In 1988, at a conference in San Francisco, 88-year-old author and radical Meridel LeSeur implored artists, against the logic of capitalism, to bring their skills to the people:
“It no longer is any good to get the grants. They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn’t doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today. There is no place for the artist. There is no artist arising except from the struggle of the people.”[1]
If 1988 seems a world away from today’s relentlessly unfolding crises and the dire urgency of accelerating ecological collapse, LeSeur’s advice has never been more potent. There is no place to go today except to the struggle.
I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta (Treaty 6 territory), the heart of Canadian oil country. In this context, to be an artist is a very specific type of choice, and one that has deeply shaped my thinking ever since. Immersed for decades in the totalizing logic of extractivism, in Alberta the limits to both acceptable speech for critiquing the oil economy (and its colonial, white supremacist foundations) and the space for imagining alternatives are explicit. Here, Margaret Thatcher’s famous edict that “there is no alternative” has been deeply and uncritically internalized, rebranded by the dominant social order as simple common sense. As Tarence Ray writes in an incisive piece on the liberal misunderstanding of rural America, “The message was clear: there is a natural order to things, and it all stems from oil. To challenge that order is to risk losing everything.”[2]
The oil workers in my home province and in Ray’s piece are not wrong to be mistrustful of a future in the hands of an elite political class that has never served their interests. But to have a future at all, we have to first imagine and then create something better. To avoid losing everything, challenging the white supremacist, capitalist order is exactly what we must do. Art was my way in to that.
Art as Another Way of Knowing
“The assumption that currently exists, must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
– Murray Bookchin
Our collective ability to imagine different futures was not the first casualty of capitalism, but today it is one of the most critical to resurrect. Before we can change, we must first believe another way of being is possible; that humanity is capable of living more just and ecological lives. In his classic 1969 text, “Listen, Marxist!” Bookchin writes that social revolutions occur “not merely because the masses find the existing society intolerable (as Trotsky argued) but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between what is and what could be.”[3] In creating space and providing tools for imagining alternative realities and futures, it is exactly this tension that art can help to make clear (and to increase).
From Engels’ charge that artists must choose as their subject either the corpse of the old society or the consciousness of the new, to the Situationists’ critique of recuperation, the liberatory potential of art has always been recognized as a powerful site of struggle against capitalism. Through my work in social movements, I have seen that the act of creating or experiencing art together in a social context has the potential to open a rare space outside of the logic of the capitalist marketplace, which demands all ‘production’ be commodified. How many truly public gathering spaces are left to us outside of our relationship as consumers: the mall, the café, the university? In making art together, we create that space and a place for ourselves to imagine different, better futures.
Artist and therapist Paolo Knill calls this imagining an “alternative world experience.” Knill’s philosophy challenges traditional therapeutic approaches to art by placing the process of art-making and the artwork itself at the center, and takes seriously the premise that art-making is in itself a fully realized way of thinking. He describes the “art analogue” perspective as one that corresponds to the ethical stance inherent in art-making: “The artist approaches limitations, resistance, or conflicting matters not as things to be eliminated, but instead as resources for transformation…however, this attitude also includes the courage to eliminate hindrances that block the process.”[4]
What is needed today is not more clever or beautiful objects for the marketplace (that fewer and fewer of us can afford anyway), but more resources for transformation. Artists grounded in a radical leftist tradition need not shy away from making our position and goals in this regard explicit. As Bookchin writes, “having emphasized the need to resolve the problems of material scarcity, it is equally necessary to emphasize the need to address the moral emptiness that a market society produces among large numbers of people today.”[5] This is a power that art, and artists have. If the belief that “what currently exists, must necessarily exist” is fundamentally at odds with artistic thinking, what would it mean for artists to take this radical knowledge out of the galleries and into the streets?
Artists as Workers
Despite the radical potential of art, today it has become a ubiquitous tool of gentrification, with ‘artwashing’ now synonymous with skyrocketing rents across the world. Artists have often been labelled the shock troops of gentrification, obliviously preparing the ground for property speculators and investors seeking to capitalize on the next cool district. If artists have naively cast ourselves as gentrification’s soldiers, maybe the metaphor of a bayonet as “a weapon with a worker at both ends” can useful.
As Chiapello and Boltanski illustrate,[6] neoliberalism has been especially effective at incorporating and reflecting the values of art, a tendency which has only grown stronger and more absolute over time. Much has been written on artists as embodying neoliberal capitalism’s ideal worker: endlessly flexible, tirelessly innovative and solely motivated by passion and love for our work. Artists have in large part adopted this perspective of ourselves wholesale, uncritically, only really upset over the details: “surely all of this selfless effort should be better compensated?” When we do recognize that such a ‘do what you love’ ethos is functionally only available to the privileged[7], the critique often stops short with liberal calls for greater inclusion to even the playing field. But we’re playing the wrong game.
The dominant capitalist understanding of the art world defines us in competitive and individualizing terms. In this understanding, the artist is an entrepreneur with creativity their isolated private property, to be leveraged to produce commodified objects for the market. Similarly, in the art world these neoliberal capitalist norms of interaction usually – though, via recuperation not always – come with the requirement of political neutrality (for both artist and art) in order to be more widely marketable. It is our acceptance of this entrepreneurial, individualized view of the artist as divorced from our social context and responsibility that makes possible our current complicity in gentrification.
Against this logic, artists must return to our social, communal and collaborative context. We must see creativity as something we do together and share as social beings, viewing ourselves not as petite bourgeois ‘creatives’ but as workers who can organize together in the interests of our communities and our class. In the North American context, imagining different futures and carrying on a tradition of struggle must also mean explicitly acknowledging the violent and ongoing history of settler colonialism and slavery that our spaces and institutions are founded on as a starting point for our organizing. When artists are grounded in and aligned with their communities in this way, we can begin to imagine a future where the existence of artists does not mean inevitable displacement. To be clear, some artists have always been doing this work.[8] So this is a call to the rest: it’s long past time to start listening, and it’s time to take sides.
Art as a Weapon
Max Haiven argues convincingly that, due to the often contradictory position art occupies within capitalism, artists are uniquely situated to exploit their position in potentially radical ways.[9] If we were to free ourselves from the entrepreneurial logic of the professional art world, we might use “the strange semi-autonomy and institutional liquidity of ‘art’ to kick open holes in the capillaries of global capital and redirect energies and funds to living anti-capitalist alternatives.”[10] In the fight for a prefigurative anticapitalist politics, art can be a weapon.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney argue that the only possible relationship to powerful institutions like the university today is a criminal one, in which “one can only sneak in…and steal what one can.”[11] In this tradition, liberatory artworks are those that materially expropriate resources and redistribute them, prefiguring a more equitable future. A current example of this strategy can be seen in the work of artist Hilary Powell and filmmaker Dan Edelstyn with their project Hoe Street Central Bank, which consisted of setting up their own bank, printing their own cash, and selling it order to buy up and destroy high interest debt.[12] But the recent examples of this kind of strategic artistic intervention are many.
To move beyond capitalist recuperation, our art must be grounded in responding directly to community needs. This is not an argument in favor of mere utilitarian propaganda or flat, didactic art that merely ‘points to’ issues or ‘raises awareness’ in already privileged social spheres. This then, is a call for the reorientation of both our work and our audience explicitly towards our communities and towards the working class. Rather than limit artists, I believe this opens up all kinds of new possibilities.
Art
must not be a separated space of freedom, only tolerated because it is
disconnected from social and
political life and therefore easily reabsorbed into capitalist ethics. Our goal
must be to resocialize both artists and our work. In the same 1988 speech,
Meridel LeSeur singles out the “immense” culture of the radical anticapitalist
union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for teaching her that culture
is an inseparable part of the struggle: “You could
only be a poet or an artist if you were a worker, a revolutionary.” The world
today needs more creative revolutionaries and revolutionary creatives, not more
entrepreneurs. It’s time for artists to start fighting.
[1] Le Seur, Meridel. “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers”. AbolitionJournal.org https://abolitionjournal.org/want-perfume-sewers/.
[2] Ray, Tarence. “Get Real: What liberals like Paul Krugman Still Don’t Understand About Rural America.” TheBaffler.com https://thebaffler.com/latest/get-real-ray?fbclid=IwAR3jUGt1BFpJvc6XidhV5a6gDsHpVey-RWr38kB-Ttihl51ZLgrjUf-yYPc
[3] Bookchin, Murray, The Murray Bookchin Reader (Montreal, Canada, Black Rose Books, 1999), 132.
[4] Knill, Paolo J., Ellen G. Levine and Stephen K. Levine, Principles and Practices of Expressive Arts Therapy: Towards a Therapeutic Aesthetics (London, UK, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005), 135.
[5] Bookchin, Murray, The Murray Bookchin Reader (Montreal, Canada, Black Rose Books, 1999), 189.
[6] Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso, 2007).
[7] Tokumitsu, Miya. Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness. (Regan Arts, 2015).
[8] Marín, Betty, Heather M. O’Brien and Christina Sanchez Juarez. “An Artist’s Guide to Not Being Complicit with Gentrification.” Hyperallergic.com
[9] As Debord recognized, “capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity — an isolated creativity which serves as an alibi for the alienation of all other activities.” (Knabb, Ken. Situationist International Anthology. (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 699.)
[10]Haiven, Max. Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. (London, UK, Pluto Press, 2018), 106.
[11] Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. (New York, USA, Minor Compositions, 2013), 33.
[12] Curator Space. “Artists Blow Up £1.2 of high interest debt in Walthamstow.” Curatorspace.com