of knowledge. Thi

1. To the extent that there is anything resembling a critical response to t

intelligence, since one can use the w

3. The artistic context is as sick as

4. One mistake we must not mak

5. It depends on what our frame

If you are liv

On Being Significant During War

October's six-point questionnaire about "artistic and academic opposition

There is a vein of thinking current among the fashionable and well-educated

institutions left to us."2 This way of

1. In June 2005 I was in Vietnam for a month at an international artists r

Since returning to the U.S., I have taken the re-create

2., 3. Art production is seen as transgressive but the transgression is generally

to address and engage social/politica

4. The Internet is free from the gri

1. Before I address the substance of this question, I would like to ask ab

and that less

I find it somewhat difficult to conceive of these exhibitions in terms of their

the fashionably skeptical view

images of carnage to be compel

arts professionals that featured a

2. The absence of the draft is a

abortion, comparative approach

5. There was a period in the mid-1990s when many new-media advocates in

Responses to the invasion and attempted occupation of Iraq have been m

struggle against the combined for