As direct, physical evidence of citizen personhood, the Occupy movement brings together human bodies in a symbol of speech made in stark contrast to the 2010 Citizens United ruling upholding the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment. There is no place for corporate personhood in this vision of democracy, as muddy, dynamic and diverse as the protest sites themselves.
I am currently working on a research project involving what I have termed “occupational realism,” in which artists perform labor – or more specifically, go about their normal jobs—under the rubric of art. This phrase resonates not only within long-standing debates about art in everyday life, but also evokes questions of value, embodiment, and “realism” as an art historical and economic strategy. Though I began this project well before the Occupy movement, with an article in Artforum about British artist Carey Young, the lexical overlap has prompted me to think further about what it means to be “occupied” by one’s work (emotionally, physically, mentally), or to “occupy” the space of labor as a self-conscious artistic operation.
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The General Assembly is a signature form of the Occupy Movement, both for how it recalls earlier conceptions of collective, consensus-based deliberation and for how it devised expressive innovations—such as the human microphone. Notions of assembly and assemblage have specific aesthetic histories as well. Dubuffet used the term to expand the practice of collage into the three-dimensional; others emphasize the terms’ kinship with practices of pastiche or appropriation, each of which sees a different kind of political edge or political evacuation in the assembly of the miscellaneous.
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Every crisis is an opportunity to sell something. You can buy yourself out of environmental crisis by purchasing organic, local, naturally raised, eco-friendly, free-range, zero-waste, green, green, green. If the economy is the catastrophe that is bringing you down, you are obviously looking at this from the wrong angle. Interest rates are so low, you can’t afford NOT to buy! What about starving children? What about girls who can’t go to school? What about endangered animals?
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“We know that people often desire something but do not really want it,” said Slovoj Zizek, in closing remarks to the Zuccotti Park Occupiers on Oct 25 2011, “Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.” Adbusters Magazine, and its co-founder Kalle Lasn are arguably the first to call for an occupation of Wall Street, and despite the current multitudinous voices, it is worth examining the desires of this demographic.
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“Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is.” – Freud
I’m curious about the resonance of the word “occupation” which connotes both non-violent strategy and employment. The Occupy Movement is fueled by frustration over unemployment: many of its participants are out of work.
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How does the consensus decision-making process function on an embodied level? Moving through downtown Oakland the night after the police raid, I am struck by the heightened kinesthetic awareness evident in the hundreds of bodies that fill the streets. True to the Occupy ethos, there is no top-down leadership, and yet the group is certainly moving together, en masse, with implicit nonverbal agreements about directionality, pauses, speed, and – in particular – a highly attuned empathetic response mechanism that kicks in as we encounter the blockades of riot police.
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The horizontal governance and DIY aesthetic politics of Occupy foster a visual culture of creative diversity–letting “a thousand flowers bloom.” Occuprint, a website showcasing donated graphic designs of protest from all over the world, makes this case visually. As part of the creative commons, the graphics can be freely downloaded for noncommercial use.
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