 |
| Image from this past weekend of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement in NYC (image courtesy: NY Times) |
As many of you may have heard, a small
group of protesters began occupying Wall Street in NYC several weeks ago in a
bid to draw global attention to a growing resistance movement criticizing corporate
America and the growing economic crisis worldwide. What started out as a small
group of activists in New York has now spread to other U.S. cities and grown to a much larger and more organized
cross-section of participants, drawing attention from the mainstream press and
other labour groups across North America.
 |
| Adbusters creative contribution to the movement |
What specifically caught my attention this
weekend was the call for artist participation in what is officially being
called the Occupy Wall Street liberation movement. Modelled on the tactics
employed in the Arab spring resistance movements of Tunisia and Egypt, the
organizers are seeking artists to participate in an “Occupennial.” A full text
of the call for participation follows along with a YouTube video describing the
aims of the movement. The Vancouver-based anti-consumer magazine Ad Busters has already contributed to the call by
organizing a Wall Street zombie walk this past Monday and using Twitter to
circulate information using the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hash tag. For now, I look forward to
tracking art-related developments of this growing movement.
An Open Call to Artists in Alliance with
Occupy Wall Street and Beyond
The Wall Street Occupennial is an urgent
call for artists to contribute to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement
currently centered at Liberty Plaza in the Financial District of New York City. The Occupennial is founded on the belief that artists
have a crucial role to play in helping to elaborate and sustain the democratic
public space that is currently being created by the occupation of Liberty
Plaza.
OWS is one in a chain of protest movements
unfolding across the world over the past several years concerned with
democratic empowerment and economic justice in the face of untrammelled
corporate domination of political institutions and social life more generally.
This domination has involved the legal enshrinement of “corporate personhood”
at the expense of representative government, punitive austerity
measures, rising unemployment, massive income inequality, ecological
destruction, assaults on collective bargaining rights, the dismantling of the
social safety net, and the scapegoating of public employees, working families,
people of color, and immigrants.
The Occupennial embraces the fact that the
OWS movement is not reducible to a single “message” or even a particular set of
policy prescriptions; in the most general sense, OWS and its affiliated movements
around the world are about democratization, the first manifestation of which
has often been the unauthorized occupation of nominally public streets,
buildings, and plazas ranging from Tahrir Square to the Wisconsin State House.
While it echoes the familiar art-world term
“biennial,” the Occupennial is unencumbered by any predetermined curatorial
program or institutional apparatus. It exists instead as an imaginative
umbrella-concept and pragmatic media platform (wallstreetoccupennial.tumblr.com/) through which diverse
activities might be brought into alliance around both the specific site of
Liberty Plaza and other occupation-sites throughout the United States and the
rest of the world.
While OWS has gathered political strength
and sympathetic media coverage in recent days, the occupation of Liberty Plaza
remains an inherently precarious process due in part to the ambiguous legal
status of the site: it is a privately-owned public park mandated to remain open
twenty-four hours a day; however, the immense police presence is a constant
reminder that events on the ground can change very quickly. For now at least, a
major priority is sustaining the presence of as many bodies and cameras at the
plaza as possible. The Occupennial thus encourages contributions that engage
the physical site of Liberty plaza and its occupants, and that can unfold in as
timely a manner as possible. For those contributors unable to be physically present
at the site itself, we encourage projects that are digitally-based (photos,
videos, texts, graphics), but also long-distance ideas capable of on-site
realization by interested collaborators. These might encompass sign-making,
performative gestures, tours, choreographic scores, acoustic experiments,
historical reenactments, or ephemeral architectures. In conceiving of such
projects, it is important to keep in mind that various park regulations already
constrain OWS occupation activities in terms of the marking of surfaces, the
amplification of voices, and the erection of structures found to be “blocking
the sightline of the park.” Such constraints are unfortunate, but they might
also become opportunities for artistic inspiration, response, and critique.
Finally, it is crucial to note that in
recent days, important new linkages have begun to develop between OWS and
already-existing labor unions, non-governmental organizations, community
groups, public intellectuals, and media outlets. Art projects working to
cultivate and facilitate cultivate such linkages are especially welcome under
the umbrella of the Occupennial.
We look forward to your contributions
to this initiative…Time is of the essence!
Wall Street Occupennial