Top

The Occupy with Art blog provides updates on projects in progress, opinion articles about art-related issues and OWS, useful tools built by artists for the movement, new features on the website, and requests for assistance. To submit a post, contact us at occupationalartschool(at)gmail(dot)com .

Entries in art and occupy (2)

Sunday
Oct212012

Toroidal [Occupy] Effect

 

By Paul McLean
1
Occupy is not an object. 
[Time is the only object. 
Everything else is a subject. 
True time is 4 dimensional, 
Heidegger deduced.] 
An object is not recursive. 
A machine can be reverse engineered. 
A system can be monkeywrenched. 
2
[To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility...But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.] - Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Occupy is an idea that cannot be evicted, whose time has come. To paraphrase, more or less. What do you think? Did you Occupy Wall Street, or any of the 1500 towns & cities across the USA where an occupation popped up? To do so was to participate in collective and direct action. So occupation is a verb thing. Doing the Occupy, a strange circular pantomime, a version of dance, if not exactly dance, as such, called also a General Assembly by anarchists and/or direct democracy practitioners. The sound circle formation, or sphere, as old as humankind. Until we don't occupy anymore, for whatever reason, and there have been many given, by many authoritative and even some supportive voices, and it's not, which is to say, we incessantly self-evaluate, critique, deconstruct, parse, negate. A redress of grievances. A gathering of souls. The only way to catalog Occupy is for Jez to invent the Anarchives. It has been done, or did itself. Occupy is play, then, let's say. A revolutionary game. Players are called Novads. We have a literature that is time-based, aspiring joyously to timelessness, dimensionally operating in all time zones we know of & don't, with rules that aren't, LULZ. We are legion. Nobody is Occupy. Everyone can. What isn't Occupy, really? Occupiers discovered much is unoccupied, and many otherwise occupied, and an occupation isn't forever, even if in one aspect it might be, at least in its metaphysics. Occupy is a dream. A network. 

Click to read more ...

Friday
Apr272012

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.2]

By Paul McLean

2

MEPHISTOPHOLES: Now we are already again at the end of our wits, where the understanding of you men runs wild. Why didst thou enter into fellowship with us, if thou canst not carry it out? Wilt fly, and art not secure against dizziness? Did we thrust ourselves upon thee. or thou thyself upon us?

FAUST: Gnash not thus thy devouring teeth at me! It fills me with horrible disgust. Mighty, glorious Spirit, who hast vouchsafed to me Thine apparition, who knowest my heart and soul, why fetter me to the felon-comrade, who feeds on mischief and gluts himself with ruin? - FAUST, A Tragedy, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. - "Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done... Next?" by Slavoj Žižek 



Žižek, "The Elvis of Cultural Theory," has again weighed in on Occupy, now, and Adbusters celebrates, perceiving the text as a ratification of its alarms. May Day protests are fast approaching, and the mustering of forces against Occupy's foes is in full bloom. I'm really looking forward to the Guitarmy, myself. Who knows what will happen? The organizational problem seems to be defining who are the opposition, and the overarching question is who will answer the call for a general strike. The whole set-up smacks of Faust. The flaws in the stances of both Adbusters and Žižek typify the old Left that both the magazine and the colorful thinker fear.

Click to read more ...