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Agent K stopped by DSLR's temporary headquarters to get
a better perspective on their work, ideology and collective response
to the privatization of our lives amongst many other issues...
LUMPEN: So
how did you all start? Where are you all coming from?
JOSH: We both come at it from parallel but different ways that have
a lot of similarities, but also interesting differences. My interests,
like Nato, lie with trying to create a radical community trying to figure
out what makes sense, and how to generate effective political art in
an urban area in the United States in the twenty first century-and then
also just a personal interest in street art-in finding ways that, for
me, are about the form following the content Or being in parallel. The
thing that has also attracted me into varying forms of street art, like
graffiti, is that it's an inherently illegal act that carries as much
message as anything that the particular work has to say. And in a city
like Chicago, where it's illegal to purchase spray paint and having spray
paint in your car is immediate grounds for impoundment, it makes an important
and valuable statement in and of itself. That's sort of where I was coming
from.
NATO: Right. And it was probably
September 2000 when we talked about doing a campaign that would unite
a lot of practices that don't necessarily fit under the rubric of ART,
so to say, things like guerrilla radio, pirate radio, guerrilla gardening-things
that are my fit. There are people who practice alternative living who
are very much engaged politically just by nature of what they do. So
we're interested in trying to create some kind of campaign that encompasses
a lot of different strategies that aren't always considered "political art" In
a strictly defined context. So the idea of the Department of Space
and Land Reclamation kind of covered the bases of a lot of different
groups operating in a lot of ways that we thought were really exciting
and really interesting from graffiti, to pirate radio, to things like
Critical Mass to things like-just also in terms of the art strictly
defined-public intervention projects. Up in New York people like Rev
Billy, groups like Repo History, and in Chicago, groups like Temporary
Services are doing interesting work. These are people who are actually
interested in engaging the audience directly and then trying to combine
them in a more radical context, people who are not interested in the
gallery mode at all. And Josh and I both kind of come out of a political
art background but we also have a lot of art love and hate. We tried
to come across that in our practice.
LUMPEN: Did you know each other before and were you practicing private
art before, or was it always public art as individuals?
NATO: Well actually, I don't make art I actually, I have been doing,
well, I do whatever. Well I don't make objects and not that I should
say this demeaningly, but I'm not very crafty. I've been doing shows
for a while. I had a space in Oakland. And when I came to Chicago I was
very interested in creating the kinds of spaces, a social catalyst where
you create some kind of rule structure and design where people from all
walks of life come together and get really amped, and then explode into
the world.
LUMPEN: What kind of shows did you do in Oakland?
NATO: I did a show called Counterproductive Industries, that actually
Josh was in, which is how we met. The show was a critique of production
as progress. And we used the space as people using corporate tools from
faxes to copy machines to internet to telemarketing, and then the space
became this kind of hub. The west loop, the financial district, was supposed
to be this target area where artists would deploy their work. We were
very much interested in this art-specific context. I mean pretty interested
in like this public intervention exhibition stuff
JOSH: And in some ways what was interesting to me about Counterproductive
Industries at least their rhetoric was that it sort of dovetailed with
portions of theories by an Italian insurrectionary anarchist named Alfredo
Bonnano, who was, for lack of a better term, a counterproductive anarchist
who has a pretty deep critique of the left's infatuation with production
and how communists (in particular) and socialists kind of typically want
to re-instill this productivist model into a future society in which
we're still slaves to the creation of things.
LUMPEN: What do you mean by production or modes of production?
JOSH: Under capitalism the logic
of production is "To produce is
inherently a good thing". You don't start from what people need,
you start from "production is good." And I think that the basis
of critique of any rational society is that you need to make
an assessment of what people need and from that point, people should
just produce what is necessary to survive to enjoy to any number of things.
But the left in general often unwittingly follows lock-step with the
capitalist assumption that production is good, that we'll take over the
means of production and we'll just keep producing and because it's inherently
wonderful and great, and obviously, that's not so I mean we're over-producing
an amazing amount of things that we don't need, and underproducing an
X amount of things that people actually do need.
NATO: It actually incorporates a
lot of things that I find healthy about a lot of anarchist stuff that's
been written. This kind of "no work" ethic
really problematizes the idea of work itself, problematizing
the desire to produce. The Critical An Ensemble talked about slacker
luddites. The idea of the slacker is a very interesting idea, that
here is a person who no longer wants to produce. It is a way of still
being radical without having this son of productivist mentality, and
that was sort of how Josh and I met. That show we were in-we like to
use the word campaign-had a lot of exhibition flaws. They were still
pretty arty and the community involved was still pretty limited and
these are things you are continually battling in order to grow and
get a more diverse audience. Really getting more invested in the communities
in the Chicago area and stuff like that.
JOSH: And I think that in doing the Department of Space and Land Reclamation
in some ways is an attempt to correct some of those problems. In some
ways it did correct a lot of those problems. And I think it wasn't corrected
because the art was somehow better, it was corrected because the politics
behind it made more sense. What we do now in some ways should build pieces
of what we want to exist in the future, and we need to do this collectively,
and so we tried to generate some sort of campaign or exhibition model
In which people would work collectively to build into the future. We
gave a huge range of options for people to work from and there were sixty
plus planned actions that occurred over the weekend. And there was probably
close to an equal number of sort of impromptu actions.
JOSH: This was over the weekend of the Department of Space and Land
Reclamation-
NATO: We had a campaign that happened in late April, from April 26-29,
and we set up at The Butcher Shop and it was kind of set up as a hub
where people came in and got excited about stuff and headed out into
the world. We had 2 a.m. raids, we had three panel discussions, and 59
planned projects that went out into the public space.
LUMPEN: At the time how did people find out about it?
JOSH: We distributed a call pretty far and wide and across a number
of networks and we did a lot of individual work tracking down people
to participate in the show or campaign in some way, shape, or form. And
it's all getting hazy now.
NATO: About how we got people out there-
JOSH: But there were a lot of people, though.
NATO: I think what's really difficult about the stuff we do is this
belief that the world commodifies everything, it co-opts everything including
counterculture.
JOSH: Not the world, but capital.
NATO: I agree that capital co-opts whatever, but you must also be positioned
in some way in relation to those people, in situations of modes of power,
in order to have something to say. A lot of the stuff that was in the
show was illegal because it positioned itself immediately in a position
of power. A lot of the stuff that was in the streets were very public
acts that you can't get a permit for, and the reason that this was very
important for us was this whole idea of reclamation. I mean the idea
of space and land reclamation is basically a trespassing of sorts, that
you're somehow intruding on a property owned by someone else or a power
structure owned by someone else, so basically you are in a power dynamic
in which the content is allowed to flower in a much greater sense. We
had people like Yoshi Suzuki who did this project Vital X in which she
just made out with people on camera in places like Home Depot or K-Mart
or some of the Chicago bridges.
JOSH: We also had a 24-hour pirate radio station that was running in
this space that had its normal sort of radio broadcasting, except for
that the music we played would never be broadcast on a commercial station.
It also had announcements on what was going on with the show and we broadcasted
some of the panel discussions we had, and it became this voice for what
was occurring over the weekend. The act was inherently in and of itself
in opposition to the sort of colonization of the air-the airwaves strictly
for commercial use.
NATO: I think it's important too, to talk about Chicago specifically
and what sort of role we thought that played. A lot of people who we
think are doing interesting work are engaged not just specifically in
creating Interesting objects so much as dedicating their lives to living
in a pretty progressive way. There's a very loose connection between
these things in Chicago and in terms of the an community this is a really
big problem-a lot of people don't feel like they have a place to plug
into, so we're interested in trying to create a network in which people
can be not so didactic with their an (what with all the abundance that
art could be for people with just the creativity and the mind), but still
engaged with a politics that can transform the world; a politics that
isn't just so lost in some hermetic dialogue in their head that it becomes
useless, but engaged in a social struggle with other people so that their
own beautiful desires are much more beautiful because they're engaging
with the world.
And that actually worked really
well. We had a ton of people who met that had never known each other
through this space. And really amazing people. It really generated
a lot of excitement about the potential of the community that's here.
We had people say, ~I went to Montreal, and after the FTAA demo, I
was sort of sad to come home because there was all this excitement
in Canada." And then they came to the DSLR campaign
and they were like oh my god there is all this energy here:
I don't have to trek across the country to find something: it's right
here and that was something that caught me very much by surprise. I
mean we knew it was here but we didn't know how possible it really
is in Chicago. There's a lot of energy here and I guess that's just
another way to lead into it following the campaign. And I should also
mention that another woman, Emily Foreman, helped Josh and I organize
this. She's in Venice Beach right now. But she is a key player in helping
us put this together... it's not like there's just us three.
JOSH: There's about 70 of us
NATO: and it's all pretty much de-centered.
JOSH: One of the main impetuses behind DSLR is that every square inch
of space that we operate in everyday is specifically constructed to make
us think or act or do certain things, and that, for the most pan, what's
considered public space is really a semipublic privatized space that's
set up to
NATO: move you from point A to point B.
JOSH: In which point A is where you rest up so that you can get to point
B which is where you either make or buy things. We wanted to sort of
make that transparent so that people would be forced to acknowledge that
we're all on a treadmill. Because once you realize you're on the treadmill,
you can make the decision of whether you want to get off and where and
how you want to get off it. That treadmill exists in physical space but
it also exists internally. Capital, through design and advertising, has
colonized our internal head space so that we pavlovianly react to these
designs: Golden Arches inherently mean McDonald's. I mean, some of this
is up for debate, but I feel strongly that there is this-kind of growing
out of Adbusters and some other things-there is this whole satire culture
where you take your golden arches and it says McMurder instead of McDonald's
and I think that people underestimate how powerful those signs are, and
that 90 percent of those people who see that shirt read it as a McDonald's
ad. It's not read as a critique of McDonald's and even if it is read
as a critique of McDonald's-
NATO: It's not successful-
JOSH: Best case scenario is that
someone says "Oh, McMurder. and
they have to think about that for a second but while they're thinking
about it, the back of their head is storing the fact; once again replaying
all the advertisements they've ever seen, you know, all the TV advertisements,
all the print advertisements, the smell, the everything they know about
McDonald's is replaying at the behest of that symbol. It's like a <PLAY> button
for how our heads operate. We are continually arguing about
how to present a campaign or organization or a show in a way so that
it's recognizable, but it's not just a re-creation of those same pavlovian
responses.
NATO: Right, so that we don't become iconic in and of ourselves. I mean
we talked about the Depanment of Space and Land Reclamation and we talked
about Counterproductive industries and in terms of our reluctance in
not having a name
JOSH: I wanted it to be "DEAD"
NATO: We both were kind of reluctant
to have any kind of name for it because a name becomes very alienating
very quickly and all we want is a space where people can come together
and do some great shit about reclaiming their lives and reclaiming
space and creating social structures. Sometimes a name is helpful in
that it is a recognizable thing, but sometimes it falls prey to these
co-opting ideas. So it's a tension that we're continually dealing with.
Sometimes, when we talk about this, like press stuff, it's very difficult
because we don't want to perpetuate this alienating thing like "DSLR,
you know, this 'thing.'"
JOSH: Where people are inherently
like "Well I don't know if I
want to do something because they're always going to do it better than
we would," or that we become professional at what we do. I think
that, for us, it's always about trying to perpetually generate
the idea that anyone and everyone should and can. Resistance should be
entirely decentralized and it needs the only amount of organization necessary
to be effective. That means that anyone and everyone both individually
and in groups should get together so that whatever social connections
could be made in our environment that are strong collectively
will endure into the future to further seed resistance. And that doesn't
have to be labeled anything, it just needs to happen.
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